DANCE WITH ME
first performed on August 23, 2018
MAR / Rio Art Museum, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
performed four times in 2018
ÉLLE DE BERNADINI
São Paulo, Brazil
elledebernardini.com
DANCE WITH ME
ÉLLE DE BERNADINI
Transsexual and non-binary gender bodies, like mine, are read by society in an abject, indecent, depraved way, as bodies that only serve for the dirt and prevarication. In “Dance With Me” I cover my body with honey and leaves of 18k gold and, to the sound of Bossa Nova and MPB, I invite the public to dance with me in a gesture of approximation and disfetichização. I play with the jargon, “I do not accept you nor covered with gold,” to question the mechanisms of acceptance and rejection of trans and non-binary bodies by normative society. In my work such mechanisms are the appeal to the beauty and wealth that adorn my body considered abject and raise it to the level of acceptance, or approach by the other, who at the end of the dance takes gold in his hands or in parts of his body that touched mine.