Since 2018, Davi Pontes (São Gonçalo, Brazil, 1990) and Wallace Ferreira (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1993) have been developing a series of works based on their shared research into the history of dance, performance, and modern philosophy. As artists, performers, and choreographers, they create pieces that confront the experiences of dissident corporealities and seek to answer the question: “How can we elaborate a dance of self-defence?”

Davi Pontes and Wallace Ferreira create choreographic repertoires that explore mimetic, repetitive movements and whose rhythmic marking is done through the steps. Perceiving dance as self-defence training, they develop bodily strategies of poetic resistance to confront structural racial violence — consequently questioning some epistemological instances of post-colonial societies. Through the body, the duo creates strategies of emancipation, identity affirmation and belonging.

Repertório N. 2, 2022

Video, color, sound, 19'25"

Courtesy of the artists.

Part of a trilogy of videos, Repertório N. 2 proposes a hypothetical answer to the question: “How do you create a dance of self-defence?”
In one of the rooms of the Parque Lage mansion in Rio de Janeiro, the setting used as the stage, the architecture alludes to the colonial past-present of Brazil and Portugal, as does the space where the work is presented today, the former military garages of the Santa Clara-a-Nova Monastery. In this environment, potentially inhabited by ghosts from the history common to both countries, the performers perform, through dance, a symbolic diversion from the racial violence to which black bodies have been subjected since the European colonisation of other territories.

In contrast to the normative tradition of dance, the choreography of Repertório N. 2 denies the presence of majestic movements or a narrative arc. Instead, Davi Pontes and Wallace Ferreira insist on using repetition as a catalyst for tension and unpredictability. Reinforcing an expectation that remains imminent, their bodies hold the gaze in an experience that is as sensory as hypnotic. On stage, the two performers devote themselves to bodily mimesis and trace rhythmic, mirrored movements — ambiguously forging an almost military discipline and feelings of intimacy and union.