Seminário - Performance, selvagens e poscolonialismo

“The Other History

of Intercultural Performance”
Coco Fusco. The Drama Review .1994.
 Coco Fusco (1960– ): Cuban-born interdisciplinary
artist based in New York City. She attained a
Bachelor's degree in Literature and Society/Semiotics
from Brown University in 1982. She later attained a
Master's of Art degree in Modern Thought and
Literature from Stanford University in 1985 and a
Doctorate in Art and Visual Culture from Middlesex
University (England) in 2005.[2]

Collaborated with Guillermo Gómez-Peña on the

performance Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the
West (1992).
Other performances include: Dolores from 10h to 22h
(2002, with Ricardo Dominguez) and The Incredible
Disappearing Woman (2003, with Ricardo Dominguez).
Fusco is the author of English is Broken
Here (1995), Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the
Coco Fusco Americas (2000), The Bodies That Were Not Ours
(2001), and Only Skin Deep (2003, with Brian
Wallis).
Guillermo Gómez-Peña (1955– ): Mexican-
born bi-national performance artist and
author, leader of La Pocha Nostra. Na
international organizationa of performance
artists of diferente countries. His works
include both writings Warrior for
Gringostroika (1993), The New World
Border (1996), Dangerous Border Crossers
(2000), and Ethno-Techno Writings on
Performance, Activism, and Pedagogy
(2005, with Elaine Peña)
– and performances: Border Brujo (1990),
El Naftazeca (1994), Border Stasis (1998),
Brownout: Border Pulp Stories (2001), and
Mexterminator vs the Global Predator
(2005).
Locais onde a performance foi concretizada:
• Plaza Colon em Madrid
• Covent Garden em Londres.
• Field Museum of Chicago
• Art Gallery of the University of California
• Australian Museum of Natural Science em
Sydney
• the Smithsonian's National Museum of
Natural History,
• Buenos Aires, Argentina.
“Fusco and Gomez-Pena chose
countries deeply implicated
in the extermination or abuse of
aboriginal peoples. By staging their
show in historic sites and
institutions, they situated the
dehumanizing practice in the very
heart of these societies' most
revered legitimating structures.”
“The performance was interactive, focusing less on what we did than
on how people interacted with us and interpreted our actions…we
intended to create a surprise or uncanny encounter…In such
encounters with the unexpected, people's defense mechanisms are
less likely to operate with their normal efciency; caught off guard,
their beliefs are more likely to rise to the surface.” C.Fusco. The Other
History of Intercultural Perfomance.
1493: An Arawak brought back from the Caribbean by Columbus is left on display in the Spanish Court
for two years until he dies of sadness.

1501: .Eskimos. are exhibited in Bristol, England.

1810.1815: .The Hottentot Venus. (Saartje Benjamin) is exhibited throughout Europe. After her death, her genitals
are dissected by French scientists and remain preserved in Paris's Museum of Man to this day.

1853.1901: Maximo and Bartola, two microcephalic San Salvadorans, tour Europe and the Americas, and
eventually join Barnum and Bailey's Circus. They are billed as .the last Aztec survivors of a mysterious jungle city
called Ixinaya..

1906: Ota Benga, the rst Pygmy to visit America after the slave trade, is put on display in the primate
cage of the Bronx Zoo. A group of black ministers protest the zoo's display, but local press argue
that Ota Benga was probably enjoying himself.

1911: The Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company is sold for $250,000, after thirty days of performances
in the United States. 150 shows include one or more Kickapoo Indians as proof that the medicines
being hawked were derived from genuine Indian medicine.

1992: A black woman midget is exhibited at the Minnesota State Fair, billed as .Tiny Teesha, the Island
Princess..
La Belle Hottentot, a 19th-century French print of Baartman
Khoikhoi Gamtoos Valley of South Africa. fonte Wikipédia
Maximo and Bartola CDV by Edmonds of Southampton,
c1867.jpg. fonte Wikipédia
Ota Benga, a human exhibit, in 1906. Age, 23 years. Height, 4
feet 11 inches (150 cm). Weight, 103 pounds (47 kg). Brought
from the Kasai River, Congo Free State, South Central Africa, by
Dr. Samuel P. Verner. Exhibited each afternoon during
September. — a sign outside the primate house at the Bronx
Zoo, September 1906. fonte Wikipédia
Uma critica ao passado ou ao presente?
“The Guatinaui cage confronts the viewer with the "unnatural" and extremely
violent history of representation and exhibition of non-Western human beings. Yet,
it also enters into dialogue with another history: the caging of rebellious individuals
in Latin America from pre-Hispanic times to the recent public caging in Peru of
Abimael Guzman, leader of Sendero luminoso (Shining Path), and the caging of
Taliban fighters by the United States in Guantanamo. These performances of power
have different histories.” D.Taylor. Scenarios of discovery. Reflections on Performance and Ethnography in The
Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003.
A critica aos museus
Os museus encenam o encontro com o outro.
“Like discoverers,the visitors come and go; they see, they
know, they believe – only the deracinated, adorned and
"empty" object stays in place.”
“This chapter explores the scenario [scenario of discovery] as an act of

transfer, as a paradigm that is formulaic, portable, repeatable, and often

banal because it leaves out complexity, reduces conflict to its stock

elements, and encourages fantasies of participation.” Diana Taylor. Scenarios

of Discovery: Reflections on Performance and Ethnography

I love the video, and the live
performance that I imagine I see in it.
Yet I believe the anger in part comes
from the "testlike" quality of both.
Reverse ethnography
o observador está a ser observado
A dupla encenação
“the two mediums- live performance (repertoire) and film (archive)-affect the
nature of the audience response. The intense controversy surrounding the cage
is, I believe, in part a product of this double staging.”
Diana Taylor. Scenarios of Discovery: Reflections on Performance and Ethnography
One last thing: I agree that there are ethical issues involved in putting people on the spot.
However, I know that some people are put on the spot all the time, while others hardly ever have
to show who they are, or be caught off guard, or have their identities questioned. I teach an
undergraduate class on Art and Race at Tyler School of Art in which I start with a discussion of
whiteness, and most of my students have the hardest time grasping the concept, let alone being
able to talk about identities or behaviors as white. Whether it's in the art arena or the classroom,
I don't feel too guilty about making them stop for a moment and experience that sort of
pressure that people of color experience all the time-in a sense I think that sort of strategy is
similar to minimalist approaches to sculpture that made audiences uncomfortably aware of
the presence of the object that was not them.
C . Fusco. “Fusco Responds to Taylor and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett” . The MIT Press.
TDR (1988-), Vol. 42, No. 4 (Winter, 1998), pp. 10-12