(Originally written in Portuguese)
Within the Pluriversidade network, a group of women came together with a shared goal: to explore how the body in motion can serve as a source of reflection, creation, and knowledge production. What began as informal monthly meetings, connecting participants from Brazil and the United States via online platforms, quickly evolved into a rich space for collective experimentation, intellectual exchange, and profound bodily experiences.
Each meeting combines creative freedom with a collaborative structure. In each session, a member takes on the role of facilitator, leading a workshop whose theme stems from her own research—whether academic or based on personal experiences. In one of these workshops, a university student shared her experiences and research with the Xokó ethnic group in Sergipe and the Toré ritual. She reflected on how bodily experience is inseparable from the life of this group and how their relationship with daily life, nature, and, above all, the land directly influences the movements performed during the ritual.
During the proposed exercise, we were invited to consider the concept of the body’s axis from different perspectives. Drawing on the canonical experience of ballet, which presupposes the body’s alignment with the ground and an upward thrust that propels the body, we observe a contrast with indigenous practices: in the movements of Toré, the body anchors itself to the ground, redefining its axis and vital force. This exercise engaged with previous sessions, in which we explored Afro-Brazilian dances inspired by the movements of the Orixás. In one of these sessions, I shared the concept of “Escrevivência Corporal,” presenting movements of the Yabás (female Orixás) as forms of knowledge production, connecting women’s life stories and their life trajectories with the performance.
These meetings reveal how our experiences intertwine, creating opportunities for connection and the collective production of knowledge, even from a distance. Technological tools, such as the Zoom platform, become essential instruments for this work, not as substitutes for or erasers of ancestral, indigenous, and community knowledge, but as means of expanding and articulating this knowledge in new contexts. By critically appropriating these technologies, the Pluriversity group subverts the notion that technology means disregarding traditions; on the contrary, they become vehicles for encounters between bodies, histories, and practices, allowing reflections and experiences to intersect and transform collectively.
This is how Abya Yala Pluriversity works to overturn epistemological hierarchies, drawing on Black and Indigenous sciences, technologies, oral traditions, arts, and literatures, and promoting a production of knowledge that values corporeality, ancestry, and collective creativity.
More than just a space for practice, our group has become a support network, a laboratory of ideas, and a platform for questioning traditional hierarchies of knowledge. Here, the body and dance function as vehicles for investigation and reflection, enabling dialogues between different epistemologies, cultures, and life experiences. The experience vividly demonstrates that thinking with the body, exploring dance, and sharing trajectories opens new perspectives on performance, feminist and Afro-diasporic epistemologies, and collective practices of knowledge creation.
By connecting theory, practice, memory, and movement, our group exemplifies the principles of Pluriversity: collaborative learning, epistemological diversity, and the construction of knowledge that emerges from bodily, communal, and creative experience.
