Danielli Nascimento Mendes
- Fellow 2022
- Dancer and choreographer from Brazil
- Cooperating partner: École des Sables (Senegal)
Danielli Nascimento Mendes is a Brazilian dance artist based in São Paolo. After graduating from Universidade Estadual de Campinas, she has been working and collaborating with different local choreographers. Her artistic work is deeply informed by the practice of Chinese Anatomy and Chinese Body Practice. Danielli’s artistic trajectory aims to investigate techniques that help her build a strengthened vital center and create spaces beyond the Eurocentric contexts of contemporary dance.
For her fellowship, Danielli is going to cooperate with École des Sables, a worldwide recognized professional dance school with theoretical and practical teaching in Senegal. There, she will take part in the African Diaspora Training Program. For Danielli, being in Africa won’t be a return, but an act of repositioning herself to move forward. Living and working in Brazil, a territory where black people are strategically weakened and threatened, she as well needs to be strategic, especially as someone dealing with questions of body, movement, and space. Participating in École des Sables’ training Program will offer Danielli the necessary support to embody her spirit, to activate her body's potentialities as an existence that recognizes itself in diaspora and to build a strategic position of existing in this world as a black female artist.
Danielli's Reports
„This fellowship allows Danielli to participate in the African Diaspora Training Program École des Sables located in Toubab Dialaw, Senegal. Her artistic trajectory aims to investigate techniques to build a strengthened centre as a black woman in Brazil. She intends to move beyond the Eurocentric contexts of contemporary dance in which she is inserted. For Danielli, 'being in Africa is not a return but an act of repositioning to move forward'. The encounter with international black artists and their techniques will allow Danielli to map her context more precisely in Brazil and the world. A courageous personal choice to journey across the Atlantic to other Southern experiences disconnected by colonial histories."
- Jury Statement