\u00a0\u201cThe body communicates by itself. Every part, every detail, forms a message\u201d. This sentence, which Anal\u00edvia Cordeiro published in Nota-Anna<\/em>,[1]<\/sup><\/strong><\/sup><\/em><\/a> reformulates a concept that had exerted a strong influence on artists of her generation who were interested in the intersections between everyday life and the phenomena of mass culture. At the turn of the 1970s, Canadian theorist Marshall McLuhan\u2019s assertion that \u201cthe means is the message\u201d was gaining currency. Within this context and throughout her trajectory, Anal\u00edvia has investigated the body as a means, or rather, as an instance that produces, drives, and conditions discourse, even predicating the far-reaching impact of the mechanisms of technology and communication.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It may seem obvious to say that the body is the message, but not if we take into account the sophisticated modes of control over individual expressivity and agency in industrial society. In creating choreographies for the video camera and using rudimentary computational algorithms that were just emerging, the artist experimented with ways of conciliating individual freedom and collective conventions, leaning into diverse types of negotiation between people, machines, devices, ideological frameworks and systems of knowledge. This text presents aspects of Anal\u00edvia Cordeiro\u2019s work as a score for structural creation and, consequently, for reflections on artistic and social structures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Few artists of the Brazilian experimental avant-garde claimed an affiliation with the feminist movements and studies that were flourishing in Brazil and around the world through counterculture. The themes in her work, however, often respond to these debates and to the growing critical awareness of hegemonic narratives rooted in gender perspectives. Examining some of the projects Anal\u00edvia developed from the 1970s onward reveals her willingness to challenge the conditions that shaped and constrained her body and identity as a woman. Such a reading also allows for an appreciation of just how pioneering and radical her research was, qualities that have guaranteed the ongoing relevance of her work and its place in Brazilian art history, but which may also explain why the public and critics at the time struggled to understand and embrace it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Her practice is founded on an interdisciplinary education. As a child, Anal\u00edvia began taking classes in modern dance with teacher Maria Duschenes, a specialist in the Laban method[2]<\/sup><\/a> that emphasized expressivity over formal structure. She became a professional dancer and, even after graduating in architecture and urbanism at S\u00e3o Paulo University in 1976, she continued dancing with companies in Brazil and around the world. Another key space that shaped her repertoire was the Center for Data Processing at the University of Campinas, where her father, Waldemar Cordeiro (1925\u20131973), an artist and theorist who played a central role in S\u00e3o Paulo\u2019s concrete art movement, was producing art which he would go on to call \u201cArte\u00f4nica\u201d[3]<\/sup><\/a> based on his research into computers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Waldemar encouraged his daughter to think mathematically and computationally and opened doors that granted her access to concepts and spaces that would prove essential to the work she would go on to develop. While her understanding of dance and space deepened, she also managed to come up with original ways of putting the considerable research that she encountered in the Campinas laboratory into practice. Through a series of experiments in video-dance undertaken from 1973 to 1976, Anal\u00edvia expanded the methods for the electronic processing of images in such a way that they not only detailed static scenes, but also captured the minutiae of human movement, taking important steps towards studies in biodynamics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At just 18 years old, Anal\u00edvia began sketching out the ideas for M3x3<\/em> (1973) and convinced TV Cultura, a state television broadcaster in S\u00e3o Paulo, to produce the work in their studios with their technical crew. Against a set arranged as a grid with the white walls and floor marked out in dashed black lines, nine dancers performed for three cameras wearing patterned leotards that echoed the set design. The choreography was mechanical, making clear references to Oskar Schlemmer\u2019s Triadic Ballet<\/em> (1922), and in dialogue with the cadence of a similarly marked soundtrack. Conceived with the aid of programming systems developed in the labs at Unicamp, both the physical postures and the camera angles aimed to emulate a discursive efficiency typically achieved by commercial media broadcasters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The dancers determined how the postures were joined into sequences of movement, while the artist determined the way the images were cut in the final edit. Although conditioned by structures that preceded and transcended them, the dancers continued to act as interpreters, breaking away from standardization and discovering new ways to create movements in response to predefined spaces and repertoires. This authorship, at work inside structures, both with and against their forces, activates an audiovisual metaphor for the possibilities of agency and irreducible identity within the micropolitics of everyday life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Anal\u00edvia Cordeiro belongs to a generation that initiated video art in Brazil[4]<\/sup><\/a> in the wake of conceptual and multimedia practices. Making use of the first portable cameras available in the country, names such as Anna Bella Geiger, Carmela Gross, Julio Plaza (1938\u20132003), Let\u00edcia Parente (1930\u20131991), Paulo Herkenhoff, Regina Silveira and Sonia Andrade (1935\u20132022) created works with simple narrative structures that often featured elements of self-representation. The appropriation of equipment for filming and being filmed \u2014 previously inaccessible technologies \u2014 and the breaking of mass-media hegemonies became major drivers of what came to be known as Brazilian experimental video<\/p>\n\n\n\n While often read through the same lens, Anal\u00edvia\u2019s practice differs from her peers in its focus on investigating the conditions for cooperation in complex systems, rather than insisting on absolute creative autonomy. In M3x3<\/em> and even in O>45<\/em> (1974), produced a few months later and centered on the same theme, the artist claims to have made an \u201cinstitutional video,\u201d[5]<\/sup><\/a> a format dependent on her being embedded within broadcast television, and this led her to deal with other types of equipment and workplace