Photography by Peter Cheng
Courtesy of Proximity Festival



Twerkshop
2014
One-On-One Performance
Mixed Media



Twerkshop is an intimate one-on-one performance that offers an instructional lesson through the basic fundamentals of twerking. In this lesson, Garcia draws from a decade of dance training in Jamaican Dancehall and Reggaeton to share how her dance practice led her to this inquiry. This performance adopts a similar format to Adrian Piper’s Funk Lessons (1983), looking at twerking from a structural movement research approach.

Twerkshop came about from a performance at the MTV Music Video Awards 2013 by pop singer, Miley Cyrus. It aims to culturally critique twerking’s exponential growth in usage frequency and popularity in mainstream media over the last few years as a form of colonisation. A strategy for this occurs in the work by acknowledging the origins of the movement to those who may not be familiar. Twerkshop provides a historical and cultural background of twerking, situated within the African Diaspora, and also offers to expand upon this history, placing it in Latin, Arabic and Pacific cultures and dance practices, which fall under different names.