Leda Martins keynote address : Performances of spiral time.

Video documentation of Leda Martin's keynote address, 'Performances of Spiral Time', presented as a part of the 4th Encuentro of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, celebrated in July of 2003 in New York, United States under the title 'Spectacles of Religiosities'. Africa prints her marks, traces and styles on the American territories, inscribing herself on the palimpsests that, by means of countless processes of cognition, assertion and metamorphosis, both conceptual and formal, transcreate and perform her presence and heritage. The arts and cultural creations colored by the African knowledge ostensibly reveal the ingenious and arduous means of survival of the African memory transplanted to the Americas by the diasporic Atlantic slave-trade and by other transcultural and transnational routes. Introduction by Zeca Ligiero. Leda Martins is Professor of Literature, Arts and Sciences at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais. A major theorist of Afro-Brazilian religious performance, she has done extensive work on 'congados' and other forms of diasporic worship that participate in the transmission of Afro-Brazilian memory and identity. Her books include: 'O Moderno Teatro de Corpo Santo', Editorial UFMG, 1991; 'A Cena em Sombras', Editorial Perspectiva, 1995; 'Afrografias da Memória', Editorial Perspectiva, 1997; and 'Os Dias Anônimos', Editorial Sette Letras 1999. Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics