Panorama Pantin

The Rio de Janeiro festival is moving to the CN D for three weeks of shows, performances, roundtables, encounters and festivities

Some invitations are like offers of asylum. As a reaction against the populist measures of Jair Bolsonaro’s government, which led to the cancellation of the 2019 edition, the CN D is hosting the Brazilian Panorama festival, a genuine centre of resistance and critical reflexion, unrivalled on the South American continent. Considering Brazil as an Artistic Zone to be Defended, the CN D is explicitly taking up a position beside these artists, who are today being threatened by the application of a retrograde, identity policy, conveyed by the suppression of the ministry of culture and a drastic reduction of public subsidies. In this particularly sensitive context, providing visibility for minority, or undervalued propositions, is a truly political gesture. It extends the action of a festival which, since being founded in 1992, on the initiative above all of Lia Rodrigues, has been highlighting local emergent creation while organising a dialogue with the who’s who of contemporary international artists.

Now directed by Nayse López, Panorama is pursuing this commitment to its territory by putting on productions by artists who are often excluded from institutional networks. Faithful to this positioning, the Pantin edition brings together young companies, some of whom are on the road to professionalisation and are more used to third places than official stages. In three chapters, each along a time axis (future, past, present), the programme approaches the question of the body through the prisms of education, technology, decolonial thought, censorship or information in modern democracies. This political reflexion will be extended during roundtables and encounters, in particular devoted to the question of minority rights (LGBTQI+ or First Nations). Aware of the ecological cost of such a move, the CN D will also be making the most of the arrival of the festival to organise European tours, such as Luiz de Abreu’s show which has been programmed in several towns in France and Belgium.

By becoming the host of this transcontinental off-site event, the CN D is consolidating the bonds it has forged with Brazilian choreographers over the past few years, from Wagner Schwartz, Calixto Neto, Marcelo Evelin and Nayse López who were invited to previous editions of Camping, to Volmir Cordeiro, an associate artist from 2017 to 2019. But it also, and above all, declares its intention to create new ones, to affirm international solidarity and to work on the definition of art as an act full of resistance.