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Dancing: conditions for moving

Conversation between Tanja Baudoin and Sofia Caesar, 2022-2023

 

For documentation of Sofias work, see:

https://sofiacaesar.net/

https://vimeo.com/353834797 (Workation, 2019)

https://vimeo.com/user6878475 (Superacecidas, 2022)

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Stills from Workation, 2019. Video, part of the installation Workation.

Tanja Baudoin: I’d like to ask you about an aspect of your work that interests me a lot: the question of movement. It is present in the Workation videos that you presented in the exhibition Canseira at Centro Hélio Oiticica in Rio de Janeiro and at M KHA in Antwerp in 2019, and also in the more recent videos involving other performers, Superaquecidas (Overheating, 2022), presented at Galeria Cavalo and at KIOSK in Ghent.  

                 It seems to me that you are researching body movements. I believe it is a very profound investigation, but at first glance it’s not so obvious where it comes from, it’s not easy to identify its nature. I kept thinking about what kind of movement this is, what the context is of this body language. For example, in the short videos that make up your installation Workation, you are with a computer in a hammock or on the beach and you begin making a kind of sliding move, it's almost a fall, but it's not quite that. It's a directed and intentional movement. It looks like you are entering the movement deeply in a way that is rare to see in visual artworks. Saying it’s a dance or a performance doesn’t really qualify it. It's something else, which maybe has to do with your background, which started in dance, and then continued with contemporary art. 

           Maybe it is difficult to talk about this. Your practice deals with many other subjects, such as work, exhaustion, and how these forces impact the body. We can't leave this completely to the side, but I would like to see if we can talk about movement and the body without immediately going into a socio-political contextualization or an interpretation of the work. I would like to hear you talk about the relationship between the body and the object, such as the computer, for example. What movement can this relationship generate and what state of the body does it imply? 

          To start with, maybe you could talk a bit about how you entered the art field and the practices you encountered along the way. 

 

Sofia Caesar: This is a very interesting question because we’re talking about a place that is only of the body. What do I mean by ‘only of the body’? I mean a place that cannot be verbalized, a place that is experienced. What can be verbalized are the ways of entering this bodily state, the images, the surrounding things. The practices, exercises, and ways of approaching these bodily states that are difficult to put into words.

                My body has been conditioned since I was born. I am white, was born in England and grew up in the Glória neighbourhood of Rio de Janeiro. I was raised by a family of artists, art teachers, and cultural agents. What I bring to my work is also my background in dance, which is based on somatic thought, a practice that isn’t related to the perception of the body by an external eye, seen on stage by the audience. It is the point of view of the body as it is experienced or seen from within the body itself. This is Thomas Hanna’s definition of somatic practice(1), and the term is usually attributed to him, even though the history involves many other people. I studied at the Angel Vianna School(2) in Rio de Janeiro, whose origins go back to the 1960s and ‘70s. In this period of the military dictatorship it was a place of resistance. The school was founded by Angel Vianna, a classically trained dancer, and her now deceased husband, Klauss Vianna, who worked a lot with actors and the theatre, and their son Rainer Vianna was also involved. In 2009 Suzana Saldanha published a book that tells the story and talks about the ‘Angel Vianna method’.(3) Angel doesn't like the word ‘technique’ and also doesn't like the word ‘method’, but it was the middle ground she found to refer to a certain ‘modus operandi’ that we use to get into these body states. 

                I was taught at this school, a private school that at that time was almost exclusively attended by a privileged class of white people. I had started with contemporary dance when I was 17, because I had many depressive episodes where I couldn't move. I was into Brazilian music mixed with punk, grunge, mod, a mixture that I like to recall as ‘luscious goth’, because there we were, a bunch of punks sitting on the waterfront, wearing long black pants at the height of summer in Rio de Janeiro, all sweaty. I was in a band and had no relation with dance, except for playing guitar and dancing at alternative music concerts. But I was very paralyzed and melancholic and started to have issues with my posture. An aunt commented that my posture was terrible, and told me to take a dance class or something to make my back less hunched. At that moment the Deborah Colker Movement Centre opened in Glória.(4) I went to take a contemporary dance class for beginners with Aírton Tenório(5) – I thought he was incredible: a contemporary dance person with a well-structured method. I now think that he was teaching a technique similar to what is called release, which is about letting go of your body and using your weight to generate a dynamic, a movement. I loved the class and immersed myself in it. For the first time in my life I enjoyed moving my body and feeling my body, in a way that was different from the pain or paralysis I felt, of the chest closing in, the rock in my stomach. Or that explosive feeling of playing the guitar, screaming into the microphone, losing total control in ecstasy. The teacher noticed that I enjoyed the class and told me that I could be a dancer, but that I needed to take more classes, that I needed to do ballet and make up for ‘lost time’, since women in dance usually start early and I had already lost a lot of time.

 

TB: He saw a potential in you... Was that around the time you went to the Angel Vianna School, after finishing high school? 

 

SC: First, in 2007, I went to ESDI (Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial), the School of Industrial Design(6), which gave me a great basis in visual language and making projects. ESDI is an incredible school, very technical: you learn how to weld, sand, work with photography, drawing, metal, wood, resin, printmaking, typography, modeling, furniture... It is both a graphic design and product design school, you get this double training. But while I was at ESDI I started having a very deep depression that kept me paralyzed in bed for two months. Then I had a chance to get into the Angel Vianna School, because they started offering evening classes. I did my classes from 8am to 5pm at ESDI, and from 7pm to 11pm at Angel. I graduated from the Angel Vianna Technical Course in Contemporary Dance. It saved my life.

            There I got in touch with Angel's method, which basically consists of unlearning how to move. The focus is on what she calls ‘awareness through movement’, which means you move by being aware of your own body. It's about dancing. It's also about denaturalizing everyday movements. The idea behind it, as I understand it, is to deprogramme the body, to de-discipline the body; our habits, the way you get up from your chair... There are many people involved in Angel's School: there is someone who does a reading of your body; a person who looks at your body and sees all your traumas; there is Soraya Jorge who works with Authentic Movement, but has a background in craniosacral therapy and various somatic therapies.(7) Soraya was my body awareness teacher and she is very important to me. Other people who were particularly important to me and who taught there were Maria Alice Poppe(8) and Alexandre Franco.(9)

          The focus of the technical course is not just on deprogramming your body. The idea is to go from an organized, disciplined, colonized body to a reinvented, emancipated body, what some call a ‘body without organs’(10), possibly, a body that comes out of a process of deconstruction. This causes a crisis in all the students. But in the final year, you leave the place with tools to build a new body for yourself. It’s a deconfiguration and a reconfiguration. And in that reconfiguration there is an invention. There is a utopia of freedom there, the possibility to make a choice, to invent your body, to create yourself. Every body dances.

               There are many people and interests gathered at the school. They offer modern performance, theatre, there is the contemporary dance approach, and when I was there, there was a lot of attention for ‘therapy through movement’, with people who work with mental health, especially with schizo-analysis.(11) There is the Pulsar dance company(12), made up of Angel's former students and teachers.

 

TB: Were you dancing with companies at that time and did you also create your own works for the stage? 

 

SC: Yes, I danced semi-professionally. I danced with Esther Weitzman(13); Márcio Cunha(14); Maria Alice Poppe; Alexandre Franco... I also briefly had companies. One company with Renan Martins(15) was a bit of a joke, when we were still teenagers. Then I was part of one that was a little more serious, with Vandré Vitorino(16), Laura Noronha(17) and Camila Fersi.(18) My first solo took place in 2010, in the graduation show of my class in the technical course, called Eu Multidão (I Multitude).

 

TB: How did you start working with video?

 

SC: I remember exactly when that was: in 2010, when I received an invitation from Martha Niklaus(19) to participate in an exhibition that took place inside an empty apartment. I had already filmed a few times, things to watch back later, rehearsals, etc., but for this work I really incorporated the camera for the first time. The work was made for the bathroom. I liked this idea of people who were peeing and seeing a video shot on top of the same toilet they were using. It was a video of myself, jumping on top of the toilet, in a loop. The loop was a repetition of the moment I was in the air. I became some kind of flying monster, a crazy butterfly, above the toilet. This was my first study with a camera... and I liked it. It mixed with a kind of punk thing. And it allowed me to feel freer with my body even when I was very depressed. Even my first solo for the stage was a kind of bizarre, out of the ordinary, kind of animal behavioural thing. In the sense of really embodying a different physical state that is not that of everyday life, but also not so far from what we consider abnormal in daily life. So it was more connected to everyday gestures, like walking, sitting, jumping, etc., in a way that is a little detached from the image. It's not about a still image, it's a physical state. 

