Erika Villeroy da Costa

Between the 1950s and 1970s, dancer and choreographer Mercedes Baptista (1921-2014) and her company marked a shift in black concert dance in Brazil and contributed to staged representations of the black diaspora in the United States, articulating Afro-Brazilian sacred and social dances in relation to choreographer and anthropologist Katherine Dunham's (1909-2006) technique and research methodology. Drawing on archival research, oral histories and choreographic analysis, this project traces the records and stories of the first-generation members of Balé Folclórico Mercedes Baptista, attending to the limits of redress, and the interplay between hypervisibility and erasure of black dance makers within broader narratives of pioneerism in modern dance histories. By interrogating lone-person accounts and rendering visible material networks of dance transmission through and as black sociality, it investigates how documents can be reinterpreted through absence, residue and fullness as resources in archival practice and collective memory work.