CHICHE

CHICHE is a solo dance piece about how landscapes, memory, and migration shape the body. What do we carry when we leave home, and where does home exist within us once we have left it?

The title borrows a Chilean word for a small, cherished object, kept for the love and memory attached to it. A chiche is, above all, a gift, and this solo is a chiche: a small offering to my mother, to the people I carry with me, and to the landscapes that live in my body.

Rooted in my memories of growing up in Chile, the piece began in 2021 as Madre y Tierra, shortly after I arrived in Germany, as a way to process displacement through movement. Today it is accompanied by Pedro Lemebel’s Poco Hombre. Reading Lemebel is an act of imagination and return: through his words, I can inhabit a Chile that lives in my memory but is no longer my daily reality. I am no longer fully from there, yet it has never left me. He writes in Chilean idiom, with the picardía, the simplicity and complexity of belonging, and his words mirror my history back to me. From that reflection I draw material for the body. Lemebel’s reflection “aprender a leer esos silencios es reaprender a hablar” resonates deeply with this process. The body reads its own silences: what has been omitted, repressed, or never spoken. Dance becomes a way of entering altered states where identity feels fluid, unstable, and multiple, a presence at once personal and ancestral, and movement gives form to what has been silenced and offers it something back.

Johannes Schropp’s pre-recorded composition, made of sounds and recordings from different worlds, opens the door into the world of CHICHE for me and for the audience.

What do we carry with us when we leave our homes? And what do we give back to the people and places that made us?