Article by Joaquin Alejandro Newman

For the past two weeks I had the great honor of partaking in New York University’s Hemispheric Institute’s 5th Encuentro, dubbed Performing Heritage which took place in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. This Encuentro explored the production and circulation of notions of indigenous identity, traditions, authenticity, rights, cultural access and ownership in the age of globalization. Participants from all the Americas included performers, artists, cultural workers, politicians, academics, and indigenous representatives.
I was hired as Dancing Earth Theater group’s documentarian, and became an enthusiastic participant and performer throughout this Encuentro. Dancing Earth was part of this year’s Encuentro lineup of world class performances, which included Pamyua, an Alaskan Indian modern jazz/funk group, Susana Baca, the Peruvian superstar vocalist, Jesusa Rodriguez & Liliana Felipe, A Mexican Pre-Columbian Cabaret Duo, Guillermo Gomez-Peña Mexican Performance artist, and many other amazing singers, dancers, actors, and musicians.
These performances lit up our evenings while our days were filled with workshops, seminars, roundtable discussions on subjects ranging from pushing boundaries of content and form in film, to arts and markets, to cultural agency. The conference was set up to accommodate those interested in deeper academic workgroups as well as provide workshop surveys of topics covered at the Encuentro. Rich lecture presentations were given by progressive people such as Antanas Mockus, former mayor of Bogotá, Columbia on cultural agency, Francisca Novan of Brazil on alternative indigenous university formation, and several others on ideas on intangible heritage, performance & pedagogy, and art & activism.

More >>