Raised on the seaside of southern Brazil, the wind was her first professor. It taught the inevitable aspects of human movement: gravity, displacement, change, velocities, resistance, etcetera. A curator of human expression and a philosopher of movement, the author develops her research by embodying and embracing the environment. Beyond identities, the research methods are transnational, transcultural, translaguage, transexpression. Transitory and somatic. Listening is an exercise. The research about territories of expression has been continuously informed by the relations with elements of nature and the environments that surround the body. For instance, breathing is the ventilation of the body: air transit. Indispensable to vocal expression, breathing is the body’s wind making. The skin is seriously perforated, a passage: impression and expression. Atmospheric pressure? The edge is a limit: separation. At the same time, a line of encounters. Border. Belonging. Being. Nature and cultural aspects overlap in human-animal expression. Similarities between habitats-home-nests, paws and feet, mouth and beak, eyes and eyes, bones – shells – skins, and death. Modes of connection inspired by the South American indigenous knowledge. Embodiment happens in the transpiration, transformation, and transknowledge between performance, philosophies, poetry: person and planet Earth. Training expressive bodies is then training to be alive, improving the abilities to perceive the world. As one can notice, the wind makes the sand or the leaves dance.
The above scene is an excerpt from the play “Machinic Manual of the Stage Bodies”. Practice Research. Arts Centre – UFPEL. Pelotas, 2018.
Performers in “the wind” scene: Francine Pereira, Germano Rusch, Lindsay Gianoukas, Mario Celso Pereira Jr.
Directed and choreographed by Lindsay Gianoukas