Crashing the party: Entering uninvited, decolonial ancestry, and the white Gaze

Fernanda Ermelindo Rodrigues opens the session with an autoethnographic account of violences and exclusions experienced within the field of dance in Brazil. This narrative is juxtaposed with a close reading of a 1985 newspaper article by a prominent Brazilian dance critic controversially claiming the lack of a dance tradition in the country, revealing colonial assumptions embedded in the construction of “Brazilian dance”. Drawing on decolonial theory and Brazilian anthropology, the presentation examines how coloniality persists in aesthetic regimes and critical reception. The session then expands into a conversation with invited artist Amanda Piña about her work Exótica – On the Brown History of European Dance and broader questions of exoticization, ancestry, and the white gaze in contemporary performance.

This session will be held in English.

Fernanda Ermelindo Rodrigues is a Brazilian dancer and scholar. She holds a MA in dance studies from the HfMT Köln and is currently a PhD candidate in the inter-university doctoral college “Cultures in Transformation”, of the University of Salzburg and the Mozarteum, with a research on dance in Brazil during the military dictatorship (1964–85). She has presented her research in institutions in Brazil and Austria. Her research interest is centered in decolonizing dance history and the entanglements of arts and politics.

Amanda Piña is a Vienna-based artist and researcher whose practice engages with movement, ecology, and decolonial thought. Her work draws on Indigenous knowledge systems and world-making/world-sustaining practices that offer alternatives to the dominant paradigms driving today’s socio-environmental crisis. Since 2014, she has been developing a long-term artistic research project entitled Endangered Human Movements, which responds to the accelerating loss of cultural and biological diversity. Working collaboratively with artists, local communities, scholars, and activists, Piña creates performances, curatorial projects, lectures, workshops, and installations that host the re-emergence of ancestral movement practices, proposing relational, embodied ways of being in the world.

The event is part of the public lecture series Un/Inviting Gestures: Politics of Welcoming and Withholding in Art and Culture

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