Cristina Fernandes Rosa
Creative Practices, Performances, & Experiments
Selected examples of live art, lecture-performances, and embodied experiments.
Link to visual arts portfolio at the bottom of this page [or click here]
“I think, therefore I move”
- Thomas Hanna, somatics scholar and practitioner
Performance
Interstice or What Needs to Exist (2023)
Interactive performance using images, sounds and materialities based on collective somatic experience, redesigning embodied ethical-aesthetic spaces-times of decolonial re-territorialization, intersectional and accessible multi-sensory existential crossings. Ritual anti-violence, anti-territorial invasion, anti-destruction of original and diasporic cultures, ecological sanctuaries and plural and dissident corporeities, tracing interstitial spiral paths for the recognition, validation and protection of invisible wisdoms and which, despite all the violence that they have been suffering for millennia, they have been providing support for the affective - therefore, effective - life of and on the great mother earth. In this proposition, performance inhabits spaces in order to guarantee a permanent cultural intervention in the oppressor's aesthetics and point out dialogues of symbiosis with Mother Earth.
Coletivo A-FETO and guests
Special participation by guest composers: Luca Forcucci and Guilherme Bertissolo
Performers/creators: Angel Fox, Brenda Urbina, Ciane Fernandes, Cristina Rosa, Felícia de Castro, Franclin Rocha, Leonardo Sebiane, Lia Sfoggia, Ludimila Nunes, Milianie Matos, Raphael Brito, Raquel Parras, Vivian Schmitz
Images: Brenda Urbina, Deborah Dodd, Felícia de Castro, Solange Pires
Interdisciplinary project
Musoni (2023)
Musoni is pilot episode for a series of dance-for-the-camera films, under production. In this pilot, created as part of the funding application, I accumulate the roles of director, performer, costume designer, original soundscape, and film editing/montage. However, each episode of the series will feature a different group of artists in front and behind the camera. The entire series is part of a larger project research-creation project grounded on the Bantu-Kongo cosmogram, the Dikenga dia Kongo. To learn more about this larger project, titled Cognitive Movements, click here [original in Portuguese with subtitles]
Performative lecture
The Whiteness of Contemporary Dance
For this performative lecture (2019), I constructed three dioramas connected to systems of oppression (from left to right, Capitalism, Coloniality and Patriarchy), initially encased inside paper boxes, and additional miniature materials addressing what Boaventura de Sousa Santos calls the the "modern abissal line"(2017). These had-crafted objects are manipulated in the course of the performative lecture.
It was first performed at the Theatre / Performance / Dance Studies is Too White. Roundtable organized by London Theatre Seminar at Birkbeck School of Arts (UK) and at DSA conference in Chicago, IL that year.
"Patriarchy" (above) is the first diorama addressed in this performative lecture. Formally speaking, it makes reference to the pharmaceutical industry and gendered notions of hygiene as well as the work of Global North artists such as Rembrandt's "The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp", Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus", Madonna's videoclip "Material girl" and Pina Bausch's "Café Muller".
Dramaturgy and costume design
Desplante (series)
Enter, Please
I have collaborated as a dramaturg and costume designer for the series of performance works by artist Laura Pacheco. Featuring here are Desplante and Enter, Please, both of which address the challenge of a migrant in a foreign land (2013 - present).
research-creation project
Moviments of Sustentability
Research-creation project that combines different movement practices with the concept of sustentability, understood as a series of concentric spheres.
Site-specific performance in Maillorca, Spain, 2018
Performative Lecture:
Risk-taking Bodies and their Choreographies of Protest
Lecture performance examining the socio-political significance of choreography within body politics discourses in contemporary Brazil: Capoeira Angola's call-and-response fight-games; the work of Alejandro Ahmed (Grupo Cena 11); and the mass-suicide letter issued by the indigenous population Guarani-Kaiowás (October 2012).
International Conference:
Black Bodies in Motion
Choreographing Resistance across the Americas (2015)
In 2016, I organized an interdisciplinary conference at Tufts University with which to extend the recent discussions around the concept of “Black Lives Matter” to Latin America, thus offering a transnational perspective on the subject. Combining lectures and round tables with practice workshops, guest artists and scholars exposed students across campus to the creative strategies that African descendants living outside the US, in places like Salvador (Brazil), Havana (Cuba), and Port of Spain (Trinidad and Tobago), have employed to overcome racial discrimination and foster social justice.
Visual Arts
Portfolio
Prior to the doctoral studies at UCLA, I worked primarily as a visual artist, initially exploring 2D media (drawing, painting, and printmaking) and, later on, installations and performances. From 2003 to 2005, I moved to Honolulu and, to support myself, I worked as an art director for the resort wear company Tori Richard. Great aprenticeship have come from these experiences.
Offering, oil on wood board (2000)