MOVING IN A LANDSCAPE OF PRESENCE
Perception demands a quality of presence that we could address as a kind of "energy". Let´s accept this image, kind of a fuel that moves perception (let´s amuse us calling it percépton?). I am wandering about the potency of this "energy" in dancing. Precisely, how and when dance accumulates such "source of personal power" or just burns it out. Perhaps dance could happen either in the practice of concentrating or dispersing such energy (a "power of presence"), moving perception and experience in both directions. We could say that the dancer, mainly the improviser, manages this energy for building up and moving through his poetics. The particularity of Contact Improvisation is doing that under strategies for a complicity of experience. It is all about a technical-poetic approach of dancing and improvisation interested more in "impressions" than in "expressing oneself". But we could adventurous us in a technical-mythic approach as well…
In his books, Carlos Castaneda suggests that the reality we use to rely upon is not more than a description of the world. A description we are taught since the first day of our lives, until we are locked in that. I have been investigating a similar suggestion in my dancing over the last years. I propose that the "reality" is the exercise of our perception and the "description" Castaneda mentions are their habits we built by movement since we are born. One needs concentrate the energy of his presence to break up habits. And when they break up, a larger amount of energy is made free. In CI we share a mutuality of experience in which we could reshape and dishabituate the usual bubble of perception we are locked in, moving in a slightly or really non-ordinary world which we recognize as ourselves. What to do out of the energy of presence we unfroze from our habits of movement and perception, what the imaginary of our dancing opens up to?
HUGO LEONARDO SILVA
Contemporary dancer, founder and organizer of the EmComTato Contact Improvisation Festival of Bahia, where he has been teaching for the last 10 years, besides of participating and collaborating in the brazilian network of events related to Contact Improvisation. PhD in Performing Arts and Master in Dance at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), author of the books "Poetics of Opportunity: choreographic structures open to improvisation" and "Shared Dishabituation: contact improvisation, a game of dance and vertigo". In the present, dedicated to the outset of an Institute devoted to the creative investigation under the concept of "art and autonomy", to be located in a mountain rural area nearby Chapada Diamantina National Park, in Bahia, Brazil.
I take part of independent companies like Group X of Improvisation in Dance, directed by Fafá Daltro of the School Dance of the Federal University of Bahia, since 2002. As the same in the artistic group of creation in the Technological Poetics Research Group Body Audiovisual directed by Ivani Santana (2006-2012), a major reference of dance and art with technological mediation in Brasil and abroad, in the Sciences Arts Humanities Institute IHAC-UFBA. PhD in Performing Arts at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA) and Master in Dance at the same University, with researches devoted to bring the improvisation in dance to a perspective in studies of cognition. Author of the books "Poetics of Opportunity: choreographic structures open to improvisation", published by EDUFBA (2009), and "Shared Dishabituation: contact improvisation, a game of dance and vertigo".Founder of the EmComTato Contact Improvisation Festival of Salvador-Bahia (junho 2010, abril 2012, september 2013), as a dancer, researcher and educator, I have been dedicated myself to Contact Improvisation since 2003, mainly in Bahia, besides of acting in events and festivals in Brasil and abroad such as Contact in Rio (Rio de Janeiro 2008, 2010, 2011), ECITE – European Contact Improvisation Teachers Exchange (Liverpool, England, 2009, Raasepori, Finland, 2010), Transformando pela Prática (Florianópolis-Brasil, 2009, 2012), Disseminação Em Contato (BrasÃlia-Brasil, 2010), São Paulo International CI Festival (Brasil, 2011, 2012), Joinvile Festival of Dance (Brasil 2011), Encontro Coletivo de Contato Improvisação de Pernambuco (Olinda, 2013), Contactfestival Freiburg (2013), Contact Journey (Geórgia, 2013), Festival Internacional de Contact Improvisation of Montevideo (Uruguay, 2013) etc.
I am also interested in subjects such as: unity bodybrainmindenvironment; states of perception, subjectivity and dancer imaginary; values of autonomy exercised and embodied in practicing Contact Improvisation and theirs possible analogies to other thought systems, such as Permaculture; strategies and organization of festivals and other nodal events to that community of practice; poetics and methodological strategies for the improvisation in pieces of dance. MORE: www.emcomtatofestival.com
