How to Cite: Urrea Uyabán, Tatiana, Luna Rodríguez López, Angie Moreno Arteaga and Giovanny Peña Fontecha. "To Think, to Dance-Create, to Resist: The Time Dedicated to Our Flor is What Grants Her Such Importance". Dearq no. 43 (2025): 132-178. DOI: https://doi.org/10.18389/dearq43.2025.10
Tatiana Urrea Uyabán
Universidad Nacional de Colombia
Luna Rodríguez López
Universidad Nacional de Colombia
Angie Moreno Arteaga
Universidad Nacional de Colombia
Giovanny Peña Fontecha
Universidad Nacional de Colombia
A few weeks ago, the organizers of the Latin American and Caribbean Conference of Social Sciences (CLACSO) 2025 invited us—representing the Universidad Nacional de Colombia's Triadic Ballet and our associated research group1—to present as part of the conference program, which on this occasion is dedicated to Horizons and Transformations for Equality. We found it particularly stimulating that a gathering of leading social thinkers from the Southern Cone recognized and valued our creative work, granting us the opportunity to present it alongside such significant themes such as human rights, democracy, resistance, community, and peace. We remain mindful, however, that dance is but one dimension of our broader creative process within the arts.
Many of the words printed here were first read at the Universidad Nacional's León de Greiff Auditorium in Bogotá, at noon on June 10 of this year. The writing and public reading of that text served as a kind of exorcism of the thoughts, actions, and omissions that have unfolded since 2019. It became a moment for us to pause, to slow our pace, look back, and commemorate the value of the time that has passed since we first chose to dance together at this university's Faculty of Arts.
When we write "we," the reader may understand this pronoun to encompass all those who, at some point, have taken part in the activities we have held since the inception of both spaces—UNAL's Triadic Ballet and the research group. In doing so, we speak on behalf of students, professors, directors, graduates of this and other universities, independent participants affiliated with the research group, administrative staff, volunteers, and even dissident voices that, for various reasons, have remained on the margins of this initiative.
In order to reflect on the passage of time through what we have built, we have sifted through mountains of documents, notes, control charts, minutes, budgets, schedules, class programs, and folders filled with images, videos, and audio recordings. From this material, we have conducted our own research and selected fundamental elements of our journey to showcase this laboratory of active thought—focusing less on final outcomes crystallized in public performance, and more on the backstage processes and the collective enjoyment of time shared.
We would like to invite you, through the three memory albums—To Think, To Dance-Create, To Resist—to attend an imaginary exhibition dedicated to our Flor. These albums show countless actions, the anachronisms, and certain new creations in our collective work. The album To Resist also includes our Cartography of Time, which began as a line and gradually transformed into a geography over the course of the activities. It functions as both a memory and storytelling device, designed to gather and assemble future moments, to narrate collective and individual stories, and to reveal useful signs about what is yet to come.
Both UNAL's Triadic Ballet and the research group have given rise to a progression of multiple voluntary forces, all converging around a shared set of questions: Is it possible to teach and learn the arts in a non-compartmentalized, holistic manner—transversal to different disciplines and attentive to multiple scales of thought—in order to generate a creative force that contributes to el buen vivir (good living)? How do we learn and teach, and how might we do so more effectively?
In practice, carrying these questions with us, we act as operative critics of academic and social systems that are anachronistic, rigid, or inhumane, moving deliberately against the current. We cultivate a form of stimulating resistance that seeks to generate new ways of doing things, of mobilizing knowledge and skills, and of implementing bottom-up approaches to creation. These impulses—driven by desire—are fluid, shifting in response to ever-changing conditions: the surrounding context, unfolding events, the opportunities that arise in parallel, the economy of our own resources, the number and uniqueness of those working on shared objectives, the spaces available to us, and the exercise of individual self-determination and agency, among other factors. Confronted with this onslaught—which is none other than life itself, yet a conscious life—this collective has evolved organically, continually nourished by the very force that appropriates and sustains it.
The Triadic Ballet was founded in 2019 by the Universidad Nacional de Colombia's Faculty of Arts as a commitment to dance—at last!—in conjunction with all the faculty's curricular programs: Arts (visual arts, creative writing, theater, and live arts), Architecture and Urban Planning, Music, Film and Television, and Design (Industrial and Graphic). At that time, the Ballet emerged as a collective celebration of the Faculty's approval of the PhD in Creation + Project + Design (C+P+D).2 This initiative represented an academic and administrative effort to bring together four curricular areas in order to envision a potential and pressing integration of the arts. Producing a proposal of such scope was a significant achievement, as it underscored both the necessity—and the difficulty—of theoretical and practical integration of the arts around collaborative creation. Although the PhD proposal was not approved in the end, its approach has been carried forward experimentally within undergraduate programs through the Ballet.
