Digitizing the Archive from 1994-2016 – Angela Guerreiro Productions (AGP)
Digitizing the Archive from 1994-2016 – Angela Guerreiro Productions (AGP), it is an attempt to recover analog memories of intensive creative dance productions. My main research focus was topics around embodiment, the bodymind connection („Project X“ and the collaboration with neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, 1999), political and social concerns, such as racial and gender prejudice. These collaborations were an inquiry around the body and of belonging.
One of these productions was „Permanent Prints“, premiered at Kampnagel Hamburg in 1999. It was a triptych, constituted of three different choreographic works „Duett“, „Antarctica” and „Caligula“, the piece „Duett“, was performed by myself and Cristina Moura and it started with us both on stage, sitting on a chair, looking at the audience, with an empty look, a self-written banner hanging above our heads with the written statement „We won’t move“.
One of the main concerns was to bring up themes for reflection such as multicultural identities (today I would have used the terminology ‚body of cultures‘ coined by Resmaa Menekem), gender, racism, including social political conflicts. „Duett“ was about two Black women, two dancers, one of them seven months pregnant, performing movement scores considered out of the conventional approach. „Duett“, dealt with social prejudices and clichés around the Black body.
Going through some of the reviews of my choreographic work it is interesting to analyze the terminology used to describe these two female Black bodies, “Both are dark-skinned, so their dance also calls into question the identity-creating potential of skin color.” What a review, ‘Potential of skin color’? The fact is that the discourse around race, ethnicity and colonialism in contemporary dance in Germany at that time did not have found its place to be discussed.
The above example is just one of many more, and I trust that my work is an important source for research around the role of the female Black body within the German contemporary dance scene.
To digitize there is: 139 Hi8 + Mini DV, 27 VHS, 5 Betacam, 1 DVCam und 39 CD-Rom, including photographs, texts, postcards, programs and reviews.
