History

1. About the Program

The Dance Graduate Program (PPGDança) is a dance research program hosted by the Dance School of the Federal University of Bahia/Brazil (UFBA). Taking into consideration the continuous and growing demand for advanced qualification in Dance graduate studies, the program seeks to consolidate Dance as a specific area of knowledge. PPGDança offers master’s and Ph.D. courses and welcomes researchers for post-doctoral studies, post-doctoral internships or as visiting professors. It is organized according to these lines of research:

1. Dance, Body and Cognition;

2. Artistic processes and configurations

3. Dance and Educational and Cultural Mediation in Dance;

4. Dance and the African Diaspora: poetic, political, educational and epistemic expressions.

These lines of research comprise the specificities of the bibliographical, artistic and technical academic production of faculty, their partnerships and their specific pre-established dialogues with other groups and researchers from UFBA and other national or foreign institutions.

PPGDança is constituted through ties to the UFBA Institutional Development Plan (PDI), the Academic Teaching Council (CAE) and the Pro-Rectory of Research and Graduate Programs, as well as criteria of CAPES, the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel, a governmental agency of the Brazilian Ministry of Education for graduate courses. It has, nevertheless, its specificities and dialogues with other graduate programs from other areas of knowledge. In accordance with the values of the Federal University of Bahia, the course is public, free of charge, inclusive and of quality standards. The insertion of PPGDança impacts the intellectual, artistic, technical and bibliographic aspects of society with its research.

PPGDança has a wide variety of productions and scopes of activity, with a local, regional and national scope. The program also works harder to grow in the international scene.

We strive for excellence with a Dance that is dedicated to all numerous manifestations, social classes, genders, sexualities, ethnicities and other kinds of intersectionality. A Dance which values the quality of the research and produces knowledge that is primed to stand against discrimination or prejudice of any kind.

PPGDança is made up of research in artistic enacting, didactic-pedagogical contexts with a corpus of theories able to broach corporal and cognitive, aesthetic and compositional, historical and cultural processes. With the body as the nucleus of cognition, communication and evolution imbricated in the active cultural systems, we understand dance as a setting that potentializes these processes and makes them explicit.

Given the interdisciplinary characteristics of the Arts and Dance, the propositions of the Master’s and Doctorate programs span a range of theoretical approaches.

PPGDança welcomes conceptual and epistemological approaches from various areas of knowledge in order to potentialize and aggregate the complexities and peculiarities relative to the specific subjects of Dance. Up to the present moment our processes and results have been involved with themes that we deem “research attracting”, the likes of which, in multiple and differing contexts, are:

1. Corporal, educational, cultural, artistic policies

2. Disabilities, Accessibility

3. Hybridism, Miscegenation, Ethnicities

4. Body Cognitions, Actions for Knowledge

5. Native Peoples, Cosmoperceptions, Cultures

6. Gender, Sexuality, and other kinds of Intersectionality

7. The Use of Dance in Education

8. Performativity, Indisciplinarities

9. Afrodiaspora Aesthetics/Poetics

10. Creative Processes, Dramaturgy, Procedures

11. Criticality, Dance Criticism

12. Militancy, Activism in Dance, Artivism

13. Technopoetics, Intermediality

14. Regional | (Trans)national territoriality, Cultures | Dances | Cultural Manifestations

15. Stories, Historiography, Repertoires

PPGDança, thus incorporates nuclear conceptual presuppositions that postulate a closer relation among Dance, Arts, various cultural processes, and the Sciences, in order to understand dances as a form of cognition. Also, our mission is founded on the coherence between lines of work, courses, groups and research projects of the faculty, which gives us an edge in the field of Dance.

PPGDança has advanced to contribute to the consolidation of Dance as a specific area of knowledge, constantly updating and distinguishing itself in the Brazilian context as well as the global Arts and Dance systems.

We are open to knowledge, and are rigorous in relation to bibliographical, artistic and technical productions. With reverence and respect towards the tradition and history of dances, we apply ourselves onto contemporary thinking as a form of constant critical research.

We commit to an admission process that follows the policy of quotas as well as merit, and recognize the vulnerability of trans people, people with disabilities, indigenous peoples and quilombolas.

Consequently, we seek to help such students remain in their studies through the distribution of scholarships that strive to repair the immense inequality when it comes to admission into a Graduate Dance Program.

The creation and implementation of the country’s first Master’s Program focused on Dance, by the Dance School of the Federal University of Bahia in 2006, was a result of many optimal factors. There was favorable academic, administrative and institutional infrastructure. Up to April 2021, the program has granted a total of 194 Master’s. The Graduate Dance Program’s dissertations, articles and books can be accessed through the link https://repositorio.ufba.br/ri/. Search on: “Comunidades do Repositório”- “Escola de Dança”.

The Doctorate in Dance Program was approved by the Academic Council of the Federal University of Bahia and the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES) in 2018. On the 18th of February 2019, PPGDança consolidated its maturity by starting the academic year with the first doctoral level dance program in Brazil and Latin America. Considering the specifics of public and private institutions on a global scale, it became the only public and free of charge graduate course in the world to the present date. The novelty of this course brings the program, staff, faculty, students and the university great satisfaction for it illustrates a strength and growth that as a whole reaffirms a formative space and the relevance of production in the area of Dance.

By the approval of the Doctorate program of PPGDança there were no others notably focused on Dance. This resulted in a great number of researchers specializing in the Arts or other areas with compatible proposals with Dance.

It is possible to note a strengthening of Dance in its various forms of expression when observing the graduates of the course. Many already have doctorate degrees and work as university professors. There is also a significant number of graduates active in the Basic Education of Brazilian cities and capitals and a great many, with advanced research, working with the arts in a national and international setting. It is also worth noting a vertical research predominance, as most alumni are Ph.D. candidates.

PPGDança historically marks the importance of conducting research in the area. For 15 years (completed at the start of 2021) there have been annual research seminars with visiting researchers, presentations given by faculty research groups and student research groups, artwork, annual evaluations and self-evaluations.