Performing Peruvian Blackness

Abstract This chapter explores the rich legacy and ongoing choreographic evolution of Perú Negro, Peru’s most celebrated Afro-Peruvian music and dance company. The group marks its founding in 1969 and continuously asserts black identity through dynamic performances grounded in memory, rhythm, and tradition. Perú Negro constructs a cultural narrative by transforming embodied experience into expressive choreography, using oral histories, kinesthetic pedagogy, and disciplined training to teach movement as resistance. The company develops a stylized canon of blackness by integrating ancestral memory, musical innovation, and improvisation while cultivating a familial ethos across generations. Finally, the chapter underscores how Perú Negro’s repertoire performs living memory, challenges dominant historical silences, and transnationalizes Afro-Peruvian identity through a repertoire that celebrates and revives black cultural expression on the global stage.