That local moment coincided with the worldwide commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the German Bauhaus school. In a spirit of euphoria, we seized the simultaneity of circumstances and emulated the exercise that, under the direction of Professor Oskar Schlemmer, was known as the Total Work of Art.3 This exercise consisted of a collective creation process that enabled the participation of all members of the school, assuming as many roles as needed to stage a performance involving dance, music, scenery, lighting, and interpretation. We were particularly struck by the fact that these festive annual closings also carried a political purpose: to demonstrate the talents of students and teachers while forging connections with a local community often skeptical of the Bauhaus's creative endeavors.
Seduced by photographic images and brief archival films of the original work, we chose to draw upon the lessons of that modernity as an initial impulse for engaging with our own local reality. Set to the music of Colombian composer Blas Emilio Atehortúa, we prepared a performance of just sixteen minutes. For this piece, we designed and constructed five characters: three evoked the legacy of German design—modern, abstract, and geometric; another served as a bridge, blending those traits with the softer, vibrant, and endearing qualities of our tropical palenqueras; and the last was drawn from our pre-Hispanic and mountainous modernity, represented by the Quimbaya poporo, an artifact held in the permanent collection of the Gold Museum in Bogotá.
An endearing character inaugurated the Ballet, and he has remained ever since—until his cardboard-and-fabric pants finally gave way to wear: he is Time. We gave this name to our Bauhausian replica because, when he takes his short and difficult steps, constrained by form and material, he produces the sound of a relentless second hand moving through space. It is he who has determined the entrances of the other characters, including those of the most recent version. However, today his pants succumbed to his impertinent and constant action, to the wear of the eternal. We now have, well, a time without pants. What this might mean for creation remains to be seen.
By our count, more than 150 people have participated in this Total Work of Art over the past six years. They include professors from all disciplinary areas under the Faculty of Arts and other faculties at the Universidad Nacional, as well as students from this and other universities, volunteers, administrative staff, alumni, professionals, technicians, artisans, experts, and community leaders—particularly from Bogotá and from Leticia in the Amazon. We form part of a diverse group, full of differences, that expands and contracts like a living organism around this collective construction of thought, movement, and action that is the Ballet and its research group.
By questioning who we are, what we do, and how we learn and teach the arts at the Universidad Nacional, we seek to escape from the "highways of knowledge," as Bruno Latour would say. In this sense, we have embraced a kind of natural discomfort that dislodges us from our comfortable places—our established positions in the academy and in life—in order to "get down to work" as soon as possible. Blurring traditional hierarchies between student and teacher, for instance, in order to construct a genuinely creative space of freedom and collaboration proved difficult and, at times, even unbearable. Yet it was a crucial part of how we worked, because it enabled us to recognize that each of us knows how to do something with our hands, and that is something we can teach. Conversely, all of us—even those teaching on the front line—can learn by doing.
In March 2020, barely a month after the premiere of our mestizo version of the Triadic Ballet, the global crisis brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic forced us into isolation. Yet, despite the fear, the collective construction of the Ballet continued through every possible medium, sustaining the characters we had created—characters who remained confined in an empty university hall, in a city, in a desolate world—awaiting the moment to return to the dance floor. Maintaining this window of creation open through digital networks is what kept us going. We began to care for one another, and for everyone. The continuous meetings that stretched on for more than two years confirmed that, more than a research group, we were cultivating something sacred for our shared lives, nurtured through music, color, dance, literature, and other passions that accompanied us in the midst of a critical present.
A triad is defined as a "set of three objects, circumstances, symptoms, or beings that are closely or especially linked to one another" (Real Academia Española n.d.).
height, width, length
music, costumes, dance
good, beautiful, simple
point, line, plane
orange, green, purple
space, time, architecture
floating water, fresh water, salt water
thinking, feeling, living
a braid
Oskar Schlemmer's Ballet was a theatrical work divided into three parts that explored the relationship between body, space, and form. Its realization required the design of geometric apparatus, music, and movement. From there we set out, enriched and, above all, compelled to incorporate the idea of our local mestizo nature in a resounding way.
Thinking is creating, and dancing is our most complete form of creation. Dance loosens the supple heart of the Gordian knot4 that structures us with both delicacy and resilience. We dance subjectively, metaphorically, physically, and intellectually—with body and thought—as a philosophy through which to question our relationship with the world. We are animated by the design of forms, music, light, colors, and—why not?—also by darkness and silence. Through dance, we festively resist the conditions we have been given to live in our time.
