I propose a workshop-lab that draws on my experiences as an Indonesian dancer, artistic researcher and museum worker. As part of my doctoral research, I delve deeply into the concepts of embodied knowledge and negotiating my own identity as an Indonesian dancer in a European context. With a history of various Indonesian dance style practices, I investigate how the dance became a tool on the international stage for building a nation-state identity after Indonesian independence. In this laboratory, I propose a movement workshop that introduces basics of Javanese dance and autoethnographic writing, exploring how knowledge is produced through doing and then articulated through writing. The workshop explores decolonising Western knowledge construction through experimental methods of research. Highlighting performance and dance has long been a primary tool for recording one’s own and cultural history, especially when scholarly writing and official historical writing have been done from a Eurocentric/colonial point of view. Depending on participants’ disciplinary backgrounds, I would like to introduce approaches to how writing and experiential knowledge can cast a different light on traditional research methods, and how I, as an artistic researcher, deal with this in my case.