Towards Within… Quarantine Poems

Artistic Data:

Artistic conception, creation: Ana Beatriz Degues, Maria Goretti Coelho

Cocreation, Interpretation: Ana Santos, Maria Abreu, Mariana Catalão, Margarida Ferreira, Patrícia Churro, Teresa Fonseca, Vanja Karadzic

Musical Interpretation: Very Mary & Mário Teixeira (Djing Percussion Live Act)

The performance/installation "Towards within " is the culmination of the interpreters' creative emotional and corporal integration process, developed over the pandemic period.

It consists of 3 moments/spaces:

The first is an exhibition space curated by the interpreters. It gathers documents shared during periods of confinement (poems, texts, drawings, etc.).

The second, representing confinement, exposes the constraints and their respective emotional states.

The third represents the return to the outside world, the ability to reinvent life and transform reality from all the memories, marks and resources available.

The Choreographic Composition, based on improvisation, assumes itself as a creation in real-time, both in terms of movement and music.

When you think that a bit of our world might have been suspended, after all, something new is on the horizon. It would be unthinkable, outside the current circumstances, to imagine that it would be possible to develop the Dançar com o Coração® (Dancing with the Heart), on an online platform, work that, as we all know, involves body, emotions, bonding, sharing, group. In this method, we work on the integration of the voice, the look and the movement within the individual trajectory. This means that, once such integration is achieved, each part of us becomes aware of the whole, triggering an intelligent and organic dance. Our body's memory allows us to return to the full experience, to update sensations and emotions lived in a group, in contact.

The bond, until then developed through an intense group dynamic, left its mark, working miracles online. Our own voice, the voice of someone who guides and monitors from a distance, was imbued with a body and vibrant notes that involved our students in shared trust, allowing them to walk through a new space of experience. Taking the experience of Dançar com o Coração® (Dancing with the Heart) indoors was, in a way, creating a new world, and impregnating each object, each corner, and each element of the family in an expansive, inclusive, regenerating energy. It was a unique opportunity to resume with the past found in each photograph, in each book, and in each significant picture. It was bringing to life spaces that were asleep. Bringing them more colour and relief. The living spaces became one, opening up a great opportunity to become more ourselves full-time. Dancing with the Heart at home, and teaching it from home, allowed us to experience Being what we do and Doing what we are. It was doing psychotherapy and dancing within one's own life.

The multifaceted experience of who we are is now one, in a unique space that, thus, expands. By eliminating the borders that separate us from ourselves, a vast and luminous horizon opens up. And so, confinement is transformed into a space of freedom, a space for reflection, for redefining the direction we want to take in our life. We acknowledge, through this peculiar experience, that the empty room of life can be a space of infinite possibilities, and that the crisis may well be the gift that humanity needs to focus on and reinvent.