Performing transformation in the Community University of the Rivers

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Notes

1. We join the words art and educator to affirm the importance of the arts as pedagogic languages, key to the development of a new paradigm of education and formation. In Brazil, we also identify ourselves as ‘popular art educators’, to connect with the collective struggles by social movements of and with the excluded, for human rights, social justice and participatory democracy, historically, through pedagogies and literacy processes for self-determination.

2. In 1999, we coined the term cultural literacy to refer to our pedagogy which aims to decolonize the memory and the imagination through dialogic processes of sensitization, decodification and collective recodification. Our cultural pedagogy seeks a questioning self-reading of our subjectivity to reveal the histories of subjugation, self-sacrifice and exclusion, recorded in our everyday gestures and reflexes, transforming their effects into resources of personal and collective self-determination. It is not proposed simply as a pedagogic option or new curriculum discipline, but as a way of life which decolonizes the political unconscious and body memory to intervene in the reproduction of the past, cultivating an intercultural sensitivity and performative awareness, necessary in the formation of new communities of empathetic and reflexive solidarity, and new democratic politics of liberation.

3. We understand Culture in its broad anthropological sense. I quote the definition that we cultural activists in the 2020 Vision project formulated in Derry, North of Ireland in 1989, to intervene within a populist perception of Culture in communities like Cabelo Seco. Culture is normally understood as art produced for galleries and theatres by creative geniuses in isolation. This belief has misled and subordinated peoples across the world for centuries. It has been used to convince us that culture is irrelevant to our lives, and to exclude us from the construction of ideas and interpretations. It has resulted in the idea that we do not possess cultural skills. But above all, this lie has been used to discourage us from participating in the making of our own culture and identity. Culture expresses our relation with the production and reproduction of life, for this reason, it comes from the verb cultivate. It interprets and defines our economic, political and social relation to the world. It is how we work, eat, think, dress, organize, feel, choose our lovers, love, relax, reflect, remember, talk, laugh, cry, make love, see ourselves, educate our children and bury our dead. It is how we understand ourselves in the world and live out this understanding. We are all the time inheriting, adapting, selecting, constructing and passing values and interpretation – even very contradictory – through our everyday culture. If we do not make our own culture, we can be dominated and used without knowing it. We can live – even work, love and dream – against our own interests.

4. My collaborator and partner Manoela Souza, arteducator and co-founder of the Community University of the Rivers and of the Rivers of Meeting project, who also lives in the Casinha of Culture.

5. Transformance distinguishes between intervention and interruption to highlight opposing pedagogic methods. We understand interruption as a monologic authoritarian interference in the rhythms of a process and community, and intervention as a consultative dialogic proposal, concerned with exposing and valuing the process of a community. This reflects the aims and influences the form of any given cultural action.

6. Our pedagogy aims to be dialogic as opposed to monologic. This affirms the principle of learning through the dialogue between individuals and their knowledges, and the practice of embedding this intersubjective dialogue and construction of identity in the interactive, dynamic and celebratory exchange of knowledges in the artistic languages and forms of their popular culture. In practice, Dialogic English uses the learning of English to provide and create a distanced, intimate and decolonizing stage of reflection for Cabelo Seco on Amazonian histories and identities, towards personal and collective self-determination. This process inspired the emergence of the concept of trialogue to define the interaction between two simultaneous processes: the dynamic public onstage dialogue that emerges through the presence of two intimate dialogues that are set in motion when two people meet in a historical and actual place of possible narratives; and the interaction between a narrator/author, a questioner and a focalizing listener (audience), who together enable a circle of story-telling to take place, through agreed principles, as the conditions for the performance of making a new collective story. This trialogic process-drama requires and cultivates the skills of performance-aware reflexive empathy, dialogic solidarity and ethical co-responsibility, with and through others, nurtured through the intercultural literacy techniques of Transformance.

7. This decision is based on a number of coinciding pedagogical considerations. We are concerned that people empathize with the assassinated youth in the photo, despite their involvement in drug-running and armed protection of drug territories. We also need to empathize with the parents and extended family of the assassinated youth, who suffer the loss of their son and may not be able to grieve due to the silent judgement of the community. Finally, we need to stimulate a reflexive empathetic response in the community to enable it to look beyond the immediate cause of the death, to understand historic causes and interacting intersubjective effects, without losing sight of an ethic of individual responsibility. These considerations are guided by our distinction between empathetic and reflexive identification. We understand the first as an affective reaction, sentimental and manipulable, and the second as an affective response, analytic and self-aware. We associate empathetic identification with the tendency (of the victim) to erase the difference of identity of the other, and reflexive identification with the tendency to distance oneself in affirmation of the difference of identity of the other. These definitions imply very different models of solidarity and cultural activism, and are essential for the development of a politics of empathy. The same distinction applies for empathetic and reflexive solidarity.

8. Barão is the poorest street in Cabelo Seco. PAC (Program of Accelerated Growth), is the government housing project. Francisco Coelho was the ‘founder’ of Marabá.

