works

MACAQUINHOS – DANCE PIECE

  Macaquinhos (little monkeys) was inspired by the book The Brazilian People – The formation and meaning of Brazil by Darcy Ribeiro, during an artistic residence at Núcleo do Dirceu, Teresina (PI), back in 2011. Since then, it has served as a horizontal collaborative place between artists from distinct formations, mostly researchers of contemporary dance and performance art. Since 2015, Macaquinhos settled its cast with the performers Andrez, Caio, Daniel, Fernanda, Iaci, Luiz, Rosangela and Teresa. The work investigates the metaphor of the anus as the ‘southern hemisphere’ of the body, in an attempt to subvert the hegemonic domination imposed by the northern epistemologies that understand that what is above is more important than what is below. This idea “led the first doctors and religious leaders to consider the human tail something of lesser importance (…). It is at least curious to understand how a part of our body is wild, while other parts are accepted as divine” (Putnam, 2000, p.232).  

The performance departs from the guidelines pointed out by the sociologist Boaventura de Souza Santos in the book Epistemologies of the South: learning to exist, learning to go to, learning from and with the south/anus. In Brazilian Portuguese, we have this kind of gentle, kind of explicit, kind of popular way of calling the anus: cu. We assume a plural identity of Africans, indigenous, and Europeans to presume that the body architecture is a political entity. The anus then becomes cu: a factory/cauldron to elaborate the body anew, creating horizontal circumstances that open to other epistemological experiences. When the anus becomes cu, we start to face untimely obscurity that precipitates routes, gestures, and paths for other ways of existing.  

The dance is organized by the following choreographic devices: flirting, exposing, touching, circle, as well as the porosity regarding the space and the audience. The bodily states are investigated on the construction of oneself through the other, creating a chain of otherness. Seeking for a collective body that evades a leader, doctrine, or instance hierarchizing relations, we even avoid allowing the movement of artists to become the center and the authority, therefore giving rise to the need of reinventing oneself by creating strategies in order not to crystallize on a rigid structure nor predetermine the flows.  

The choreographic thought is given by the peripheral knowledge and the resistance to the disciplinary production of forms so that contradictions do not cease to produce new agreements and paradigms. Our challenge is to build a collective body of common interests: the balance between forces without losing the contradictory tensions, a welcoming and caring environment, the respect for singularities, learning from fragilities to strengthen the collective, promoting the horizontality of roles, learning with the other, recognizing the other as oneself, and so on. The anus that rises with the fragmentation process of the hetero-centered body as one of the first organs to be privatized and placed ‘outside the social field,’ is now expressed and promoted by transiting between the contradictions and tensions of an imperative, postcolonial, and contemporary cultural formation. “Hence, here is the anus presented as a clear analogy of a struggle device, available to the epistemologies of the south and faced with the hegemonic domination imposed by the epistemologies of the north, aiming at a fairer, and consequently better, society.” (Pedro Paulo Gomes Pereira).  

  More than a show performed every evening, Macaquinhos is a happening, an event that tries to give substance to a contentious act. It deploys, in space and time, a form of body art in which the body is conceived more than anything as a political force. United around a shared reflection on north/south divisions, a group of Brazilian artists performs a shared practice. They conceive a “dance” in which the body is envisaged as a metaphor for the world: divided, organized in a hierarchy, governed by relationships of top-down power. The dance in Macaquinhos is organized around the lower part of the body, centered on the anus, that most democratic, but perhaps also most taboo of the human body’s orifices. Far from the stereotypes of a liberated and sensual dance, each performance by Macaquinhos is a desire to form a collective, decolonized body. An artistic and political approach that has been severely criticized in Brazil, it seeks to abolish all forms of hierarchy within a practice that (very) literally confronts taboos. A disorientating work.