             Since that time in 2010, I've done a lot of work that involves filming the body. A certain state of enchantment between the body and the camera began to happen more and more. As soon as the camera moved, came close, or was turned on, something in the body would be triggered. A kind of trance, or a state of presence. I associate this state of presence very much with the Authentic Movement practice that I started doing there at the Angel Vianna School with Soraya Jorge. This practice involves a relationship between a person who is the witness and another person who is the mover. The camera has served as a witness in some lonely and paralyzed moments in my life. It has been a witness of anguish, of afflictions of this ‘other’ body, of other states, and today I know that in psychiatry these states are framed as psychoses. I always wanted to go beyond the limitations of my structured body. Maybe because sometimes, in my anguish, my body became unstructured and I felt the need to move it.

                 In addition to this, when you find yourself trapped in a language that traps you, as was the case for me with dancing on stage, or classical dance, or modern dance, there comes a time when you have a feeling of limitation, of suffocation. To me, the very rigid choreographies of the Italian stage gave me this feeling of being trapped at the edge of my skin, in my patterns of behaviour. Even as a spectator I feel stuck in the room without being able to leave. At that point my body wants to go somewhere else, to break free and sprawl out. 

 

TB: You said that when the camera is on, you get into another state of presence, an almost trance-like state. At the same time, if the camera has the role of a witness, there is a possibility to create distance. Watching what has been recorded is perhaps a way of taking yourself out of your body.
 

SC: Yes, and distancing yourself from the body is different from transcending it, from the feeling of going beyond the limits of the body, of getting lost, a feeling that dancing gives us. During this period, the camera perhaps had the function of a witness, as is the case in Authentic Movement(20), and it helped me understand this dysfunctionality of my body, which sometimes paralyzes or speeds itself up too much.

                 At that time, I understood that dancing with the camera was almost like inventing a new body, a body that exists through the image that the camera makes. It’s a kind of dancing with a body that is only embodied that way, in the image, because the camera is there filming all the time, the camera is an extension of our bodies. It’s thinking a more virtual body, a body that’s a little more hybrid. A body in which the camera is an organ, it is part of that body. I only experience life the way I do because of my body. And the camera today is part of this body, it permeates my experience of the world. Even if it is turned off, it is already part of my way of being in the world.

                This body is not the body of a model, pausing for a photograph, it is not a body ‘posing’. It is the body that is witnessed moving with the camera inside of it. It moves through an altered state of body consciousness – which includes this new camera-organ.

                My last two video series, Workation (2019) and Superaquecidas (Overheating, 2022) were a continuation of thinking these bodily movements, which exist there along with the witnessing camera, but in collaboration with bodies other than my own or the ‘camera body’ (if we consider the camera a moving body). In Workation, the camera moves closer or further away: there are four videos, in two it moves closer, in the other two it moves further away. We used a wide range zoom, which goes from a wide view to being very close. The moment the zoom movement of the lens starts is what Andrea Capella(21) –  who worked on both pieces as director of photography – and I called the moment of ‘enchantment’, or the ‘spell’. As the camera lens was getting closer, my head began to drop down. The two things happened simultaneously.

               From the beginning of my research into this body movement, I have been very interested in the ‘pause’. In stopping, being still, what that encompasses. I have always been interested in the relationship between a pause as something inert, something unproductive, and movement as something productive... That is how I felt when I was inert: unproductive, stopped, nullified. André Lepecki(22) talks a lot about the project of modernity as being a project of movement, an arrow-movement that goes and cuts... There is a text of his that talks about the pause as a form of protest, of opposition, of resistance.(23) But I don't think that's where I'm at, I think I'm still inventing another body, a body that is neither productive nor unproductive, you know? It is another state that is tensioned between the two.

         This interests me, the pause as a state. Largely because of personal issues, because during my bouts of depression I had these crises, moments of anguish or paralysis, of not being able to move. With this research I started to try to open this up a little.

(1) Thomas Hanna, "What is Somatics?". In: Bone, Breath and Gesture: Practices of Embodiment, ed. Don Henlon Johnson (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1995), 341 - 352.

 

(2) The Angel Vianna School and Faculty of Dance.

(3) Suzana Saldanha (ed.), Angel Vianna: Sistema, Método, ou Técnica? (Rio de Janeiro: Funarte, 2009).

(4) Deborah Colker Centre of Movement.

(5) Aírton Tenório is a dancer, choreographer and dance teacher. 

(6) College for Industrial Design at the University of the State of  Rio de Janeiro.

(7) Soraya Jorge is a movement specialist, contemporary dancer and teacher of Movement Awareness classes. Together with Guto Macedo, Soraya is co-founder of the International Centre for Somatic Movement.

