How to perform Blackness: Creating possibilities through costume design

Abstract

The creation of costumes for a Black body in performances that deal with Blackness always evokes the conflict in presenting complex facets of a socially stigmatized body, in face of a tool (costume) that usually works to categorize bodies onstage. In this article, I initially analyse how the Black body has been represented, for decades, on the stages of Brazilian theatre. I also try to understand how the theatre, in a structurally racist context, has become a place of resistance for the Brazilian Black Movement, as well as a political space to redefine what it means to be Black. Bringing in references from my own artistic research and practice as a costume designer in the performances Unrestricted Contact (Grupo Oito, 2017) and Black Memories on White Bones (Ricardo de Paula, 2019), I conduct this research that deals with the complexity of narrating Blackness through costumes that, together with the body, convey a process of deconstruction and decolonization within the performance.