Statement 2019
Transcription of the statement for the 21st Biennial
My first contact with dance was in Umbanda yards in the 1960s. In the following decade I started my formal training. In the mid-1980s I danced in various professional companies in Belo Horizonte and São Paulo, but it was from the 1990s that I started creating solo works focused on the black body. From then on, my dance, besides being an aesthetic investigation, became mainly political action.
The presence of the black body in the Brazilian society, an issue that has been at the core of my work from the very beginning, can be divided into three significant periods: From the 1970s to the 1990s, a colonial mindset still prevailed in Brazil, dominated by themes such as racial democracy, structural racism and the invisibility of the black body in dance. It was very common to hear things such as “My nanny is black, but she’s like family.” This situation changes between 2003 and 2016 with the establishment of a decolonization outlook that seeks to unravel structural racism and the myth of racial democracy. Policies such as affirmative action and increased admission of blacks to university play a key role in this process. However, as of 2016 we have apparently regressed to colonial times, with several cases of appropriation of black symbolic capital and the increasing genocide of the black population. It seems that Brazil wants to go back to being a colony, but it needs to understand that it no longer exists.
Reflecting on those processes, the dance works shown here explore the black body as a field of research and artwork. I put together these original videos for the 21st Biennial in an attempted rereading of the contexts related to the black body over the last three decades. My intention is to promote an intergenerational meeting between an artist that has been creating since the late 1970s and present-day black artists. It is important to reinforce the Brazilian black memory to counter current attempts to erase the Brazilian black history.