(8) Maria Alice Poppe is a dancer, researcher and collaborator of creative processes in contemporary dance.

(9) Alexandre Franco  is a dancer and dance teacher at Sarah Rio de Janeiro - International Centre for Neuro-rehabilitation and Neuroscience.

(10) The concept of the 'body without organs' was developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to discuss the unregulated potential of a body without imposed organizational structures - Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia 1. Second ed. trans. Luiz B. L. Orlandi (São Paulo: Editora 34, 2011).

 

(11) 'Schizo-analysis' is another term by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, which describes a type of social analysis based on libidinal investments - Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia 1. 2. ed . trans. Luiz B. L. Orlandi (São Paulo: Editora 34, 2011). In Brazil this developed into a clinical practice. 

 

(12) Pulsar Companhia de Dança, created by dancers with and without disabilities, uses the aesthetics of dance to introduce the spectator to a different look at the multiplicity of individuals.

(13) Esther Weitzman is director of the Esther Weitzman Company, choreographer, dancer, teacher, body trainer and a Specialist in the Philosophy of Art at PUC/RJ.

(14) Marcio Cunha is a choreographer, performer and visual artist.

(15)  Renan Martins de Oliveira is a choreographer and performer based between Porto (Portugal) and Heidelberg (Germany).

(16) Vandré Vitorino is a contemporary dancer, researcher of contact improvisation, Pilates instructor and a certified fasciatherapist.

(17) Laura Noronha is a physiotherapist, with a specialization in pelvic health. She was trained as a dancer and is a certified Pilates teacher. 

(18) Camila Fersi is a stage artist, contemporary dramaturgy researcher, dance teacher and artist-member of Coletivo Instantânio.

(19) Martha Niklaus is a visual artist. She set up and directed, for 10 years (2003-2013), the Galeria do Lago - arte contemporânea, at the Museum of the Republic (RJ).

(20) In Authentic Movement, "the person who moves (the Mover) closes their eyes to map their own impulses and decide whether they want to externalize them or not. And the Witness, with open eyes, observes the Mover and what happens to themselves in the presence of this other."

(21)  Artist Andrea Capella made her directorial debut with Desassossego (Filme das Maravilhas) in 2010. Before that, she was director of photography for short films and for the film A fuga, a raiva, a dança, a bunda, a boca, a calma, a vida da mulher gorila (2009) by Felipe Bragança and Marina Meliande. 

(22) André Lepecki  is Associate Professor in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.

(23) André Lepecki, "Movement in the Pause", In: ConTactos, ed. Diana Taylor and Marcial Godoy-Anativia, HemiPress, 2020.

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Exhibition view of Canseira, Centro de Arte Hélio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro, (2019). Photo: Pat Kilgore.

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Tired Mobiles, 2019. Letters, threads, metal rods, 120x120x60cm. Photo: Pat Kilgore.

TB: In recent years, you have made several mobiles, which sometimes consist of words deconstructed into letters, or objects such as cell phones that are taken apart into several pieces (Mobiles Cansados or Tired Mobiles, 2019). In this way the objects or words lose their original function, but become part of a new structure that also involves movement, because they are mobiles, they are moved by air. They are constellations in motion, never fixed. It is still a movement study, but with objects as the main protagonists, and involving a kind of movement that is not mechanical, but environmental. Could you talk about this kind of movement of the object?

 

SC: Now I remembered something from the first question, which is perhaps a more specific answer to this question of movement in my practice. All the gestures and movements that I have been exploring in various works since Workation have to do with using the weight of the technical device. The object, such as the cell phone, is heavy in the sense that it is exhausting, but it is also heavy because it is a material, and matter has weight. The question is how to use that to go to the ground, how to deliver the weight to the ground. 

            A lot of the gestures in these works came from this idea of incorporating weight. Because the cell phone is not very heavy, it’s not a fast drop. It's about feeling the weight... feeling it... taking it... to the ground. After the Workation video I made a performance called Unrest (2019), with cell phones and computers. The cell phone started to appear not as a camera, but as a physical object.

           About the mobiles: I was very tired, exhausted, and I came across these little plastic letters. I spelled the word ‘exhausted’ and started thinking about the weight of these words, which mean so much, and if I could rewrite or re-figure them... The first mobiles I made were all of words associated with tiredness and synonyms of these words in other languages, such as ‘exaustão’, ‘crevée’, ‘uitgeput’... That’s it, the movement of the structure gives it a new structure, a new body. I always think about this: creating a new body, mobilizing, disorganizing and reorganizing the body through movement. 

