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June 17, 2011: Performance by Andréa Maciel: Carmen Miranda Goes to Trash on 42nd St

Friday, June 17, 2011 — 11:10 am sharp

42nd Street @ 5th Avenue

A_Maciel_Rodrigues_06_17_11

Credit: Bernardo Cox

Performance by Andréa Maciel: Carmen Miranda Goes To Trash on 42nd St @ 5th Avenue, in front of the New York Public Library

Can the body reveal urban tensions and be able to transform the way people perceive the public space? That question is the motivation behind this performance. The theoretical background is the idea of the Supra-sensorial1 from Helio Oiticica, and the concept of “orgiastic” from Deleuze.

The aim of the performance is to create an opposition between the supra-sensorial body, which is engaged in sensorial explorations involving social, cultural, architectural and environmental spaces and an anesthetized daily urban life caused by the excess of violent images, advertisements and mechanizations.

A dancer dressed in a huge paper skirt offers a ritualistic and orgiastic dance inspired by the myth of Carmen Miranda to passers by on 42nd street. She also plays with the images of ecstatic body and the culture of waste.

Andréa Maciel is a dancer and actress and teaches in PUC – RIO, Arts Graduation Department. Currently she is completing her PHD’s in Performance, body and politics at the Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO) with a work entitled Body and city in the political performances. Since 2003, she has developed several performances, videos and performance installations regards to issues as gender, social violence in public spaces.

1 Oiticican’s concept of supra-sensorial came from his experience with "Mangueira Samba School" and it regards to alternate states of consciousness such as ecstasy and delirium facilitated by the samba dance. 
In this words: “this entire experience into which art flows, the issue of liberty itself, of the expansion of individual consciousness, of the return to myth, the rediscovery of rhythm, dance, the body, the senses, which finally are what we have as weapons of direct, perceptual, participatory knowledge is revolutionary in the total sense of behavior” Oiticica “Appearance of the supra-sensorial” (nov/dec 1967) in Brett et al, Helio Oiticica, p. 130.