Elisabete Finger, Maikon K, Renata Carvalho & Wagner Schwartz

This piece is presented as a right of reply, arising from the debates coming from Wagner Schwartz’s previous creation, La Bête [The Beast]. In this reinterpretation of a participative performance by the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark, the choreographer offers a naked body to be observed or handled by the audience, for example in 2017, at the São Paulo Museum of Art, with a child accompanied by its mother. After a video of this event was distributed on the web, Wagner Schwartz had to answer to serious accusations, above all of paedophilia, which led him to question the limits on his freedom of expression. In Domínio Público, he is pursuing this thought process and working with three artists victimised by censorship. The first is none other than the child’s mother, Elisabete Finger, who is also a choreographer who has been threatened, insulted, interrogated and questioned to make her explain herself about her role as a mother or woman, and her place as a spectator. They are accompanied by the performer Maikon K, who has been accused of acts of obscenity for appearing naked in a transparent bubble in DNA de DAN, a piece violently stopped by the arrival of military police. This quartet has been rounded off by Renata Carvalho, a transgender actor whose piece El evangelio según Jesús, Reina del cielo, in which she plays the part of a transvestite Christ, has been quite simply banned. As a response to these attacks, the four of them go back over the status of a work of art, cultural relativism and the paradoxes of performance the better to show up the contradictions of our judgements and of our societies.