The triad proposed by Deleuze and Guattari (1991)—to think, to create, to live—activated the montage between their writing and our own, the latter more modest when set against such a model. Reflecting on the interplay of these three actions and their modes of overlap—thinking with thinking, feeling through dancing-creating, and living as resisting—has led us to construct a theoretical-practical body that keeps us attentive and careful in our relationships, while also prompting us to devise visual forms through which to expose ourselves to the public and to continue building.
Music brings us together. Sound is the most public of sensations: it coexists with the air, and when it emerges, everything else falls silent—thoughts swirl, memories are activated, and collective images take shape. It is a concrete, embodied, and distinctive physical reality. The music for this dance has been in the works since 2023, when, for the composition of Contracorriente, it patiently awaited the definition of concepts, ideas, characterizations, and characters. It awaited, and it transformed, session after session—reminding us that in the arts there are no fixed laws, and that a ballet does not always dance to a previously written score. Once again, our forms of composition privileged common agreements of horizontality in co-creation. Such a reversal of order is possible only because the musicians are generous.
In preparing the material for this section of the magazine, we immersed ourselves in a sea of information drawn from an archive containing thousands of photographs, hundreds of minutes of recordings, and countless sketches documenting the design, preparation, and construction of objects. This also involved innumerable pages of writing, days of conceptual discussion, and the revisiting of both repetitions and new creations. Mountains of records bear witness to our time in the Ballet, all inscribed within this map.
The result of this assembly is a topography shaped by the traces of our thoughts, creations, and actions—an object of creation in itself, where what has been conceived, experienced, danced, moved, and inaugurated is synthesized. Its complexity, as the reader will see, is grounded in the diverse territories traversed over the years. In our effort to capture this information, we have arranged it across lines, years, and themes. We continue to ask ourselves how long those issues—always subject to change—will last, and which of our thoughts and actions are worth preserving in order to cultivate this space.
The Cartography allows for intersecting and incomplete readings, opening a space where personal subjectivity can exercise a high degree of creative power. From it, each participant may recount what they wish to remember and project: the moment they got on or off the bus; where they traveled and who they traveled with; the times they dressed to embody one or another dancing character under the lights. This machine of thought and memory serves as a working tool for reflecting on what has been done and for making decisions in the present. It is also a gift—a way of expressing gratitude for the care we have extended to one another.
The different ways in which we have recorded time reveal how constant movement has collectively transformed us. We inaugurated our experiment in 2019 with A Time Without Pants, replicating a Eurocentric model of the twentieth century—drawing on electric materials, basic shapes, and the colors of the artistic avant-gardes. From there, we gradually moved toward the characters of the Contracorriente version: Water that Floats, Saltwater, and Fresh Water, inspired by the Victoria regia flower that inhabits the Amazon. In 2023, we fulfilled one of our long-held wishes: to travel together to Leticia. Immersed in the jungle geography, we allowed ourselves to become water—water that ripples and dances.
We propose moving forward by looking at the images across the different albums, retaining fragments of the Cartography of Time, as though it were not merely a montage of moments, typographies, events, and people, but a vast dance hall—one for jumping, drifting, wandering, and moving by activating the available links and QR codes. Through these resources, viewers can access the movements, spaces, and compositions of sound and light that we have experienced.
The inventories of events that compose each of the sections—To Think, To Dance-Create, To Resist—are presented as collections of moments connected by relationships that are far from obvious. Each chapter includes images, links, and annotations not only of what has been shared in public presentations, but also of what remains unseen, located in the depths of the Ballet's backstage. We highlight processes that we consider essential to expressing the triad; they are both effects and results. These include academic courses, preparatory activities, material workshops, laboratory experiments, notebook entries with initial ideas, research reports, sketches, and designs still in progress. Questions and mistakes are included here as well. We also incorporate travel, imagined as a collective aspiration, along with presentations in public spaces. The reader may sense that each set carries its own texture, color, or mood, characterizing each activity.
I think, therefore I am
— Descartes, Discourse on the Method
To invent, dream, procreate, imagine, conceive, found, establish, institute, legitimize, name, designate, choose, reason, discourse, meditate, study, reflect, believe, understand, estimate, consider, ruminate, concentrate, suspect, judge, desire.
