Home – Home – Jornals – "Philosophy of Education" 2020 number 1

Introduction. This work reflects on dance teaching driven by the pluricultural dance-art-education method entitled «Body and Ancestry», by the concept of «Escrevivência», and the oral knowledge of Nagô people conceived within what we call terreiro, which is a place where Afro-Brazilian religions take place. It proposes a reflection about dance teaching as a place of convergence where the knowledge present in the individual and collective imaginaries are respected and articulated as proposals that stimulate awareness of the subjectivities and «subjectivations» of individual’s narratives. It suggests Afro-oriented perspectives to dance teaching, added to the already existing teaching strategies in the current scene of contemporary dance teaching as a possibility of a pluralized teacher, capable of hosting and representing the multiple narratives in the Dance and Education fields. Methodology and methods of the research. This is a qualitative research based on the experience report of the first author as an apprentice of Afro-diasporic dances in her grandmother’s terreiro, at the city of Rio Claro, state of São Paulo, Brazil. Based on her experience report, together with the skills she developed within the disciplines of the dance undergraduate program at University of Campinas, we searched for bibliography that could be a basis for the theoretical research intended, e.g., a reflection on the importance of including the knowledge of the Nagô people in the curriculum of diferent grades of dance teaching in Brazil, from basics to the superior education, since we have a significant number of Nagô people descendants in Brazilian lands. The results of the research. After reading and analysing all the texts listed, we found three main subjects that we considered that would deserve a thorough reflection, which led us to structure our discussion in three topics: 1) «From memory incarnate: knowledge of terreiro in a body perspective», where the first author presents, from her own memories and writings, the justification for choosing the themes focused on this paper when she first wrote a conclusion course manuscript regarding the same themes; 2) «Black aesthetics, scathing and subtleties: A bridge between ‘Body and Ancestry’ and the writings of self and time», where we discuss the pluricultural dance-art-education proposal of Dr. Inaicyra Falcão dos Santos and the concept of «escrevivência» created by the writer Conceição Evaristo, drawing a parallel and connectivity between the approaches; 3) «Dudu Iyè: Black Reflections in Dance-Music Teaching», where we return to the Nagô people knowledge and discuss the insertion and performance of their descendents in a kind of dance teaching that searches a plural space, capable of accommodating the multiple narratives of individuals in dance. Conclusion. Including Afro-diasporic knowledge in dance teaching helps us to reflect on the dishonest renunciation of black performance in the multiple spheres of contemporaneity and «modernity», which conceive of infinite trajectories of knowledges and acts in dance [1]. It is to expose the hermetic and colonized gear that makes invisible black narratives and stifles any possibility of representation and representation in any medium, be it artistic or social.