Continuing his exploration of the politics of Black bodies, Brazilian choreographer Calixto Neto examines in Il Faux the dispossession of the body the risk of losing one’s own body.

Does a Black body truly belong to itself? In Il Faux, Calixto Neto confronts the systemic threat weighing upon racialized bodies the ever-present risk of “losing” one’s own body. His starting point is the work of Ta-Nehisi Coates who, following in the footsteps of James Baldwin, theorizes this African American experience of dispossession.

Starting from the recognition that his Black body is inherently exposed to the threat of expropriation, Calixto Neto seeks, through words and movement, to imagine a dance capable of resisting external control and the constant risk of erasure.

What would a dispossessed body be? How can dispossession be embodied in all its force? What is such a body capable of? Does it move? If so, how? Does it speak? What can a body say when it appears unable to speak?

In Il Faux, Calixto Neto explores a process of “de-corporealization.” He begins from the perspective of a body that can, at any moment, be annihilated, taken away, or destroyed a body manipulated by external forces in order to expose the mechanisms that threaten to erase racialized bodies. Through dance, manipulation, and ventriloquism, like a puppet brought to life, he embodies dispossessed bodies while summoning the forces that sustain them, resisting erasure and restoring their vital power. Step by step, word by word, another being is patiently reassembled and reconstructed even if that being ultimately reveals itself to be entirely fictional.

Oscillating between empowerment and fictionalization, Il Faux extends this inquiry to the broader forces that shape our social interactions, political choices, regimes of visibility and privilege, as well as the structures of domination that underpin them.