Prompt: ‘Set to Go’ brought together an international group of artists whose works consider the multivalent potentialities between music and dance and the political possibilities for how these entangled forms of cultural production both shape and indicate personal, collective, and even national identities. Taking its title from Bárbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca’s work Faz que vai (Set to go) (2015), this program looked at movements in flux and in the process of becoming. Their work refers to a Frevo dance step that simulates a moment of instability, which, taken as a statement, offers a meditation on the power of movement, of rhythm, to address gender, socioeconomic, and environmental issues as well as the maintenance and transformation of cultural heritage and identity. To go is to traverse new regions through movement and music, instigate environments, engage with new ecologies, and bring bodies together.

Some issues that arose include how the histories of how certain music and movements are developed, re-mixed and spread; the extent that music and movement form and become emblematic of national identity; how dance can exist as a form of resistance, of therapy, of contagion; how memory is stored in the body and released collectively; the extent that dance has political agency; and how the existence of sound and movement is intertwined with histories of trauma, oppression, while also existing as processes for joy and catharsis.

Image credit: Tibor de Laminne de Bex, Climatic Migration, 2020