Dances are invented everywhere. Styles and ways of moving spread, take shape locally, relying on or generating communities, lifestyles, ways of occupying space and making oneself heard there. Communities in turmoil, linked to social inequality and violence but also to energy and the intensity of urban life. Although linguistics has attempted to make an inventory of languages and the ways in which humans communicate and socialise with each other using words, phrases and intonations, an inventory has not yet been made of gestures, rhythms and bodily movements. What distinguishes one way of dancing from another? How is the subject mobilised in its relation to a symbolic or imaginary community? What common musical sources generate these dances without a stage or theatre, where every person can be alternately performer and spectator, judge and judged? How do gestures, music and style of clothing intertwine? To answer these questions, the choreographers embarked on a subjective and non-exhaustive inventory of a few urban dances that they encountered and learnt. In the course of his presentation, which veers between documentary enquiry, lecture and performance, the performer reveals a complex cartography in which voguing, dancehall, pantsula and many other dance forms are a reminder of the history of migrations, exclusion and struggle that these bodies bear witness to.

Choreographic  and imagery artist, researcher in urban dances, contemporary dancer and  pedagogue. Her practice is situated among notions of transit,  displacement, belonging, overlaping, memory, colors, and ordinary  gestures.

In 2018 she creates  COROA, the performance and installation for  the Galeria Vermelho – São Paulo, also presented in Lafayettes  Anticipations – Paris, at this same year she is awarded with the  “Revelation Prize” by the Cooperativa Paulista de Dança – São Paulo. In 2017 she creates NoirBLUE, a solo work for stage played in France, Portugal and Belgium, and also the Périphérie & Périphériques Project in collaboration with Lá da Favelinha – cultural center, where she is a partner for the dance.  In 2015 she creates DRW2 for the Instituto Inhotim and in 2014 she creates Le Tour du Monde des Danses Urbaines,  a project for the CDCN in France, with those interactive lectures she  have been performing in Brazil, in Europe and in Africa as well.   Besides those main projects she develops the practice CORPO FIRME; danças periféricas, gestos sagrados and collaborates with many artists in works of diverse natures and durations.

NoirBLUE – les déplacements d’une danse  (2018 – 27′) is her first documentary, awarded by FestCURTAS in Belo  Horizonte, Janela de Cinema in Recife, as winner of the brazilian  short-film competition in both festivals. Official selection for the  Fórum.Doc in Belo Horizonte, also for the Semana de Realizadores in  2018, then at Tiradentes Film Festival and International Film Festival  Rotterdam in 2019.

Brazil,  France, Turkey, Belgium, Portugal, Spain, Germany, Switzerland,  Austria, Italy, Poland, Romania, Japan, Peru, United States, Martinique,  Reunion Island, Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali, Nigeria, Angola, Equatorial  Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire and Mauritania are the countries where she has  been crossing her professional experience, through programs of artistic  residency, giving workshops on body, image, sacred gestures &  periphery, or within the programming of international festivals as  performer and tours of her work.

Source: Website of the artist

More information: https://anazpi.com/

Since 2001, the National Center for Dance (CND) has been making recordings of its shows and educational programming and has created resources from these filmed performances (interviews, danced conferences, meetings with artists, demonstrations, major lessons, symposia specialized, thematic arrangements, etc.).

Laboratory for the invention of new tools of radical imagination, thanks to choreographic art, discursive experimentation and poetic-political movements. Research space for healings, improvisations and connections between beings, the objective of which is to design artistic works and educational acts that highlight ancestral technologies of endurance and vitality. Together these three words are pleasant in the mouth, NA MATA LAB. At the same time an invitation to pleasure, at the same time a sound which in the Kikongo language can evoke: injury, luminescence, speech, struggle, sewing, path, the 4th, season, edge and the action of climbing. While in late Latin refers to small forests, or even the reed mat, in the etymology of its derived languages.

Source: Ana Pi