L-R: Robin Garcia and Nefertiti Charlene Altán
Join BIFFI artists-in-residence Nefertiti Charlene Altan and Robin Garcia to remember place through the waters in the body. Moving Your Inner Waters is a somatic storytelling practice: with simple guided movement, breath, and sensory prompts, we attune to water’s rhythms in us—the pulse, sway, and swell—and to the waters that run in channels through the land. Because water circulates through both body and earth, moving with its flow bridges the two and invites memories of place to surface.
Through this method, participants will sense, gather, and shape what arises—songs and sounds, gestures and movements, images and stories—drawn from personal experience or ancestral memory of waterscapes. We will experiment with material generated in these exercises, weaving individual contributions into shared stories, soundscapes, movement phrases, images, or short texts.
All bodies and abilities are welcome. No dance experience required, however the practice is energizing in scope. For disability accommodations, please contact Kasey Jernigan, kj2wz@virginia.edu. The location is fully accessible.
Method & Lineage
Moving Your Inner Waters was first co-developed by Nefertiti Charlene Altan in 2015 in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, in the creative process for the experimental dance-theater piece “Is there Violence in the Silence?” with her collective Deslimites Mediações Artísticas. It was later woven into the sound-story installation, “Voices in the Water,” with Robin Garcia commissioned by the Goethe-Institut Los Angeles. Here the method evolved into a tool for tapping interconnected stories and melodies of water held in personal and ancestral memories of Latine and Indigenous communities in MacArthur Park (Los Angeles). This BIFFI residency at UVA extends that lineage—bridging somatic practice, community storytelling, and site-responsive creation.
Robin Garcia is a Chicana scholar and artist from Los Angeles, rooted in a working-class family of organizers and creatives. Her current work centers on Afro-Indigenous spiritualities and their roles in cultural production, public ritual, climate justice, and historical accountability across the Americas and Africa. She collaborates with First People communities in Los Angeles on public art and land rematriation initiatives, and has led projects such as Voices in the Water, a sound installation of immigrant stories of water in MacArthur Park (Goethe-Institut), and Of Soil, Seeds, and Stars, a meditation on land, memory, and resistance (LA Contemporary Exhibitions). She is well versed in the global Ifá tradition and other Afro-Indigenous spiritual lineages, with a focus on ritual, divination, and sacred geographies. As a Postdoctoral Fellow in Arts Leadership in the Department of Art at the University of Virginia, Robin also teaches courses on global arts leadership, creative placemaking, and Indigenous approaches to climate change through art, ritual, and performance.
Nefertiti Charlene Altan is a queer afro-indígena, interdisciplinary performance artist, educator, producer, activist and language interpreter working towards embodied liberation through dance-based storytelling that centers Black and Indigenous memories, resistance, feminisms and futurist dreams. The daughter of Guatemalan migrants, she has collaborated with cultural workers from Africa, the Americas and Europe in more than 20 site-immersive experimental dance, theater, music and film works, presenting in Mexico, Brazil, Uruguay, Germany and the US. She has been based between San Francisco, California and Salvador, Bahia, Brazil since 2013, receiving a technical degree in dance from the Bahia State Cultural Foundation (FUNCEB), co-founding the feminist performance collective Deslimites Mediações Artísticas and the independent cultural space Casa Rosada. She received her MFA in dance practice from Saint Mary’s College of California and was a recipient of the Somatic Embodiment Award. She is an adjunct professor at Saint Mary’s College of California and a co-director of the multidisciplinary project TERRESTRIAL, a collaborative composed of queer Black, Indigenous artists from the “US” and “Brazil,” premiering The Sprout at New York Live Arts in March, 2025 as a Creative Capital project.