Mete Lança–Exercise in collective movement

Mete Lança is, at its core, an exercise in collective movement. A formation class. By means of dancing, participants are trained to come together and be guided by the mass. The work draws from dance moves widespread in Brazilian culture. Inspired by Adrian Piper’s ‘Funk Lessons’, the work creates correlations between twerking and colonial embedded social structures. The critical and discursive content is softly addressed during the moving instructions. Using dance as a more accessible language of togetherness, the workshop playfully adopts military-like formations, semantics of the watermelon or collective-chaos-meditation exercises, as metaphors for uniting against a common enemy. Recognizing that music holds deep cultural and political significance worldwide, the work believes that it can be through dancing that people will organize themselves towards a revolution. When popular music blends contemporary violence with imaginaries of pleasure, daily life becomes bearable. Perhaps even hopeful.