A Dance For Madalena

A Dance for Madalena is a poetic tribute, through movement and performance, to Madalena Santos Reinbolt, a remarkable Black embroiderer and painter renowned for her vivid depictions of urban and rural life in 20th-century Brazil.

Choreographer Ana Pi will engage in a dialogue with Santos Reinbolt’s work, responding to the "wool paintings" on view in the exhibition. Rooted in the road between the states of Minas Gerais and Bahia, Pi will evoke the vibrant landscapes and creative spirit of the coastal and interior regions of Northeastern Brazil, where Santos Reinbolt lived, worked, and traveled.

Pi has learned that gestures carry and connect the memories and traditions of Black communities across continents and generations. A Dance for Madalena will weave together movement, voice, texture, and color, bringing Santos Reinbolt’s textile vision to life while celebrating Afro-Brazilian experience, knowledge and spirituality.

Each performance is a 20-min solo dance, integrating a motif and gesture drawn from Santos Reinbolt’s work.

This live program is conceived and performed by Ana Pi. Organized by Mathilde Walker-Billaud, AFAM Curator of Programs and Engagement

About the artist

Ana Pi is a choreographer and “imagery” artist, born, raised, and nourished in Brazil, working from France and navigating the world through the regenerative layers of the African Diaspora and its radical imagination. The artist amplifies a research on ancestral dances and their actual peripheral forms; she works as an “extemporary” dancer, pedagogue, space maker, and writer.

Ana Pi studies, materially, gestures and movements that have been transmitted by traditions and transmuted through different landscapes, softwares, living bodies and archives, while carefully learning their philosophy and futurity. Interwoven by the act of traveling, her transdisciplinary works are precisely situated between notions of transit, displacement, belonging, superposition, memory, colors, and ordinary gestures.

Her choreographic pieces, sculptural installations, films, pedagogical acts, and research have been programmed in institutional spaces such as the 35th São Paulo Biennial — Choreographies of the Impossible, Cisneros Institute with MoMA, Performa Biennial, AMANT Brooklyn, The Wake — 15th Dakar Biennale, Centre Pompidou Paris and Metz, Museo Reina Sofia, Dancing Museums, Assemblée des Mutants, Histórias Afro-Atlânticas Exhibition, International Film Festival Rotterdam, RAW Material Company, A-CDCN France, P.A.R.T.S, Festival d'Automne, Impulstanz, Alkantara, Holland Festival, VIDEOBRASIL, Fondation Cartier, Puerto de Ideas, INHOTIM, MASP, The Place London, BARD College, to mention just a few.

Since 2010, she has cultivated and shared the practice STEADY BODY; peripheral dances — sacred gestures. Since 2020, NA MATA LAB has been producing her various projects and collaborations. Ana Pi is currently working on ATOMIC JOY, a choreographic piece for 8 dancers, premiering both at Rencontres chorégraphiques internationales de Seine-Saint-Denis and Pinacoteca de São Paulo in 2025.

Images

Left: Ana Pi, NoirBLUE, 2017, solo performance. Photo: Daniel Nicolaevsky for Na Mata Lab

Right: Madalena Santos Reinbolt, Untitled, 1965–1976, acrylic wool on burlap with pieces of fabric, 36 1/4 x 38 5/8 in. Collection Edmar Pinto Costa, São Paulo, Brazil

Credits

Lead support is provided by the Ford Foundation. Major support is provided by The Coby Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Madalena Santos Reinbolt Advisory Committee: LA Dillon, Vilma Eid, Ady Fong, Maria Fernanda Mazzuco, Luciana Solano. Additional support is provided by the Consulate-General of Brazil in New York / Instituto Guimarães Rosa, Citi, the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, and the David Davies and Jack Weeden Fund for Exhibitions.

Special thanks to Jessica Mitrani for her generous support of the performance.

Registration

Free, and open to all. Advance registration is appreciated. Please consider making a donation when you register to support ongoing virtual programming.

Please note: Attendance is on a first-come, first-served basis (even for those who have registered) and will be limited to the legal capacity of our venue.

Program takes place in the Museum’s Atrium on the first floor. All bags are subject to security bag check upon arrival to the Museum. Please plan to arrive at least 15 minutes before the scheduled start time. All backpacks must be left in coat check.

For specific accommodation questions or needs, please contact us at least 10 days prior to the program at [email protected].

Friday March 7

5:00-5:20 p.m. EST

Saturday March 8

2:00-2:20 p.m. EST

Sunday March 9

2:00-2:20 p.m. EST

Host or Publisher AFAM