Questions about the act of dancing their own stories, the image of the black bodies in the Brazilian audiovisual, the black presence in dance history, and relations between dance and cinema will be debated by the manager of the Modern Art Museum’s (MAM-RJ) Film Library, Hernani Heffner; by dancer and teacher of the Harlem Dance Theatre (USA) Bethania Gomes; by researcher and dance artist Luciane Ramos-Silva (SP); and by filmmaker, producer, and screenwriter Sabrina Fidalgo (RJ).

The table’s mediation and conception are by the filmmaker, choreographer, and screenwriter Carmen Luz, invited by this Biennial. She is the founder of the Cia Étnica de Dança e Teatro (RJ), and director of the prestigious feature length documentary Um Filme de Dança [A Film of Dance] (2013),

MINI BIOS

Bethania Gomes
First African-Brazilian dancer at the Harlem Dance Theatre and current dance instructor for the New Yorker institution. Born in Rio de Janeiro, she pursued a career in classical ballet. She is currently a teacher, coach, and choreographer at the same company and professional school, besides collaborating in African-American Institutions like Collage Dance Collective and Alvin Ailey. She is the curator of her mother’s works, Beatriz Nascimento (1942-1995), a historian, teacher, screenwriter, poet, and activist from Sergipe for the human rights of black people and Brazilian women.

Hernani Neffner
Manager of MAM-RJ Film Library, where he entered in 1983 as a volunteer, working later in the Documentation and Research Curatorship and the position of the head conservator. Researcher and licensed teacher, he wrote the script for the video A Lógica do Silêncio [The Logic of Silence] regarding the censorship actuation in the civil-military. He wrote more than 100 entries for the Brazilian Cinema Encyclopedia. Idealizer of the series /lost+found about audiovisual preservation, to be broadcast in the channel Canal Curta! at the end of 2021. 

Luciane Ramos-Silva
A dance artist, anthropologist, and educator. Based on African and Afro-diasporic corporeality, she articulates plurality, movement, and transformation ideas in her works. Reflects on the black ancestry and foundations present in the culture of countries that, like Brazil, carry African heritages in their cultures and lived a colonial experience. Of a transdisciplinary education, she mobilizes actions and reflections that question the hegemonic models of dance knowledge production. 

Sabrina Fidalgo
A filmmaker, playwright, actress, and producer from Rio de Janeiro, she studied in the Munich School of TV and Cinema (Germany) and Córdoba University (Spain). Her medium-length film Rainha [Queen] (2016) was part of the Perspectives exhibit at Rotterdam’s Festival. The short-film Alfazema [Lavender] (2019) was awarded in the Festival de Brasília do Cinema Brasileiro and Festival Internacional de Curtas do Rio de Janeiro – Curta Cinema. She is the daughter of the playwright Ubirajara Fidalgo and theater producer Alzira Fidalgo, creators of the T.E.P.R.O.N. – Teatro Profissional do Negro (1970).

Carmen Luz
Dancer, choreographer, director, playwright, curator, and teacher that has been through literature, visual arts, and cinema. She is the co-founder of Cia Étnica de Dança e Teatro (1994), in the Andaraí neighborhood, where she articulates artistic ambition and social-cultural projects of qualification in contemporary dance. Author of the documentary Um Filme de Dança [A Film of Dance] (2013). Self-taught in the first professional steps, she researches and reflects on gestures, movements, and narratives that involve black bodies and memories from African people and their descendants. Bachelor of Languages and graduate of Theater from UFRJ and in Cinema-Documentary from FGV-RJ; master of Art and Culture from UNIRIO.