Sol Rei In Conversation with Davi Pontes

Using Dance and Movement as a tool for Self-Defence for the Black Dissident Body

What if dance could dismantle oppression? Artists Davi Pontes and Wallace Ferreira have spent years collaborating and developing choreographic methods to challenge the very structures that constrain bodies through race, sexuality, and gender. Their latest work, Repertório N.1, interrogates the widespread societal violence enacted on Black bodies and imagines how to create a future where the body can become a space of protection against the mechanisms of brutality. 

Growing up on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, in São Gonçalo, the church was the first place Pontes encountered dance. It was not only a spiritual centre but also a hub for political and social activity—providing resources, food and a place for the formation of artists. Over time, he realised that his connection to church was rooted more in community than religious practice, which spurred him into formal dance training at a dance school. There, he began studying ballet and contemporary dance, gradually distancing himself from what the traditional artist from Brazil is "supposed" to create. Evolving through performance and film, Pontes’ work engages deeply with performativity, influenced by the Brazilian philosopher and artist Denise Ferreira da Silva and scholar André Lepecki.

Pontes—a choreographer, artist and researcher, exploring the interchange between race, self-defence and choreography, and Wallace Ferreira—a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans performance, voguing and visual imagery, began collaborating in 2018. Their partnership emerged from shared experiences and a mutual interest in movement as research. Together, they have produced a series of works exploring the condition of the Black body in the world, including Mata leão, morto vivo (2020), Delirar o racial (2021), and the trilogy Repertório (2018-2025).

Sol Rei – Repertório N.1 explores the idea of self-defence as choreography. What does self-defence look like in choreographic terms?

Davi Pontes – It’s important to highlight that when we speak about self-defence, we’re referring to any way that dissident bodies develop strategies to defend themselves. It’s impossible to talk about self-defence without also talking about violence—the two are inseparable. We’re not interested in proposing a metaphor for violence; instead, it’s about traces and gestures that point toward ways of speaking about violence.

And how does self-defence present itself in choreographic terms? I believe it manifests in the space, in relation to the audience, and in the decisions made during the performance. I believe the performance space is a social space, and therefore all these tensions are held within it and emerge as the work unfolds and conflicts begin to arise.

To think about self-defence in this way means not viewing the space as neutral, but rather confronting the violence, fantasies, and inequalities that inhabit it. In our work, we use humour, presence, insistence, and relation to think through self-defence.

Your collaborative work is based in your shared experiences, speaking to the Global majority * while being deeply rooted in queer, Black Brazilian culture. How do you balance these themes with your specific cultural context, and what does this look like for you?

I don’t know if we manage to balance these—it’s a difficult question to answer. I believe that yes, our work comes from a very specific context, and because of that, it carries the codes, images, power, and violence specific to that context. Our goal isn’t exactly to show the world our background or our experiences, nor to represent an idea of a nation, although I know that in some way we end up doing that anyway. What really interests me is understanding what our context does to our bodies—what kinds of experiences it activates in our performativity, in how we think, move, and create. That’s what interests me, and that’s where we’ve been investing our time.

You’ve mentioned that this piece aims to explore the “mechanisms of brutality” while attempting to deconstruct them. Can you explain what these mechanisms are and how choreography becomes a tool for deconstruction?

When I talk about mechanisms of brutality, I’m really talking about systems of violence. I use the word mechanism deliberately—brutality operates almost like a machine, maintaining certain groups in positions of vulnerability or subjugation. It’s not just about individual acts, but about the structural and systemic forms of violence and exclusion that uphold racial, colonial, and social inequality. These mechanisms are embedded in political, legal, economic, and cultural systems that legitimise and reproduce brutality against racialised bodies and communities. Through Repertório, I’ve learned that the Black body can perform self-destructive actions without reproducing colonial violence and without destroying itself in the process.

What has this trilogy taught you both about the relationship between art and social justice, as well as between choreography and political resistance?

Recently, I answered a question about art and justice in another interview, and I remember beginning by saying that I don’t believe in justice, because as a principle, it fails when it comes to Black bodies. This week, that same question came back to me as I was reading a book by Denise Ferreira da Silva, in which she comments that our escapes and our ways of thinking about justice are already inscribed within a failed logic: “What we now call resistance, escape, or freedom continues to be thought of from within the scene of conquest. We still imagine liberation as a movement that moves away from domination, rather than as the dissolution of the conditions that make domination possible.” (Denise Ferreira da Silva, A Dívida Impagável, 2019) Denise is saying that even our ways of imagining escape are trapped within the modern logic of domination, because they still depend on ideas of subject, conquest, and opposition (master/slave, dominator/dominated). The very language of resistance has already been captured by modern rationality. I believe the same applies to the relationship between choreography and resistance. We’ve used this word frequently in recent years—in festivals, exhibitions, and artworks—but in some way, concepts like resistance or revolt still presuppose a dominant/dominated pair, a subject who resists another. That keeps the relationship inside the same structure of power it aims to contest.

So, what’s the alternative? What can we do? What I’ve been trying to do is to create a kind of work that doesn’t immediately trigger these modern frameworks of understanding, reason, and knowledge. I try to create space for other forms of perception, movement, and creation that don’t rely on the traditional categories of subject, opposition, or conquest—trying, in that way, to imagine new possibilities for what can be shared or made common.

Repertório N.1 completes a trilogy. What has been the evolution of this trilogy, and how does each piece build upon the previous work?

Repertório N.1 began and now completes the Repertório trilogy. The first version began in 2018 but had a very short life. At the time, we didn’t have the resources to continue, and after the pandemic, we weren’t able to return to it. After lockdown, we were invited to work on Repertório N.2, followed by N.3, but we always felt like something had been left unfinished. Returning to Repertório N.1 is a way of honouring this project, which for us is more than just a performance—it’s a kind of ethics we embrace to think about our lives.

The project began with the desire to explore poses as a form of self-defence, and gradually evolved into the stomps and sounds that make up the work’s archive. As we developed it, we realised that our relationship with the audience was crucial. With each new iteration, the project became sharper, more insistent, closer to its audience, more provocative, and more demanding of us.

Now, with two Repertórios already in existence, the challenge is to avoid repeating a formula while staying true to certain ethical principles that guide our process. Sometimes, continuing the work means returning to something from a previous piece—we either dive deeper into it or leave it behind completely. Each Repertório teaches the next one something new—even if it’s just the reminder that some things are meant to be forgotten.

* Term referring to the 85% of the world’s population rendered invisible by Western white dominance.

• Excerpts from an interview by Sol Rei, published on THIIIRD magazine’s website on 21 October 2025