Thought as action runs through each of the group's activities. Continuous creation—concepts, ideas, scripts, steps, characters, staging, lighting, ways of cutting, gluing, weaving, assembling, and giving form to things—implies three parallel approaches. The first is to build upon what has already been built, which is similar to thinking what has already been thought: recognizing the knowledge of each member, as well as the reiterations and persistence in Cartography, alongside the new creations still to come. The second seeks to understand reality in order to invent concepts that not only adapt to it but also enable us to affect it positively. Thinking as a living force emerges from our encounter with the world and with other worlds. The third proposes thinking as an act of liberation from whatever diminishes our strength, imprisons us, or separates us—an opening toward the invention of new possibilities.
The albums in this section contain diverse formats showing how we record time: minutes, lesson plans, schedules, calendars, programs, and task lists. These materials also concentrate reflections on a time projected into the future. Thinking through the processes we develop takes hours, days, and months; in reviewing this material, we recognize them as rational modes of creation. Aesthetically, they resemble tapestries that shelter the time they contain—tapestries we have woven.
Dancers are God's athletes
— Albert Einstein
To dance, waltz, to intertwine, to stomp, to tangle, to bustle, to prance, to jump, to skip, to frolic. To move the body to the rhythm of music. To move with acceleration, with overflowing energy, leaping. To have the intention of doing something. To remember, to bring something or someone to mind. To take something or someone into account when acting. To formulate or combine ideas or judgments in the mind...
Dancing means setting thought in motion as it emerges in the collective encounter. It means surrendering to the beat of the music, to the routines of beginning and ending, to the improvisations driven by freedom. It means recognizing the passage of time in each breath, in the steps, the instructions, and the tempo of the music.
We express the power of active thought through the interplay of movement, time, and space. Movement is the essence of what we create; it propels us toward continual transformation and a circulation of knowledge that enables us to joyfully cross the boundaries of our specialized academic training. In doing so, we draw from the depths of each of us what we know how to do, what we love to do, and—why not?—what we remember or long for.
Dance, for us, is not reduced to a sequence of static positions in space, nor to a succession of automatic, photogenic moments that privilege a single lead dancer, as was the case in the Bauhaus ballet of the early twentieth century. On the contrary, from that starting point we have shaped ideas that grow increasingly striking, light, and ethereal, inspired by our own culture. In the most recent version of Contracorriente,5 influenced by the pulsing waters of our territory, we maintained the concept of automatism in training so that, on stage, music, light, and dance might instead rebel—unfolding into free movement inspired by everyday, profane, and spontaneous events.
This chapter gathers everything that has moved us—what has stirred us, unsettled us, or ignited us. The actions of walking, running, dancing, traveling, seeing, watching, looking, moving through space, and feeling are all contained within these albums.
Where there is power, there is resistance
— Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité, tome I: La volonté de savoi
To endure, withstand, tolerate, suffer, fit in, deal with, contain, restrain, sustain, oppose, reject, deny, refuse, refute, challenge, defy, take a stand, rebel. Not to succumb, not to give up.
Resistance is a force of creation, action, and production that emerges along with power itself. It not only rebels against power but also arises from it and accompanies it. Resistance constitutes a positive reaction, insofar as it transforms relations of domination and reshapes individual subjectivity.
This group of artistic action, research, and participation resists the indifference that marks our present. It stands in opposition to the servitude imposed by canonical categories established by dominant work and power structures; to the shame provoked by the intolerable conditions of many of the systems in which we habitually find ourselves; to the precariousness of affective life; to violence in all its forms; to the indifference of our context; to the ugliness and poverty—and, with them, to war and death.
We challenge our bodies and activate them alongside our thoughts. Our training routines are focused on flexibility, strength, and both mental and physical endurance. This is demanding, for in dance it is necessary to set aside notebooks and technological devices in order to stand, to free oneself, to jump, to shake, and to connect with the sound and context. It means moving everything, without shame, with a certain joy and aesthetic awareness. Dancing, whether as an individual or collective act, is above all a creative act: it embodies resistance by refusing to accept what is imposed as established.
In this third part, we chose the strength of gathering—the tension created by hands that weave, cut, paint, write, interpret, and direct together. It is about recognizing the importance of creating in the company of others. Resisting also means staying within the group, assisting, acting, demonstrating, and dedicating the necessary time to others.
Thanks to Andrea Castro, Wilson Riaño, Federico Chaparro, Paola Bermúdez, and Santiago Beaumé for their contributions in editing, graphic post-production, writing, and photography. Thanks to Flor Zafirekudo for being with us in the heart of the jungle and for teaching us so generously. Our gratitude also extends to all the members of the research group and the Ballet.
