MASP

10 am
Introduction with Adriano Pedrosa

10:30 am – 12:30 pm
WILL RAWLS
Disnegatif 
In contemporary dance, “dispositif” often refers to the choreographic framework that helps us collect and cohere meaning from a particular performance. Perhaps, then, a “disnegatif” would help us embrace the choreographic strategies that invite things to fall apart or stand in disaggregation. When we watch performance how do the related desires of “understanding” versus “witnessing” compete for cognitive ground? How do these desires operate when directed towards performances featuring racialized subjects, whose encounters with regimes of interpretation are historically compromised by negation? Using my choreography as a guideline, this presentation will look at some interactions between language, voice, movement, and material to sketch out a disnegatif approach to reading choreography within visual arts and theatrical contexts. I will briefly share some theoretical tools while discussing how these tools coincide with practices of moving through, sensing, and narrating the world. 

CHRISTINE GREINER
Vulnerability as a trigger of creation
The presentation analyzes experiences made up from images/states of extreme vulnerability that seek singular ways of handling risk situations, thus destabilizing identities and models. The first example is the Japanese choreographer Tatsumi Hijikata, who conceives the dance of butoh as a reinvention of the body. In History of Smallpox, in order to handle the depletion of life, he refers to the cold wind of Tôhoku, Vaslav Nijinski, and the triptychs of Francis Bacon. The second is the Brazilian choreographer Lia Rodrigues. In Para que o céu não caia [For the Sky not to Fall], she takes inspiration from the book The Falling Sky, by shaman Davi Kopenawa, to propose another conception of image oriented towards radical changes of the bodily state from the perspective of the Maré slum, in Rio de Janeiro, where the choreography was created. The third example is Latifa Laâbissi, choreographer of French-Moroccan origins, that in her solo piece Self-Portrait Camouflage problematizes images of migrants that, under the authoritarian colonial gaze, are transformed into object-bodies, currency-bodies.

MANUEL SEGADE
Social Choreographies and Radical Gestures
Gestures are learnt, legitimized, coded: they belong to a gender, a class, a race, and they also get naturalized inside historically defined social fields. On the contrary, radical gestures dismantle the language of convenient gestures: to pose is not to make a gesture, but to take the existent codifications as a repertoire at disposal of the bodies which incarnate them each time as an event, dismantling and reconstructing the relations fixed by History. The pose is the flesh of history against the grain: radical gestures are the choreographic phrases of dissent, the microhistories that allow to make History dance. If anarchist Emma Goldman could not participate in a revolution in which she could not dance, contemporary art museums are these places where the dance of history creates new social choreographies of those neglected bodies who can still threaten the hegemonic gestures: the spaces of an affective contamination enacted by affected bodies and contaminating poses.

2 pm – 4 pm
BÉATRICE JOSSE
To Collect the Invisible
Placed outside of the academic history of art, not only performance but also other forms of protocol-based and collective works did not find room for themselves in the collections of museums, usually focused on the material aspects of the works. At the same time that the concept of “intangible heritage” is coined by the Unesco at the end of the 1990s, I started to integrate such performative works, usually conjugated in the feminine, to the collection of Frac Lorraine in Metz, France. It seemed crucial to me that a public collection would validate this practice by means of the acquisition of documents (photos, videos), but also of live forms to be reactivated and reinterpreted. The feminist perspective allows to find interest in forms of invisibility in a broader sense, thus deeply transforming the reading of the world of museums. It rattles some certitudes, notably the one considering that only the material aspect adds value.

GISELLE GUILHON
Dance Anthropology in Brazil: genealogies, influences, contributions
From the ongoing research named “Ethnographing Ethnographies: A Mapping of Dance Anthropology Researches Led in Brazil between 1990 and 2020,” the conference will pass through three topics: 1) Dance in Anthropology and Anthropology in Dance: presentation of the anthropological research in dance, indicating its specific contributions; 2) Building Genealogies: an outline of the main theoretical-methodological filiations and streams  guiding such researches (some of them including a major influence of performance, ritual ethnology, and ethnomusicology studies), which gave rise to several ramifications; 3) The Contribution of Folklorists: reference and reverence to some pioneer actions of recording, cataloguing, and analyzing that, even though they have not been recognized at the time as truly anthropological research in dance, could represent a possible first generation of researchers, once they prepared the grounds where the seeds of this discipline would later be planted.

