Performance – Sertão Negro – Corpos d’água [Bodies of water]

On December 6, the performance Corpos d’água [Bodies of water] will take place as part of a series of activities organized by Sertão Negro at the 36th Bienal de São Paulo. The activity will happen from 3 pm to 3:30 pm at the Sertão Negro’s work, on the first floor.

Located in the Goiás savanna and structured on the principles of quilombo and terreiro, Sertão Negro has its foundations in ancestry, agroecology, vernacular architecture, and the emotional and pedagogical exchanges that are built between artists, masters, apprentices, and the surrounding community. The space hosts ongoing activities such as classes in ceramics, engraving, and agroecology, capoeira angola, and artistic residencies that promote encounters between different languages and bodies.

For the 36th Bienal de São Paulo a series of activations is proposed throughout the duration of the exhibition. Each month, two moments will be dedicated to sharing practices and processes that reflect life in the Sertão: whether through body language, sound, conversation, or collective action. These are 10 sensory, educational, and performative activations that invite the public to experience, even if only for a moment, the poetic surroundings of the Complexo Sertão Negro.

In Corpos D’água [Bodies of water], as a legacy of Iyabás, who merge with rivers, female bodies are marked by various floods and overflows, red water that appears to mark cycles and rites of passage. Performed by Terená Bueno, with the participation of musician Noel Carvalho, it delves into the joys and sorrows, transmutations of the waters-blood that represent life and death, beginning and end. Cycles. Based on Contemporary Black Dance, it brings reflections on the processes experienced by female bodies, which are often transformed into taboos and silenced by society, drowning them in the experiences and lives of black women. The performance is a bodily writing of female gossip whispered in secret, bringing to the stage reflections on common, everyday processes, but which, when hidden, become clots, hurts, and suffocations. Illnesses. In this way, dance comes as a form of collective healing by touching the wound so that it can be healed, not just covered up and hidden.