Um corpo brasil: em carne viva dançar/praticar a pesquisa acadêmica

Abstract

This work results from a practical-theoretical research expressed in an essayistic, performative, and implicated tone. In it, dance intertwines with a diverse bibliography – ranging from Nêgo Bispo to Simone de Beauvoir – lived experiences, and thought in motion, taking the dance ensaio (which means both “essay” and “rehearsal” in Portuguese) as an open field for experimentation, creation, and reflection. It adopts methodological procedures aligned with errancy as work and practice as research to investigate the possibility of dancing academic research as a political, artistic, cand epistemic gesture. The creation emerges from a situated body – I’m a Brazilian artist, Northeastern migrant, self-declared white woman, with a predominantly classical ballet background – in confrontation with universalizing and exclusionary aesthetic and epistemic norms that structure the (artistic) scene, the university, and life in Western society. A multireferential approach attentive to plural brasilidades – a term that refers to the diverse cultural expressions of Brazil and can alternatively be translated as “brazilities” – is adopted, giving importance to countercoloniality (alternative translation of contracolonialidade, term by Nêgo Bispo) – a stance I strongly align with, given my practice-based background and artistic trajectory in dance. The main outcome of this research is the solo (em) carne viva, a hybrid work combining dance performance and lecture-performance that employs autobiography in dialogue with issues of collective relevance in contemporary times, grounded in the Brazilian context, particularly from the Northeast. More than a dissertation about a dance creation, this first-person essay also sets out to dance. A gesture of presence and (re)existence, it wagers on art as a force capable of creating, transforming, and communicating ways of knowing and being in a world that urgently needs to be reimagined.