KÉLINA GOTMAN 
Where Does Dance History Lie?
What is the “object” of dance history, and how does “dance history” come to appear as a field and discourse? Put otherwise, how might we conceptualize the fiction of disciplinarity – its fabrication – as a way better to draw out the possibilities of re-fictionalizing “dance” in an expanded sense as movement or choreography? Drawing on my work on “choreomania” – discourse surrounding “epidemic dancing” in nineteenth-century colonial medicine, medical history, anthropology, sociology, psychiatry, and much more – I will suggest ways we might reconceptualize “dance history” in a radically trans-disciplinary arena. In particular, I will suggest ways we might conceptualize the methods of dance research to be choreographic – to move “anarchaeologically” through historical time as “dance” comes institutionally into view. I will argue that to think choreographically may help reorient work towards a comparatively open arena of investigation, attentive to epistemological acts of displacement, translation, and transfer. 

BÉATRICE JOSSE
Graduated in Law and Art History, Béatrice Josse was assigned to direct the 49 Nord 6 Est – Frac Lorraine in 1993, then to the Magasin, in Grenoble, in 2006. As a place destined to collect artworks, she succeeded in considerably inflecting the number of male artists, all the while infiltrating intangible practices (performances, protocols). Besides writing historical monographs about a few artists, she also organized several collective exhibitions linked with her feminist engagements. Currently at the head of Magasin des horizons in Grenoble, she has been orienting herself towards a new definition of the role of artists in society through the proposition of pluridisciplinary projects, in addition to organizing a professional course open to issues concerning art, society, and climate.
 
CHRISTINE GREINER
Full professor at PUC-SP. Since 1998, she coordinates the Center of Oriental Studies, in addition to teaching and orienting researches undertaken at the Program of Post-Grad Studies in Communication and Semiotics, and at the graduate program in Body Arts. She was a visiting professor in universities in Japan (Kansai Gaidai, Nichibunken, Rikkyo etc.), United States (NYU, Tisch School of Arts), Spain (Castilla de la Mancha), and France (Paris VIII). Among her published titles are Fabulações do corpo japonês, Leituras do corpo no Japão, O corpo em crise, curto-circuito das representações, and O Corpo, pistas para estudos indisciplinares.
 
GISELLE GUILHON
Professor and researcher at UFPA, leading activities in the Post-Grad Program in Arts (PPGArtes) and in the graduate courses of Dance and Music. Holder of a PhD in Scenic Arts from the PPGAC/UFBA, with a “sandwich” scholarship from Université Paris VIII. Obtained a postdoctoral degree in Social Anthropology from UFSC and in Science of Religion from UFJF. She is the coordinator of the research group Círculo Antropológico da Dança – CIRANDA. Author of the books Sama: etnografia de uma dança sufi, Mukabele: ritual dervixe, and Rumi e Shams: notas biográficas, as well as organizer of volumes I, II, III, and IV of the series Antropologia da Dança.
 
KÉLINA GOTMAN
Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies at the King’s College London, and Hölderlin Guest Professor in Comparative Dramaturgy at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt. She is author of Choreomania: Dance and Disorder (Oxford University Press) and Essays on Theatre and Change: Towards a Poetics Of (Routledge), as well as co-editor of Foucault’s Theatres (forthcoming, MUP). She has written widely on movement, translation, dance and the cultural and critical history of disciplines and institutions, and collaborates widely on productions across Europe and North America. She has also worked as a strategic advisor and curator for galleries and festivals internationally. 

MANUEL SEGADE 
Manuel Segade has worked since 1998 in fragments of cultural history of aesthetic practices of the end of the 19th century, around the production of a somatic and sexualized subjectivity, which was the subject of his book Narciso Fin de Siglo, 2008. He has a wide curatorial practice, among which is the Spanish Pavillion in Venice Biennale in 2017. He has also been teaching curatorial practice in different postgraduate and MA programs, such as the Honours in Curatorship of Michaelis University of Cape Town, MACBA’s Independent Studies Program, and the École du Magasin in Grenoble. He is director of Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo in Móstoles (Madrid, Spain). 

WILL RAWLS
A New York-based choreographer, dancer and writer whose work focuses on language and dance as tools for engaging black embodiment and abstraction in performance. His work has appeared at MoMA and MoMA PS1; MCA, Chicago; Danspace Project; New Museum of Contemporary Art; Issue Project Room; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art; Walker Arts Center. At Danspace Project, he co-curated Lost and Found, comprised of performances and artist projects focused on the intergenerational impact of HIV/AIDS on dancers, women, and people of color. His writing has been published by Artforum International, the Hammer Museum, the MoMA. He is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Robert Rauschenberg Residency, and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant. He teaches and lectures widely in university, community and festival contexts.