This text was written by Odete, as a part of the Live Art Writers Network, taking place at Festival Dias da Dança, in April-May 2025. To view the other commissioned texts in response to the festival and its performances, as well as an introduction to the project, see here. Texts available in English and Portuguese.
I.
The Fantasy of Context
Or
Context as Fiction
Under a leaden, cruel, vertical sun that made both buildings and souls tremble, birds gathered on rooftops like old advisors to a ruined kingdom. They chirped not songs, but solemn murmurs, as if debating destinies and ancient secrets. Then, out of nowhere, a crow — like a dark thought — detached itself and, with the ceremonial air of one who carries a royal decree, landed in front of me. It looked at me with wise eyes and said, “You, yes, you who look away — you shall be a keeper.”
Keeper! A strange word, carved into my flesh as if it were a stone epitaph. And make no mistake, this is no ordinary craft, the kind one learns from a notary uncle or counselor godfather. No. Being a keeper is fate, a spiritual burden — I dare say, a near-priestly mission. It falls to me to gather and preserve the sighs of the ephemeral: dance, theater, music — those arts as beautiful as they are fleeting, born to die the moment they happen.
Like flowers!
Such pansy art forms!
Pansy as in, a little faggoty
With limp wrists, look at them.
From that day forward — the day of the crow and the merciless sun — I began to inhabit the backstage of memory. I roam dark rooms where bodies dance like shadows animated by a divine breath, where words transfigure into gestures, and sound vibrates like sensitive flesh. I try, with the humility of an ancient scribe, to capture what is naturally undone: the moment.
Because this is what is asked of me: to live between two times — that of the event and that of the archive.
and of man and woman
Of gay and straight
It’s a thankless task, almost a paradox: to archive what refuses to be fixed, to hold the wind in one’s palm. And yet, I persist. I cast bridges — fragile but sincere — between ephemerality and eternity.
Sometimes, when night thickens like a heavy veil
Or a spilled ejaculation
over the archives, the birds return. They perch at the windows with the grave silence of those who know too much. They murmur forgotten names, melodies never recorded, dances extinguished by war and schism. And I listen. And I write — with the care of one tending a relic, with the tenderness of one holding a wounded bird.
I am a keeper now. And in this role, there is austere beauty, melancholic nobility. Yes, there is pain — because to remember is, at times, to wound oneself again. But there is also immense responsibility. Because what is kept, is kept for others: for those to come, and for those already gone. So that the brief trace of what once made us human may never be lost in the mists of time.
like you, my love
II.
The Reality of the Work
Or
The Spectacle of Reality
Darkness. Skin breathes better when it doesn’t have to show anything. In the dark, I feel less observed, and there’s something freeing in that. In the dark, I don’t have to live up to any idea of woman — not even my own. They speak of the past; of a Brazil that may no longer exist, or maybe never did. And I think of what also never existed, or what I struggle every day to make exist: the body I’ve forged over time, with hormones, glances, and mirrors. They speak of singing in misery. No bread to eat, but still a voice to sing. And singing, sometimes, is that: a survival strategy. A thread of sound to cling to when there’s nothing to say that doesn’t hurt, or decay.
There’s a metallic backdrop, gleaming, industrializing and at the same time spectacularizing the stage: a declaration that this can’t be anything but — a spectacle. And that’s what grips me: the honesty of the lie. The beauty of artifice. The stage that admits everything here is constructed — including me, including this writing.
There are bodies read as feminine, at least by me — dancing, spinning, falling. Falling once. Falling twice. Falling three times. And there’s something comforting in seeing one can fall like that, without shame, with precision. One woman falls. Then another. And another. A sequence that echoes strangely in my chest — as if each collapsing body reminds me of every time I couldn’t hold myself up. Not from weakness. From excess. From saturation.
The last one falls in a game with a chair, which seems to flirt with her misery. She says, “I won’t let you sit — or maybe I will. Come closer, try it.” And I know that game. Sitting is exposing yourself. Sitting is accepting a place — and sometimes no place is enough.
There’s a band. Of men? At least I read them as men. The women dance. The men make music. It’s divided like that… strange, but we go on. We go on because we’re used to it. Because even when we don’t want to, we read the division and know where we’re placed. The men — they give it all in the beat, slicing through the spectacle’s space. They are the screams no one screams. Because this is a show, and each fall is a choreographed fall. And if the fall is choreographed, maybe aging can be too. Maybe there’s beauty in that — choreographed lines in time, folds, creases, tiny wrinkles that also dance.
No one bleeds today. No skinned knees in sight — maybe the soul is skinned, but the audience doesn’t deal with that. At least not yet. And the soul… the soul doesn’t matter that much. It doesn’t sell, it doesn’t perform. The soul is to be felt alone, in the dark, after the applause.
Darkness returns. And from it, a light emerges — a video projection. It cuts across the stage, then slips into the audience. The image clings to every wall. The light becomes skin. A foreign skin that illuminates my own.
Then we see a video: it’s Jo Bernardo. I know her, but for those who don’t, the image shows an older woman. And there’s something about old age that moves me deeply — perhaps because it promises, yes, we’ll keep going. That there is a future, even for us.
She’s with Gaya in her arms, relating to her body like a rehearsal. And this tenderness between female bodies is so rare, so urgent. The image slips away again. We return to stage light.
