Community University of the Rivers, Brazil

“So much partying, I almost didn’t notice the future already happening right there, love, in front of us enclosing our homes and videoing our squares. But love, when I heard the giants in the voices of our dancing bulls playing our tambourines stained with açaí , the penny dropped! They’re rooting themselves in our culture and mining our dreams to industrialize and steal the Amazon! Let’s rescue the future, love and throw the spear for the River Tocantins!”

Emerging from 40 years of performance-based cultural projects in communities at risk and decades of experiment within the World Social Forum and World Alliance for Art Education, ‘Rivers of Meeting’ has dedicated eight years in Marabá City to nurture youth arteducators to preserve their Tocantins River in the Brazilian Amazon. By recovering and reinventing their Afro-Indigenous roots through contemporary performance, young arteducators and their ‘community university of the rivers’ intervene and mediate within their homes, streets, schools, universities, local economies and state-federal governments to advocate a sustainable, community paradigm of solidarity and cooperation. Our trialogic performance will demonstrate how visceral, compulsive legacies of exclusion, poverty and complicity become ‘chosen ecologies of vital community’. It then invites participants to share their responses to the new micro-technologies which threaten the humanity, autonomy and sustainability of this intimate, youth-driven project in the heart of the very biome which regulates all ecosystems of the world.