Fernanda Ermelindo Rodrigues

Fernanda Ermelindo Rodrigues, born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, is a dancer and dance scholar. After completing her bachelor’s degree at the Faculdade Angel Vianna in Rio de Janeiro, she continued her dance training in New York City. After moving to Germany in 2021, she completed her studies at the HfMT Cologne with a master’s thesis entitled “Dance and the two Germanys: Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch East Tour 1987”. She received the LIMBO research grant for her thesis. As a contemporary dancer, Fernanda Ermelindo Rodrigues has worked with ensembles in NYC and Rio de Janeiro, as well as creating her own choreographies. She also worked as an assistant to the artist Anabella Lenzu, as a research assistant to the musicologist Marcia Taborda and in the archive of the Pina Bausch Foundation in Wuppertal. During this phase, she was able to acquire and deepen her teaching and mediation qualifications in ballet, contemporary dance and improvisation. Fernanda Ermelindo Rodrigue’s research interests lie in historiography, archival work and decolonial thinking, with a strong curiosity for the role of dance in transforming societies and its intertwining with the political sphere. As part of the inter-university doctoral program “Cultures in Transition”, Fernanda is researching the changes in dance creation in Brazil during the military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985.

Dissertation project:
Dancing Through the Lead
A Decolonial Perspective on the Cultural Transformations During the Brazilian Military Dictatorship

First Supervisor: Univ.-Prof. Dr. Nicole Haitzinger (PLUS)
Second Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Marcos Francisco Napolitano de Eugênio (Universidade de São Paulo USP)

At the turn from March to April 1964 the democratically elected president of Brazil suffered a coup d’état. From then until 1985 the military ruled the country under a strict dictatorship. Full censorship and a violent torture apparatus were established to silence political voices critical of the regime. This complex time in history, known in Brazil as the “years of lead”, contains a great paradox: the greater the severity imposed by the military, the more politically engaged were all those forming the opposition. What cultural shifts can be observed when a country is forced to face the death of its democracy? And how could a country host at the same time such an intense censorship mechanism and a boom in the leftist arts?

I propose to study the radical change in the political environment as a trigger for a transformation in the arts, as artists had to find ways to evade the imposed censorship. There was also a political awakening in much of the artistic sphere, which expanded the production of politically engaged art. Dance found a rather fertile locus as the censors simply didn’t seem to understand its significance. Coming from a dance studies perspective, it is rather curious that although Brazil is commonly associated with musical genres and social events where dance plays a fundamental role, such as samba and carnival, not much has been researched on Brazilian dance history. In the case of the military dictatorship, there is an extensive bibliography dealing with culture and art mainly in the fields of music, visual arts, literature and theater. These works will serve as an essential support element for my dance historiographical research.

What was in fact this fruitful ground dance found during the years of lead? Were there public policies incentivizing dance production? What was the role of dance in this authoritarian regime? Material from Brazilian newspapers and archives, as well as semi-structured interviews with artists who were active during this period, will be the sources to be studied by employing interdisciplinary methodologies, such as movement analysis, discourse analysis and those of archival research. As proposed by dance scholar Julia Wehren, I will look at choreography as a historiographic praxis, both while analyzing how the choreographies of the time can be used as archival source from which dance history can be written, and as source for re-enactment (Claudia Jeschke) as I intend on re-staging chosen choreographies. Finally, I aim to build a panorama of the different dancers, companies and works of the time, highlighting the transformations noted in theme, aesthetics and discourse, as well as their paths of subversion as they stood against the dictatorship. Decolonial theories from Latin American scholars such as Anibal Quijano will permeate the research as I question the western standards in dance studies that at many times have ignored Brazilian dance production. This research will reflect on the history and impact of authoritarian structures on the arts and culture, and its developments even in present times.