O Corpo Negro dance festival offers 60 free attractions in Rio

The start of the O Corpo Negro dance festival, one of the largest of its kind in the country, will be marked by a performance on Copacabana Beach, south of Rio de Janeiro, next Sunday (28), at 4pm, in honor of World Day of Dance, celebrated on April 29th. On the occasion, the dancers from the DeBonde group will occupy the beach promenade, at Rua Figueiredo Magalhães, with the show Stampedean intervention that crosses and is crossed by the street.

“We wanted to highlight and celebrate this date together with the city of Rio de Janeiro and society, before our official opening, and present a pill of our programming that will take place throughout the month of May”, he told Brazil Agency the technical analyst for Performing Arts at the state’s Social Service of Commerce (Sesc RJ), André Gracindo.

The festival reaches its fourth edition this year and is organized by Sesc, encompassing shows created and performed by black artists, selected by a public notice. The free program will run until May 31st in the cities of Rio de Janeiro, Niterói, São Gonçalo, Nova Iguaçu, Barra Mansa, Volta Redonda, Nova Friburgo, Petrópolis and Teresópolis.

Official opening

The shows will be presented in Sesc RJ units, schools and universities and public spaces, totaling works by 32 companies and dance groups, from the states of Rio de Janeiro, Bahia, Ceará, Espírito Santo, Goiás, Maranhão and São Paulo. The official opening of the project is scheduled for Tuesday (30), at 8 pm, at Sesc Tijuca. The event will be attended by the artists on the program, guest curators Diego Dantas, Gal Martins and Jaílson Lima, and the general public.

On this occasion, a tribute will be paid to Master Manoel Dionísio, creator of the Escola de Mestres-Salas, Porta-Bandeiras e Porta-Standartes, active in Rio de Janeiro, which trains new dancers and preserves dance and carnival repertoires for around 33 years. André Gracindo highlighted that Mestre Dionísio is one of the strongholds of dance knowledge in Brazil, which are movements related to samba and, more specifically, carnival. During the meeting, the short film will be released Dionysus, a Masterdirected by choreographer, theater director and audiovisual director Carmen Luz.

There will be more than 60 free attractions and 200 activities, including dance shows, shows, audiovisual exhibitions, workshops and debates, which will take place over the course of a month. “We have two samba shows, one that talks more specifically about samba gafieira. At the same time, we have shows hip hop, afro dance shows, contemporary dance, performances. It is a very wide variety of offerings that the public will be able to learn a little about what these artists are producing in contemporary times and experience these flavors, perceiving, at the same time, this variety of Brazilian culture, creations and aesthetics”, highlighted Gracindo.

Protagonism

André Gracindo highlighted that, in this fourth edition, Sesc continues with the objective of reinforcing the importance and role of black artists in Brazilian culture, especially in dance, based on the principle that the artist can create whatever he wants, whether in dance contemporary, in samba, in hip hopat the funk etc. “There is no proper place. The idea of ​​the project is also to deconstruct this stereotype that a large part of society has when talking about black culture, about a place that has already been built. We just want to mess this up and say ‘the person is working, producing, creating and everyone has their own trajectory, including the trajectory that comes from African cultures’.”

The festival will offer the public ten new shows, selected through a notice launched last year by Sesc RJ for the event’s programming. Among the national premieres is O Sound of the Hill, in which Rio choreographer Patrick Carvalho narrates his own story. Among the alleys and alleys, the award-winning dancer presents his genuine way of choreographing. Another first is the performance Vogue Funkwhat a mix of dance funk with the elements of culture ballroom, bringing the black and LGBTQ+ periphery to center stage. The history of Brazilian dance personalities is also represented in Isaura, a show created and performed by Aline Valentim. The work tells the story of the dancer, teacher and choreographer Isaura de Assis, one of the great references of black dances in the state.

Children

For the first time, the festival will have a program dedicated to children, concentrated at Sesc Tijuca. The idea is to talk about issues surrounding the structure of racism in Brazilian society. “We believe that having representation on stage, telling stories about black characters, with black bodies dancing, some vocabulary from Africa, is very important. The sooner we talk about this, the less opportunity there is for racism to remain established within society,” said Gracindo.

Therefore, the technical analyst for Performing Arts at Sesc RJ believes that looking at the children’s segment is essential so that there is an approach to this subject as an aesthetic experience, of dance, so that the child can get to know other bodies that they are not used to. and other stories being told. Among the highlights, the premiere of the show The girl dances, which features the girl Maria Felipe, with African rhythms and dances and songs, in a choreography that addresses the fight against colonization in the country. Another premiere is the show Gbinfrom Cia Xirê (RJ), which addresses Afro-descendant matrices in the contemporary dance scene.

Parallel programming

Although the highlight is dance, the O Corpo Negro festival will have parallel programming with music, films and other integrated activities. There will be shows of music with Jonathan Ferr, one of the most celebrated names of the new generation of Jazz Brazilian, at the opening, in addition to the dancing Baile Black Bom, and samba circles in several units.

The audiovisual exhibition will offer the public more than 65 film screenings. Among them, the documentary Othello the Great, which addresses the life and work of comedian and actor Grande Othello, who broke barriers for a black actor in the first half of the 20th century, working with names in world cinema. It will also be displayed Dialogues with Ruth de Souzawhich presents rich material from the life of one of the great ladies of national dramaturgy, the first Brazilian artist nominated for the best actress award at an international film festival.

Although the audiovisual program runs until May 31st, the festival’s closing event will take place on the 26th, starting at 2pm, at Viaduto de Madureira, in the north of Rio, a region known as the disseminator of black culture through the traditional Baile Charme.