The Divine Cypher
Expanding the cypher
More information on the performance, playdates and credits are to be found here.
For her new creation, at the crossroads of the image and the body, the visual and the living, Ana Pi is carrying out poetic and political research in Haiti on ancestral sacred gestures and their perpetuation in the imagination today. A fantastic dialogue with several contemporary transdisciplinary artists from Haiti, as well as with the experimental filmmaker Maya Deren.
The two women share the same transversal creative process of absolute curiosity, which combines the artistic process with a methodology of research. Maya Deren, from the 1940s onwards, had empirically studied Haitian culture, its dances and voodoo heritage; an experience reproduced in the book The Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haitiand the posthumous documentary film with the same title released in 1985.
Ana Pi, recipient of a scholarship awarded by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the Cisneros Institute, observes how these sacred dances have been preserved and how they resonate today. What memory is there of them? What role does video play in the transmission of these practices? How to expand this cypher, this round of fantastic gestures? The Divine Cypher circulates between unpublished video images and performance, archives and live dance solo, inspired by the filmed gestures and dreams of Maya Deren or those of her predecessor, Katherine Dunham.
Biography
Choreographic and imagery artist, researcher in urban dances, extemporary dancer and pedagogue. Her practice is situated among notions of transit, displacement, belonging, overlapping, memory, colors and ordinary gestures. NoirBLUE – les déplacements d’une danse (2018 – 27’) is her first documentary, awarded by FestCURTAS in Belo Horizonte, Janela de Cinema in Recife, as winner of the brazilian short-film competition in both festivals, « ecumenical prize » at the 65th short film festival Oberhausen. Official selection for the Fórum.Doc in Belo Horizonte, also for the Semana de Realizadores in 2018, then in 2019 at Tiradentes Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Mostra Pajeú, Sessão Vitrine, Mostra de Cinema Negro de Curitiba, MOVE Centre Pompidou, 36º Panorama da Arte Brasileira.
She creates, together with her auntie, the choregraphic piece O BΔNQUETE in 2019, commissioned by the Associação Videobrasil. In 2018 she creates COROA, a performance and installation for the Galeria Vermelho – São Paulo, also presented in Lafayettes Anticipations – Paris, at this same year she is awarded with the “Revelation Prize” in dance by the Cooperativa Paulista de Dança – São Paulo. In 2017 she creates NoirBLUE, a solo work for stage created with Jean Marc Segalen and Jideh High Elements, played in France, Portugal and Belgium, and also the Périphérie & Périphériques Project in collaboration with Lá da Favelinha – cultural center, where she is a partner for the dance. In 2015 she creates DRW2 for the Instituto Inhotim and in 2014 she creates A world tour of urban dance in 10 cities, a project for the CDCN in France, with those interactive lectures she have been performing in Africa, South America and Europe, engaging transgenerational audiences from many social and cultural backgrounds, as well as multiple institutional organizations in over 400 presentations. Besides those main projects she develops the practice CORPO FIRME; danças periféricas, gestos sagrados and collaborates with artists in projects of diverse natures.
She has been crossing the world and drawing her professional experience, through programs of artistic residency, giving workshops on body, image, sacred gestures & periphery, or within the programming of international festivals as collaborator-performer and tours of her own work. She got invited as dancer creator for both future projects: the animation film Ana, en passant by Fernanda Salgado from Apiario and the film installation INFINITY minus Infinity by Anjalika Sagar & Kodwo Eshun from The Otolith Group. In 2021, she premiered The Divine Cypher, a project anchored in Haiti for which she benefits from the MoMA – New York and Cisneros Institute fellowship for the Study of Art from Latin America. She is also associate artist for the European project Dancing Museum, and develops her researches at the MAC Val in partnership with the Briqueterie – CDCN, and is accompanied by Latitudes Contemporaines’ production office. She collaborates with Annabel Guérédrat and Ghyslaine Gau to create the trio « WOMEN », with @Favelinhadance to develop « RACE » for the Festivals of The Future and Festival Parallèle, and with philosopher Maria Fernanda Novo for "Rádio Concha", a work commissioned by the Trienal FRESTAS in Brazil.
