I know, I know. I’ve been starving you of culture and refinement.
Allow me to correct that scandalous oversight:
“I like it very much,” says one lady in the audience.
I knew you’d be intrigued.
The piece in question – by Davi Pontes and Wallace Ferreira, titled Repertório N.3, and performed during Ostend’s publicly funded Dansand! festival in 2025 – is, as I’m sure you spotted, a triumph of the political and profound.
Not only is the liveliness above “challenging and resisting the violence and oppression that black bodies face,” it’s a “brave elaboration of a queer black (self)-defense against physical and discursive violence,” and a “piece of queer Black Brazilian anti-colonial resistance.”
But you knew that, of course.
More specifically,
Confrontation is a crucial part of this performance. The two dancers enter nude, and dare the audience, sitting on chairs decked out in a rectangle around the white rubber mat, to acknowledge their existence.
And then the aesthetic stuff really kicks in.
Throughout the performance, the artists work with a minimalistic movement vocabulary, with simple movements such as mimicking swinging a lasso, a feminine roll of the wrists or shading of the eyes, and reclining on a rolling table in a pose reminiscent of Manet’s Olympia while being dragged around the stage by randomly chosen spectators.
And what’s more,
the performers create half a heart with their hand and invite members of the audience to add the other half with their hands.
It’s all deeply emotional. Very moving.
The performers seek out the gazes of the spectators, and test their boundaries. As the performance moves on, the confrontational intimacy of the performers increases. They move towards the public, charge ahead, bend down on all fours, and stand on their heads, exposing their genitals just mere feet away from the audience.
Reminds me of a club I was dragged to back in the Nineties.
Armed with a deep and radical knowledge of “postcolonial, gender and race studies,” and via the medium of nude side-shuffling, the performers are “finding new ways to represent the experiences of minorities.” Should any readers endowed with brownness care to elaborate on this point, preferably while dressed, by all means do.
For those of you craving more, highlights of another performance, from the ImPulsTanz Festival 2024, can be found here. Given the, um, nature of the piece, I’ve had to choose a screengrab with some care.
No, don’t thank me. All part of the service.
Update, via the comments:
As so often, questions are raised not by the mediocrities and grifters doing the, um, performing, but rather by the audience. The people who turn up and watch, as if they were beholding something of enormous importance, a feat of “anti-colonial resistance.”
As if “the experience of minorities” were somehow being epitomised – and defended against “discursive violence” – by two tiresome queens stomping about in the nude.
Daniel Ream quips,
This is literally just Dancing Bear videos.
While Dicentra adds,
Never underestimate the power of White Guilt to move some people.
The performance and its rather strained justifications do seem tailored to the kind of racial neuroticism favoured by progressives. Their hang-ups and affectations. An apparently inexhaustible resource to be exploited.
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