Rituals of the Body: Perú Negro’s Choreographing and Performing of Afro-Peruvian Identity

• In Event: Performing race

Abstract

Perú Negro is famed for its reconstruction, staging, and popularization of Afro-Peruvian dances. Throughout this reconstructive process, Perú Negro engaged with a series of available artifacts, including scholarly documentations and the recollection of memory from older members of societies to construct their initial repertoire. In the process, a large body of information was invented and fabricated based on a mythical African diasporic identity. Over time, the group’s repertoire was established and legitimated as an official Afro-Peruvian manifesto. The choreographic canon popularized by Perú Negro promoted two performative and embodied discourses: first, it created a perpetually static and symbolic representation of Afro-Peruvian identity, and second, it generated an identity grounded in resisting the hegemonic national imaginaries. Perú Negro’s continuous family formation and reconstruction of the past via oral traditions, experiences, and community building are all performed on stage. It is on stage where Perú Negro redirects the African diaspora, builds agency, constructs identity, and is protected and free to embody their history. Perú Negro’s choreographic platform includes multiple essentialist qualities of Africanness and borrows traditions from across the diaspora. Most importantly, the company created a new route of identity formation in the African diaspora. I contend that by transnationalizing their performances, Perú Negro became a renowned entity within the diaspora, and their definition of blackness began to be acknowledged and later picked up and studied in the academy. The performing stage becomes an important locus where Afro-Peruvian identity is allowed and transmitted.

Author

• Luis F Paredes, Stetson University