Calixto Neto’s piece works on making minority bodies visible, and on remodelling their imaginaries. Based on a research into “peripheral” dances, in other words those that have been developed on the margins of  institutional frameworks, his first solo focuses on the representation of black bodies, grasped at the crossroads between several emancipation discourses. He brings in the movements of Afropunk and Afrofuturisme,  post-colonial research, especially covering Brazil, black studies and  contemporary art. This critical intention is embodied on stage through a technical strategy which is itself subversive: Calixto Neto remains for  a good part of the show with his back to the audience, a position that makes him vulnerable, while expressing a form of resistance. His body,  as a production space for multiple subjectivities, is thus reinvented  between lamentation and revolt, protestation and celebration. Through the narratives of this distinctly plural body, Calixto Neto raises once again a question which has been freely inspired by his reading of  Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: can the subalterns finaly dance?

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.).