On Monday, June 27, 2022, the National Institute of Art History (Institut national d’histoire de l’art – INHA) presents “Performativités Noires: cultures visuelles, corps noirs et performances” [Black erformativity: visual cultures, black bodies, and performance], organized by INHA researcher Vivian Braga dos Santos. Léna Blou—dancer and choreographer from Guadeloupe, researcher, and creator of Techni’ka—and Mahalia Lassibille—dance anthropologist, specialized in Africa and professor at Paris 8—will discuss the performativity of black bodies in dance.

Description: The study of the circulation of so-called African dances in the Atlantic calls for new readings of the notions of “traditional” and “contemporary” as well as new analytical tools in order to understand the creative processes, the repertoires, the influences, transformations, appropriations, and reinterpretations of these practices today. For this meeting of the “Black Performativity” seminar on dance, it will be a question of immersing oneself, through a dialogue between dance and anthropology, in the universe of knowledge of the practices of the WoDaaBE and, by way of creation, in the aesthetics of disorder as resistance that the Bigidi teaches us. In these two examples of the transmission and transformation of dances, dancing black bodies occupy the place of bodily memory of gestures and testify to an aesthetics-politics of resilience and survival.

For more information, see https://www.inha.fr/fr/recherche/programmation-scientifique/en-2021-2022/seminaire-performativites-noires-cultures-visuelles-corps-noirs-et-performances.html