Mercedes Baptista Altered Black Modern Dance in Brazil

While other dance masters had already incorporated Afro-Brazilian dance traditions into European dances (like Eros Volúsia, Baptista’s first dance teacher), Villeroy explains that Baptista took a radically different approach when bringing these Black dances to the scene. In Brazil, in the 1940s and 1950s, “the white modernist discourse understood these dances as ‘primitive’ and ‘spontaneous.’ Baptista investigated the technical, aesthetical, choreographical, and poetic aspects of these dances, associating these repertoires with a method,” Villeroy says.