hierarchies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The partnership with TV Cultura continued in two other projects in which studies in computational choreography gave way to more explicit reflections on the devices used in televisual representation and their power to mold the collective imagination. Performed by Anal\u00edvia alongside her sister Fabiana Cordeiro, Gestos<\/em> (1975) was conceived as a \u201ctheatre-dance\u201d that took place backstage at the TV studios. The dancers attempt to reproduce the gestures of mass media caricatures as they watch them on television. Through their movements, the strong legs of a Hollywood soldier fuse with the lifeless arms of a TV news anchor and the impassioned expression of a soap opera star, forming some sort of Frankenstein’s monster. As they dance through the space, other cameras, monitors, and people from the crew become visible while they watch the recording process. Beyond them, the institutional routine is laid bare and merges with the scene, leaving no doubt that all media discourse is the product of a partial and subjective construction\u2014that is, one among many possible versions of the facts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This scrutiny of TV as a supposed window to the real world persisted in Cambiantes<\/em> (1976), the last intervention in the series. By filming the dark geometrical marks present in the set and the costumes worn by the cast, aligning them with the corners of the frame, the work systematically distorts the right-angled, rectangular nature of the screen. In its place she proposed a frame defined by an irregular, unstable edge, through which she sought to rouse viewers from their passive gaze, inviting them to break free from their alienated habits of image consumption.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sense perception of the space<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n After being shown on TV, Anal\u00edvia Cordeiro\u2019s video-dance work was presented at festivals and visual art fairs in Brazil and abroad, but circulated relatively little in dance-orientated events. Despite its roots in interdisciplinary research, visuality predominated as the organizing force behind the perception of the body and its relationships, perhaps justifying the way in which the work was received. However, beyond an interest in problems associated with the image, the artist was also concerned with sensoriality and inner impulses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the two years following her experiments with television, she lived in New York, where she took classes with Merce Cunningham, performing with dance companies and independently. On her return to Brazil, she began teaching children and developed a new venture with a view to studying human movement in greater detail. In 1982, together with engineer Nilton Guedes, she worked on a research project that culminated in Nota-Anna<\/em>: software capable of generating analytical drawings of the lines traced by the body as it moves through space. At a time when this technology had only recently been adopted by high-performance athletes, the two researchers were engaged in generating graphic notations of the choreographies and gestures of human and animal life in everyday domestic contexts. In capturing such instances in detail, these records allow one to observe, with greater subtlety, the presence of expressivity, decision-making, and even improvisation in movement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The artist stated that \u201csense perception, through these systems, has opened up a new perspective on feeling the body in movement and experiencing dance\u201d.[6]<\/sup><\/a> In the choreographies for TV there had been a pre-existing structure and subsequently a subject disposed to place it under tension, while in the video-dance production that emerged from her development of computational notation, the performers\u2019 repertoire and desires became the starting point for building new narrative horizons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One such work, entitled Air<\/em> (1985), created together with painter and printmaker Takashi Fukushima, presents a solo performance by Anal\u00edvia, standing in front of what could be any other wall in the city. Her body mediates both itself and the surroundings, leaving traces and, as such, generating meaning in what had been a non-space. This took place at a time in which Brazil was easing its way back to democracy following a 20-year-long civil-military dictatorship. The circumstances called for an attitude that was no longer responsive, but envisioned a new notion of space that could serve for performance, film, technology and the socio-political. Anal\u00edvia Cordeiro has danced through a crucial historical arc for Brazil and her legacy continues to resonate in countercultural strategies today. Amidst challenges, utopias, and structures in drastic turmoil, a sensitive and insurgent presence such as hers continues to transmit the most pressing messages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ana Maria Maia, March, 2026<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n [1]<\/sup><\/a> CORDEIRO, Anal\u00edvia. Nota-Anna: a escrita eletr\u00f4nica dos movimentos do corpo baseada no m\u00e9todo Laban<\/em>. [Nota-Anna: electronic notation of body movements based on the Laban method] S\u00e3o Paulo: Annablume; FAPESP, 1998, p. 32. The book draws on the master’s thesis the artist defended at the State University of Campinas (Unicamp) in 1996, which led out a methodology she had already been applying to her choreographies since 1982.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [2]<\/sup><\/a> Developed by choreographer and movement theorist Rudolf Laban (1879\u20131958) in the 1920s, the Laban method is a system of human movement analysis and notation that organizes movement into categories; it is widely used in dance and body studies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [3]<\/sup><\/a> This term was used as the name of a group exhibition organised by Waldemar Cordeiro at Funda\u00e7\u00e3o Armando \u00c1lvares Penteado (FAAP), in S\u00e3o Paulo. In the presentation the artist affirms: “Arte\u00f4nica is the art of our time, the art of the computer, the art of the electronic era. It is not just a new technique, but a new mode of aesthetic production that substitutes the manufacture of the analytical mind and the artisan gesture for the rigour of the algorithm” (FAAP, 1971). Cf. CORDEIRO, Waldemar. Arte\u00f4nica: o uso criativo de meios eletr\u00f4nicos nas artes<\/em>. S\u00e3o Paulo: Edi\u00e7\u00f5es das Am\u00e9ricas, 1972. [Arte\u00f4nica: the creative use of electronic means in the arts.]<\/p>\n\n\n\n [4]<\/sup><\/a> MACHADO, Arlindo. A arte do v\u00eddeo<\/em>. [The art of video] S\u00e3o Paulo: Brasiliense, 1988.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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