Does a black body really belong to itself? By posing this question in an up-front way, in IL FAUX, Calixto Neto, highlights the systemic threat posed to racialized and minority bodies, thereby questioning the danger and violence that the contemporary world offers them, and the way in which this historical heritage is passed on. The history of the body that he constructs and which unfurls onstage is thus that of a process of “debodying”, as he calls it, and which propels him into a strange undertaking, that of self-fabrication. How can we respond to our own loss? Via resistance no doubt, perhaps through compensation, but definitely through dance. For Calixto Neto, only the affirmation of a vital life-force is sufficient enough to oppose the forces of negation of which the black body is the object and which attempt, from the outside, to take control of. As a moving target and puppet, the artist makes use of a ventriloquism mechanism which throws the regime of his own identification into disarray. Placing himself between spoliation and fictionalization, he looks into words as a means of expression and into language as means of  consolation, with no guarantee of managing to do so.

Source: programme of the CND

Calixto Neto is from Recife in Brazil and he’s been living in France since 2013; he was trained in drama in the Pernambuco Federal University  and then he trained in dance with the experimental dance group in his native town, before enrolling in the exerce MA in choreography in the  Montpellier CCN. While a student there, he created the solo piece petites explosions and the duet Pipoca with Bruno Freire. oh!rage, his second solo, gives visibility to minorities, bodies and identities and focuses on “peripheral” dances that exist in the margins of mainstream institutions. Neto was a member of Lia Rodrigues’ company  from 2007 to 2013, and he worked as a dancer with Volmir Cordeiro, Anne Collod, Mette Ingvartsen and Luiz de Abreu, whose famous piece O Samba do crioulo doido he reprised. In 2021, he created Outrar and Feijoada. In 2022, he was invited to participate in the Kunstenfestivaldesarts  Free School and started researching American musician Julius Eastman’s work with six other dancers and musicians. In 2023, his piece IL FAUX premiered in Brussels during the Kunstenfestivaldesarts.

Since 2001, the National Center for Dance (CND) has been making recordings of its shows and educational programming and has created resources from these filmed performances (interviews, danced conferences, meetings with artists, demonstrations, major lessons, symposia specialized, thematic arrangements, etc.).