           The mobiles with the cell phone elements emerged from a moment of crisis. The cell phone is an object that oppresses me. When I get depressed, I can't answer messages, I get completely paralyzed in relation to the constant movement of communication. I wasn’t able to move, but one day I got out of bed and started to give another body to the cell phone. The cell phone is a ‘mobile phone’, a mobile, but it is very ‘fixed’ in the sense that it is compact, hard, with an impenetrable body. It is transparent in the sense of communication: I can access people immediately, or see what they are doing on Instagram, but physically, I don't know the body of the cell phone.

             We are enchanted, in trance, absorbed by the cell phone. It also has a camera, which is a form of capturing that is violent, that appropriates, uses, instrumentalizes. I have always been very paranoid about the camera, that is why it took me a long time to film other people. I have always felt that the camera is a monster, it captures and fixes a body and the minimum amount of freedom that the body might have, which I’m not even sure if it has. And the camera makes a body productive that was not productive. It is a somewhat paranoid view of technology, but that’s also part of the early history of photography and film. I’m thinking of the reproducibility of the body, of Muybridge's photos(24), or the first films with the dancer Loie Fuller(25): it's a spectral thing. The word ‘choreography’ comes from a similar desire, to capture and reproduce movement. To historicize it.

 

TB: When you work with other people, how do you deal with these tensions that the camera introduces? What is your way of working with the movements of others in relation to the camera, also considering that a rolling camera can provoke other behaviours?


SC: That's right. I can't work with myself all the time, because the work is not about me, it never was. At some point I realized that if I use these methods that I was using with other people, together we arrive at a different state. Each body is different, but through a methodology, a way of working the body, we come to movement. In the case of the recent Superaquecidas work I used a ‘trigger’, an ignition that started the improvisation, which was the same question for everybody: what can you do with your body when your computer overheats? What other body can exist in this moment, in this state of heat, of inability to work because the machine is exhausted? This generated conversations, proposals, counter-proposals, among all of us – the three performers and Andrea Capella, who was also part of it, because she also dances, she dances with the camera.

(24) Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) was a photographer known for his pioneering work in photographic movement studies.

 

(25) Loie Fuller (1862-1928) was a dancer and actress, a pioneer of modern dance techniques. Her Serpentine Dance choreography appeared in the early films of the Edison Company (1894) and the directors Auguste and Louis Lumière (1896). 

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Still from Superaquecidas, 2022. Video, part of the Superaquecidas installation with four video screens, ventilators, cables, and croocked stools. Dimensions variable. Made in collaboration with Andrea Capella, Varinia Canto Vila, Laura Samy, Lara Negalara, Nyandra Fernandes, Michelle Chevrand.

@Galeria Cavalo, Rio de Janeiro.

TB: Can you talk more about this process, about these triggers you use with other people? 

SC: For my doctoral thesis I'm creating a kind of a book, a workbook, of exercises that I've been learning over time, that I've been using to make my videos and my performance work. Often these are exercises to be carried out with devices, cameras... whether they are on or off. 

 

TB: How does that work when it’s not turned on? Does it become a dead object?

 

SC: It becomes a relational object! It becomes an extension of the body.

           When I work with other people I usually work in a pedagogical way, in the sense that I don't direct the person, but I offer exercises. They are scores – choreographic partitudes that are always very simple. We experiment and improvise with them. I’m trying to historically trace these strategies in my doctoral research. There is material that comes from Augusto Boal(26), from the Theatre of the Oppressed, and much of what I’ve been using these years comes from Angel Vianna. There are things from a play by the Ueinzz group(27) that I saw in São Paulo in 2014 that changed my life! I am trying to retrace these methodological paths. How do we deal with the body? And with the objects that discipline the body, like the cell phone, the computer? How do we invent another body, how can we deconstruct, re-learn, re-make, re-connect, re-pair? 

          But all of this is so hard to talk about! It comes from experience. When I say ‘I am going to build a new body’, people think it’s kind of absurd, they are a bit suspicious of it. It’s really a subjective process, an internal process that moves through sensations, perception, experience, the memory of that body that is working there, in that scene.

 

TB: When you talk about inventing a new body, about unlearning, all these things that come from Angel Vianna's methodology, the attempt to free oneself from structures and habits... Do you think it is really possible? I think it is, but in the end, the options that we have always lead us to another structure, another method, other forms of capture.

