Making the State: Forming and educating the public, presenting and circulating contemporary dance in Brazil

Abstract

This chapter begins with the ethnography of an educative project called the formation and education of the public, the presentation of a work of contemporary dance and its circulation through distinct stages. On this basis, it sets out to demonstrate the diverse social performances which have attempted to make culture or rather certain artistic-cultural practices democratize themselves in accordance with the modes in which they have been produced in Brazil since the end of the twentieth and the start of the twenty-first century. The circumscription of the study to one specific project and one particular work has as its object the investigation of the constant transformation of what is understood by the State: its policies, the inhabitants who it addresses, its projections of itself abroad and the technologies it uses so as to govern and produce legitimacy. We shall analyze the constitutive elements of a politics of the formation and education of the public in contemporary dance through the presentation of a work based on the use of elements of Brazilian popular culture so as to (re-)code them in other forms of movements understood as contemporary.