GIRA CORPO at First Church

Guest Residency: Afro-Brazilian Dance & Capoeira Angola from Bahia

June 1 - 5, 2026

Arts at First welcomes Brazilian artists Candai Calmon and Carolina Canguçu from Brazil for a week of embodied cultural exchange exploring Afro-contemporary dance, Capoeira Angola, film, movement, and community practice rooted in Afro-Brazilian traditions. Through workshops, conversations, screenings, and public gatherings, GIRA CORPO invites Chicago communities into a living exchange around body, ancestry, memory, rhythm, and liberation.

*THIS IS A FREE PROGRAM, Open to all ages, backgrounds, and experience levels.

Program Highlights

• Daily Afro-contemporary dance workshops

• Capoeira Angola classes

• Film screening: Mestre Pastinha, King of Capoeira

• Artist conversations

• Public performance / concluding roda

About The Artists

Candai Calmon,

Master in Dance and Bachelor in Gender and Diversity Studies from UFBA, Dance Technician from FUNCEB and Escuela de Danza Casarrodante (Montevideo/UY). Guest artist at the South American contemporary art residencies in Chicago, in the "Close To There" and Artistic Mobility" programs (2018, 2019). In 2018, she started the CorpoTerritório dance project (www.corpoterritorio.com), which focuses on dance creation and self-care with rural quilombo communities in Brazil and the United States. In 2023, she was awarded the Dance Sector Prize for her book Sussurros no Quintal do Quilombo: Tessituras Femininas para um Futuro Humanitário, published in 2023. Em 2025 Candai esteve em Limón (Honduras) com o projeto de circulação CorpoTerritório, compartilhando saberes com a comunidade garífuna.

Project Links:
1. Corpoterritorio,
2. Corpo Homenagem Project,
3. Whispers in the Quilombo Yard,
4. Corpo Territorio Project,

Carolina Canguçu,

She holds a Master's degree in Social Communication from UFMG, and is a Capoeira Angola master at the Escola de Capoeira Angola da Bahia. She has worked with indigenous peoples in audiovisual training courses in the Amazon. She is a documentary filmmaker, editor and curator of indigenous and Afro-descendant films. Having directed the film Essa Terra é Nossa (This Land is Ours), which won more than 10 international awards, Carolina continues her research into land and territory in Brazil.

Project Links:
1. Film Project: Mestre Pastinha, King of Capoeira,
2. Film Project: Riachão Retrato Fiel da Bahia,
3. Film Project: Ìyás da Bahia,
4. Corpo Homenagem Project

Greetings from the Artists

GIRA CORPO (body in circle) Project:

Circulation project with Afro-contemporary dance and capoeira angola practices taught by two Brazilian artists with extensive artistic training in Bahia and Minas Gerais. Gira Corpo plans to share practical studies involving the knowledge of dance and capoeira, as a culture originating in Brazil, which also shapes black memory, knowledge, and the science of the body found in cultural manifestations around the world. “Gira Corpo” is synonymous with the circular body, with the pedagogy of the gira that sees community practices as essential to the sciences of the body and its memory. It is a space for exchange and deepening of the body with Afro-Brazilian techniques and methodologies.

Background:

This project is an artistic offshoot of the CorpoTerritório Project, a dance and education project in remaining quilombo territories that, since 2018, has been developing actions based on ongoing research in rural black territories, organizing community meetings for immersive, free artistic practices aimed at the quilombo population. “Quilombolas” are ethnic-racial groups, mostly black, linked to the memory or historical processes of reorganization of the former slave population. It is this historical and community experience that our project is dedicated to. Among the memorable milestones of the CorpoTerritório project is the 2019 Dance Sector Award for the creation and publication of the book “Sussurros no Quintal do Quilombo: Tessituras Femininas para um Futuro Humanitário” (Whispers in the Quilombo Yard: Feminine Weavings for a Humanitarian Future), a book created with sixteen matriarchs and quilombola leaders in black communities in Bahia.