Performing "Heritage": Contemporary Indigenous and Community-Based Practices

Photo/ Foto: Marlène Ramírez Cancio

5th Encuentro

Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais

Belo Horizonte, March 11-19, 2005

Since 2000, our Encuentros have been a meeting place for artists, scholars, students, and activists investigating the relation between performance and politics in the Americas. Gathering roughly 300 participants, each Encuentro is part academic conference, part performance festival, part workshop series, and wholly interdisciplinary: it is a concentrated space of experimentation, dialogue, and collaboration, featuring lectures, performances, installations, roundtable discussions, exhibits, video screenings, work groups, and hands-on performance workshops.

This Encuentro on Performing Heritage explored the production and circulation of notions of identity, traditions, authenticity, rights, cultural access and ownership in the age of globalization. These issues were clustered under three umbrella topics that conceptually framed the keynotes, roundtables, performances, and work groups: 1) Intangible Heritage (the many embodied practices that define a sense of communal or national identity); 2) Cultural Agents (the many ways in which the arts make an intervention in social/political life), and 3) Arts and Markets (the circulation of arts through mass media, scholarship, government venues, etc…). In this site you will find images, videos, and texts from the Encuentro, including performances, interviews, and keynote lectures.