When dance is performance or text of the culture of a place:

Jequitinhonha: origem e gesto and Encantado

Abstract

In this article, the concept of performativity is developed in anthropological and artistic terms. Performativity is understood as a linguistic use of relevance from the second half of the 20th century, with the advent of postmodernity, both in ethnographies and in artistic poetics. Performative linguistic use is discursive, that is, it makes explicit the relativity of meanings according to the situations of emission and reception. Therefore, it differs from the linguistic use of textualization, which fixes meanings regardless of interlocutional relationships. A dance poetics occurs through the configuration of movement, through the actions of the artists who perform, and through the relationship of the artists with the other elements/objects on stage. Depending on how the poetics is made, it can be textualizing or performative. After theoretically developing the difference between these two types of poetics, and their ethical implications, I comment on the work Jequitinhonha: origem e gesto, to demonstrate that the way its poetics is constructed, akin to the poetics of classical dance, makes the dance textualize the culture of Jequitinhonha. And to glimpse a performative poetics, I briefly comment on the work Encantado, which also has the culture of a place as its theme, but does not produce a representation of that culture.