“Enfreakment is a talk-performance in the shape of a multidisciplinary and experimental device based on the national and international historiography of the non-normative body in the performance arts. The body voices a reflection on the genealogy of dance, according to a close gaze that exposes the violence and eugenics enacted upon these bodies. It is urgent to understand the evolution of the body in history and to question the policies that foster exclusion.  

My body will always exist and, therefore, the body of the other. Creating a new body and making the invisible visible. Witnessing our place. Existing in an abnormal body is to exist in a state of constant revolution. Thinking about dance from another place. Contravening the norm and the natural limits. “

— Diana Niepce

Diana Niepce uses the autonomy of her own body’s life to question the structures of power which are inherent to the subject in relation to itself, and to subjects in relation to one another. As part of the dance not dance programme, Enfreakment is presented after Este Corpo que me Ocupa [This Body That Occupies Me], by João Fiadeiro. Through the affirmation of a body-thing, their work questions the political, human and non-human subjectivity of the body, ascribing other materialities and modes of existence to it, while also reimagining the reality of where their dances emerge from.

The body, usually understood as the primary medium of dance, is also, and for that reason, the domain of the social forces that animate it. João Fiadeiro and Diana Niepce, though belonging to different artistic generations and disparate aesthetic worlds, share a common questioning of the body as matter and vehicle, proposing with their work the experimentation of its power and the reinvention of its possibilities.

In the end, the artists address these issues and their own work in a talk with Paula Caspão, moderated by Carlos Manuel Oliveira.

*This performance includes partial nudity and the use of strobe lighting, which may be contraindicated for spectators with photosensitive epilepsy.

Image © Alípio Padilha

dance not dance

This event is included in the (re)performances, films and talks series which constitutes the first part of dance not dance – archaeologies of the new dance in Portugal. More info.