The latest work by Mexican choreographer Yolanda Morales creates a utopian, magical place on stage, a garden immersed in a warming yellow light. A place that is fictionally embedded in another cultural area, in the barren, ecologically and politically crisis-ridden desert landscape of northern Mexico. There, in Monterrey, a border town to the USA, the dances of the “Cumbia Colombiana” are practiced as an identity and empowerment ritual by a young local scene. After intensive choreographic research on site, Morales is now playing the atrium theater with her team and 4 dancers and asking questions about the permeability of borders and affiliations, given the inhuman effects of global capitalism. How do new rituals emerge that can create common ground in our ever more divergent societies. In the Mexican city of Monterrey, a city on the border with the USA, a special form of Latin American cumbia music has developed since the 1950s, “Cumbia Colombiana”. The dances of this cumbia, which are characterized by slowed-down rhythmic shifts, are mainly practised by marginalized communities there and are constantly changing in line with styles, fashions and the urgencies of social conditions. Here, living traditional dance functions as a ritual of identity and empowerment.