 

SC: That's the thing, isn’t it? Angel is part of a generation of people who worked with the body, they were part of a movement that fights against a dance form that universalizes the body. This ‘universalizing’ dance is characterized as a response to classical dance – there are several techniques that go against Eurocentric ballet, against verticality, against the idea of enlightenment, of the white man's mind being superior to other bodies. They are distinct techniques, each with their own focus – there is a lot of ‘centre’, there is release, there is Martha Graham's technique…(28)

              I’m also thinking of Rudolf von Laban's technique and the notation system that he created to try to dissociate movement from the representation of classical dance where all gestures had narrative meanings.(29) Laban was interested in movement for movement's sake. All these modern techniques are about organization, about construction. They each develop a technique that can be applied to a group of bodies. And contemporary dance, as I learned from Angel, despite all the possible critique, in practice is an attempt to get rid of the notion of a universalizing technique. That's why Angel Vianna doesn't say ‘technique’, she speaks of ‘method’.

             Anyway, I love talking about the history of dance, because I am really interested in it, I really like it! I started teaching classes about this when I was about 19. I think we don't talk enough about the history of dance. Everybody in contemporary art knows about Bruce Nauman(30), but they don't know about this amazing thing that is happening in dance: the decolonization of the movements of a body that was domesticated by western societies in the North. I admire this kind of body work and I feel it’s very well developed in the work of the artist Nyandra Fernandes(31), for example, or Davi Pontes(32), both dancers from Rio de Janeiro.

 

TB: All of this history, the references, the people, the techniques that you mentioned in our conversation, when you come into contact with them, your body holds onto them, right? Which is also beautiful. You can try to free yourself, but there are things that stay…

 

SC: Yes, they stay. I began talking about the history of dance to say that when I started learning Laban's technique, for example, I got addicted to it. And when a classical ballerina joined the Angel Vianna School in my time, or any other person with a strong technical background, like the people who worked at Cirque du Soleil, sometimes it was more difficult for them to do two years of Angel’s method than for someone who had never practised dance in their life. This is an important point for Angel: anyone can dance. It’s not the same thing as the ableist universalizing technique that I talked about before. One of my fellow-students was the wonderful Moira Braga.(33) She is a blind woman who built her career in the performing arts and is currently a professor at the Angel Vianna School. We danced in a show together. 

                This methodology, which comes from places such as the Angel Vianna School, is very relevant to my work. It’s a method that mixes many things, including Augusto Boal, Klaus Vianna, Paulo Freire(34), popular dance, the Brazilian anti-psychiatry movement, the liberation of the body during the military dictatorship... Nowadays it’s part of the toolbox of the bodies and minds of diverse people with a vision, who move totally against notions that go back to the dictatorship era, and are thinking of a different body. 

           But that's it, contemporary dance today mixes with ritual, Afro-Brazilian dance traditions, performance, with contemporary theatre, visual arts, many other things... It’s like you said: every type of body work has a side to it that conditions. And reconditions. Then, once the body has been reconditioned, there is always the question in the back of my mind: is it disciplined again?

 

TB: We have to keep dancing, right?


SC: We have to keep dancing all the time! To me, dancing means just that: moving that which has conditioned us to move the way we are unconsciously moving.

(26) Augusto Boal (1931-2009) was the founder of the Theatre of the Oppressed, a theatrical method that actively involves the public in the creation of plays. He developed his method based on Paulo Freire's pedagogy, during his political exile in the 1970s. 

(27) Ueinzz is a scenic territory for those who feel the faltering of the world. The company is made up of patients and those who make use of mental health services, as well as therapists, professional actors, theatre and performance interns, composers and philosophers, renowned theatre directors and lives on the line.

(28) Martha Graham (1894-1991) was a dancer and choreographer from the United States, one of the principal proponents of modern dance in the twentieth century.

(29) Rudolf von Laban (1879-1958) was a dancer, choreographer and dance theorist, a pioneer of modern dance with an expressionist and theatrical focus.

(30) Bruce Nauman is a North American artist who is well known for his performance and video practice, which he developed from the late 1960s onward.

(31) Nyandra Fernandes is a dancer and director of the piece Elegbará.

(32) Davi Pontes is an artist, choreographer and researcher.

(33) Moira Braga is an actress, dancer, journalist, researcher and consultant in communicational and artistic accessibility.

(34) Paulo Freire (1921-1997) was a Brazilian educator and philosopher and author of Pedagagy of the Oppressed (1968).

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