A doll appears. Doll or bunekah? No, a doll, made by one of the earlier women — I’m sure of it. It wears a blazer and a mop for hair — and it dances, and the audience smiles. And I smile too, because I know that smile. It’s the smile of those amused by difference — as long as it doesn’t come too close. Because the doll engages with the humans on stage, revealing her difference in every movement: the illusion holds because she always faces away. Always turned, like someone fleeing full interpretation. I imagine it’s so we don’t see the dancer holding the mop stick, don’t reveal the doll is lifeless — just a puppet, a visual construct.
But which of us isn’t?
I too learned to hide the mechanisms. To hold everything up with discreet elegance.
Does she want to pass as human?
I wonder if this doll is Gaya — more Gaya than Gaya herself on stage. Or perhaps she’s all of us, when we pretend we’re not pretending.
The doll hides from the audience her skeleton, the thing that allows her to be what she is — she dances and the audience smiles. She dances and the audience smiles. She dances and the audience smiles. The audience smiles because they don’t see the bone. Because they don’t want to. I smile because I see myself and feel “poor lonely doll,” and my soul understands because it, too, is calloused from so many falls.
But I don’t use the word pain. I don’t need to. Time speaks for me.
I’ve fallen like those early women, fallen many times. And I’ve also invented a place in my past to justify getting up afterward. That place where I was a girl, even when no one let me be.
The music intensifies. The world of spectacle shakes. The metal set trembles trembles trembles — until it rises and vanishes and all becomes light.
Sometimes I wonder if my body trembles like that inside before surrendering to clarity.
The band of men dissolves when the women join in. They gather on stage and I remember the beginning, when it was said people may be struggling, but at least they sing. So they sing, and sing, and sing — and fade away.
And there’s strange comfort in that:
To disappear singing is better than going silent.
The music plays on, though no one is seen.
We feel they’re gone — and that they left singing.
And I remain.
In the dark again.
Thinking that maybe silence is what comes after the song.
And even then, the body still sings.
III.
The Failure of the Writing Body
Or
The Weaving of Limits
I keep. I keep and I forget. Because forgetting, too, is part of the archive. And of critique. Of the critic. And if I forget — what will I tell the birds waiting for the seeds of my words, seeds carried in their beaks to who knows where?
I give them, and they’re no longer mine.
I forgot one of the pieces. Guilt. Panic. Or rather, I know I didn’t forget it — but I don’t know how to speak of it. Look, it’s like this.
Sometimes the body refuses. Like a beast cornered. The body says:
“I don’t want to remember, I can’t remember, I won’t hold anything more for you.”
And you try to convince it with promises of beauty, of language, of future —
but it pisses on your memory and lies down, exhausted.
Then you’re left with that hot failure between your legs, your eyes, your fingers.
A failure no one sees, but that screams.
Dear crow,
My eye gives out as attention detonates under a flickering light,
fade in fade out of a spotlight aging by the second.
The chronic pain in my gaze (it’s real, mind you — I don’t lie)
tells me the body screams louder than art.
Have others noticed my eyes go red every day?
It only proves I forget.
I forget because looking hurts and I vanish —
each word a retreat into panic.
And the world moves on, of course.
People post stories. Publish reviews.
Talk about the play with clarity that shames me.
I smile, pretend I understand,
but inside there’s a pulsing knot of light and failure —
my eyes are the first to betray me.
I know there’s a delicate presence in Doutel Vaz’s “violetas”…
but how to show you?
Let’s say this:
My gaze tears, as does the paper they laid on the ground.
They dance over it and with every sharp step — ZAP — a tear.
That Vânia gently tapes back together.
May someone correct my eyes, too — these that fail me so.
Dear crow, sometimes art is exactly that:
about what we can’t.
About my failure as a viewer and WORSE —
as a keeper.
I gave in to my body at the moment of preservation and ended up…
IV.
…ended up meeting her at last — that ocular pain,
lady of weeping eyes and inflamed whims,
who settled in my orbs like a sad marquise on an extended visit.
She wakes early, this eye-ache,
and demands warm cloths, cold drops, absolute silence.
She is light-sensitive — as one expects of a lady educated
in the delicate chambers of chronic inflammation.
Her veins are like dyed linen,
and she blushes with the fury of those who suffer silently
and still hope to be read as poetry.
She mingles with intellectuals —
eyes that once devoured Barthes, Artaud,
and now can’t bear the brightness of a stage.
She scorns LED screens, hates neon.
If you mention dust, she weeps.
If you point a spotlight, she flares.
But she doesn’t leave.
She settles in, as if by inheritance.
She takes me as her page
and writes upon me her medieval flush,
her luxurious eczema.
She is beautiful —
and therefore, tragic.
Doctors examine her with magnifiers and technical terms,
but she stretches lazily and doesn’t reply.
And I, humble spectator, write this account
with burning eyes and a heart wrapped in compresses —
not out of love for art,
but because I was conquered
by a lady no one sees,
who answers to the name failure,
and tells me just how much I’ll no longer be
“You, yes, you who look away —”
keeper.
Odete works between performance, text, visual arts and music. Her work is obsessed with historiographical writing, using erotics and paranoia as two somatic ways of relating to the archival materials. She writes through her body, speculating biographies of historical characters through epidermic pleasures: fashion, personality, presence, fragrance, grace, sensibility. She claims to be a bastard daughter of Lucifer, descending from the medieval practice of satanic pacts to alter one’s gendered body. Lately she has been researching and working around building connection points between “effeminate” histories, from the baroque Castrati to the 19th century dandies.
Image Credits: xipipa