9. We define this 'fear of freedom’ as a key element of the resistance to liberation, the psycho-emotional threshold of contradictions which define the personal and collective stage of transformation and self-determination. Typically, this occurs in the fear of jeopardizing solidarity, unity and the emotional security of the community; the intensely moral and explosively sensitive refusal to be judged, humiliated or rejected by the community; and the reluctance therefore to confront and dismantle, publicly, barricaded ways of being, in the quest to experiment with new identities and sensitivities. A threshold radically defined by the existential fear of isolation (social exile) and the loss of identity (social death), and by the need for empathetic- reflexive solidarity.

10. Zequinha acts as our transcultural mediator. His reflex to avoid the dangers of open confrontation has become a skilled capacity to mediate between us and his community (to guarantee the adaptation of the proposal, pace and methodology of the project to the realities and needs of the community); and the interpretation and facilitation of the relation (and tension) between the actual and emerging community cultures. This intercultural and intra-cultural role is essential to anticipate and understand whatever resistance as a resource of knowledge and transformation in the transition from one culture to another.

11. Our transformance pedagogy distinguishes between (crude, narcissistic) sentimental empathy and reflexive empathy. We understand the former as uncritical identification, and the latter as affective but questioning and analytic identification. The difference helps to define a politics of empathy, essential in this epoch of cultural micro-technology, unimaginable in the fascist period when Bertolt Brecht polemicized against (crude) empathy in the Messingkauf Dialogues. The artistic languages, theatre in particular, have a key role in the transformation of sentimental empathy into reflexive empathy.

12. Within cultural literacy processes, the distinction between the barricade (resistance which ranges from the self-aware to the self-destructive) and the fortress (the desensitized subjectivity of the protection, rationalization and justification of privilege in an unequal, exploitative and dangerous world), helps us to understand the complex subjectivities of the excluded and the included, and their psycho-emotional relation, and to avoid a simplistic binary opposition between oppressed and oppressor.

13. The collective creation of this democratic community stage depends on an understanding of aesthetic space, a potential itself created (in all public spaces), through the magnifying and focussing empathetic power of the directed and unified gaze of the collective presence of the audience. Becoming skilled in how to read and perform this public power is what we understand to be performance literacy and nurtures performance-awareness, the performative awareness of intracultural and intercultural dramas that occur in human interaction on all the social stages where we act. Without this literacy, teachers can be extremely inhibiting, authoritarian and abusive of human rights, and pupils learn to be compulsively collusive and complicit in maintaining injustice.

14. We understand the barricade as the subjectivity of resistance which is located between the two voices of self-defence in an exploitative world: a public, external, defensive oppositional and rhetorical voice of accusation, anger and unified collective resistance; and an intimate, internal, reflexive, poetic voice of self-doubt, fear, vulnerability, questioning, empathy and individual need. The two voices tend to live in a state of tension, and even conflict, manifesting themselves in terms of gender and generation, respectively.

15. We understand liberation in the Freirian sense, that there is no personal liberation without collective liberation, and no collective liberation with personal liberation. The double meaning of liberation is similar to the ethical-juridical concept of self-determination which we use to illuminate the dialectic relation between the individual and the collective (or the people).

16. In our ‘dialogic english’ workshops, we all became fascinated by the depth of reflection that the study of English stimulated, a decolonizing reading of the afro-indigenous Amazonian self, and particularly, of the practice of colonial and anti-colonial values within Brazilian Portuguese. Each singing, poetry and dance narrative workshop became a cultural process of understanding the psycho-emotional and psycho-social effects of the intellectual project of colonialism, and how these manifest themselves in our relations and social organizations, to transform them into a praxis of intercultural respect and pluricultural equality. All became aware of the importance of recognizing language, the unconscious and its corporal memory as archives impregnated by and perpetuators of colonialism, which require processes of sensitization and reflexive identification to transform.

17. Transformance projects have dedicated more than 25 years to the development of the intimate object as a key pedagogical resource, a physical object which concentrates and contains (like a text) the psycho-emotional and socio-historical experience of the objective world of its owner. (The concept deliberately brings together and shocks the subjective and objective worlds in a philosophically and pedagogically provocative dialectic relation. The intimate object can be codified and decodified through any expressive language, and adapted in education to create a cooperative environment or research any theme). In this workshop, we became aware of the huge pedagogical potential in dance to extend the intimate object to include gesture and narrative movement, to bypass the self-censuring power of speech. This enabled us to avoid privileging articulate participants and the tendency of speech to ‘fix’ meaning, and instead to include intelligences and knowledges present in the body, and privilege the plurality of interpretation in dance.

18. The affirmation of embodied memory and knowledges and of visceral intelligence and empathy (felt in the skin), draws on the concept of the mindful-body, developed during my collaboration with Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, between 1981 and 1984. The concept affirms the interrelation between the mind and the body, and avoids their Cartesian, rationalist separation.

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Notes on contributors

Dan Baron Cohen

Dan Baron Cohen is a community-based art educator and cultural activist of Welsh-Quebecois origin, who lives and works in the Brazilian Amazon city of Marabá. After completing undergraduate and postgraduate studies in Oxford University, he developed collaborations with young people and their post-industrial communities at risk in northern England and South Wales, and with conflicted communities in the north of Ireland and South Africa. Correspondence: Rivers of Meeting Project, Community University of the Rivers, Amazon, Brazil.