Tatiana Urrea Uyabán: Architect, professor at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia's School of Architecture and Urbanism and the Universidad de los Andes's Faculty of Architecture and Design. Founder and director of UNAL's Triadic Ballet through 2024.
Luna Rodríguez López: Architect graduated from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, researcher, and creator. Cultural manager and coordinator of the Ballet. Stage director of Contracorriente. Her work unfolds around pedagogy, the arts, crafts, body movement, and singing. She dreams of becoming a rock star, working in film, re-wilding cities, and designing architecture for non-human animals (especially monkeys) in the future.
Angie Moreno Arteaga: Industrial designer with a postgraduate degree in artisanal loom weaving and in methods and techniques of social research. Researcher and transmitter of knowledge in the field of textile design and its teaching/learning process. She created and directed the costumes for the characters in Contracorriente.
Giovanny Peña Fontecha: Architect graduated from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia and student of Fine Arts at the same institution. Member of the research group and part of UNAL's Triadic Ballet since its earliest versions. He is a dancer, workshop leader, lighting technician, and mapper, and is responsible for the Ballet's archive. Collector of leaves, stems, flowers, and fruit. For his final project at the School of Architecture and Urbanism, he designed a proposal for the re-naturalization of the Bogotá River. He is our group's most active caretaker.
* In honor of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and in memory of the value he placed on relationships, care, and time in The Little Prince. Our own flor (flower), the Victoria regia, is among our most cherished creations, both for its meaning and for its fusion with Flor Zafirekudo in Leticia, Amazonas. She carries profound significance for our group: she is the singing voice, the voice of an Indigenous woman in the Colombian jungle.
1 On September 24, 2021, we formally registered the research group dedicated to exploring the continuing relevance of Bauhaus pedagogy in the teaching and learning of the arts in Colombia. The Ballet emerged as a festive, immediate, and urgent gesture—an act of showcasing ourselves and our capacities. The research group, by contrast, requires time to grow, like any living thing. It serves as a space for experimentation, where the value lies as much in the process as in the results. For us, the emphasis is always on how we do things.
2 This doctoral proposal "consolidates the knowledge generated through Creation, Project, and Design, recognizing them as three major epistemic fields within the arts. In this sense, the PhD promotes transversality and contributions across these fields, guided by lines of research and creation. The Curricular Areas of Arts, Architecture and Urbanism, Design, and Music were convened on the basis of a shared recognition that our practices are united by thought through action and action through thought—values that are an integral part of what we do. Our cultural heritage is based on practices rooted in academia: creation, research, and engagement with the broader context through extension projects. Creation, project, and design constitute both knowledge and ways of knowing, as well as processes and results constructed individually and collectively. Each is characterized by distinctive modes of knowing—sensitive, affective, rational, mnemonic, imaginative, poetic—as well as by particular approaches to interpreting, transforming, and shaping the world. Integrating these dimensions through this PhD opens the possibility of working as a diverse, multiple, and powerful community, capable of expanding our existing disciplinary, transdisciplinary, and postdisciplinary horizons. Such cohesion renders the boundaries that have until now been defined by relative and permeable disciplinary particularities, allowing us to imagine the integration of the arts and their relationship with a complex and multifaceted world, as a historical, extraordinary, necessary, and desirable opportunity for our country. Undoubtedly, such an initiative would address a profound void and anticipate a future in which university education becomes more open, creative, and interconnected with the world's transformative potential." (Universidad Nacional de Colombia 2021, 3).
3 The Total Work of Art—a creative initiative developed and transmitted by Schlemmer from 1920 onward—was explored in his courses on mural painting, drawing, sculpture, theater, and dance. The German composer Richard Wagner had already employed the term in the late nineteenth century, and it was subsequently taken up by numerous artists and architects who, through the convergence and interplay of different arts, sought to create new experiences for audiences. Today, the application of this concept continues to provide a framework for combining diverse scales, disciplines, and approaches through complex forms of experimentation.
4 It is an extremely tangled knot, impossible to undo—one that also signifies a difficulty without solution.
5 Contracorriente is the most recent version of the Ballet, first presented in December 2023. Inspired by the Colombian waters—Fresh Water, Saltwater, and Water that Floats—accompanied by the Pirarucú as Water that Plays, it was entirely conceived, created, and composed by the research group and brought to life in conjunction with UNAL's Triadic Ballet. Music holds a central place in this work, incorporating both local instrumentation and song, as well as the characters' woven garments. The spatial mapping alludes to jungle vegetation, while the narration weaves together the idea of mestizaje as a defining aspect of national nature.