“Gente de Lá” (“People From Out There”) is a black, peripheral work coming from Northeast Brazil, which at once poetically denounces racial inequality and stages social affrontation. “Russian roulette body” is how Wellington Gadelha, creator calls the daily corporeal experience of black-slum-urban folks like himself, a bodily state which he turns into artistic investigation/intervention. This performance consists of experiment that seeks to interconnect forms of resistance and to cross forbidden boundaries, rethinking territory, violence, and the subjective circuits of ethno-racial-spatial segregation in the city. Though it might relate to global cities in general, it is most representative of Gadelha’s enduring experience, as artist and activist, in the outskirts of Fortaleza, his birthplace.

Cutting across different art fields, such as dance and visual arts, the performance takes each of its materialities (sound, music, props, time etc.) not as mere objects, but as bodies themselves. Materialities dialogue with and affront one another in a composition criss-crossed by a double dramaturgy of emergence and emergency. While rendering its own urgencies and poetic approach to favela culture, “Gente de Lá” mingles politics with subjectivity in the search for an anti-colonial counter-narrative. If moving under the random spin of a gun barrel forces the urban-black-favela body into a compulsory form of dance, “Gente de lá” turns around the target and prepares to pull the trigger.