Body/Language: Sustaining Space for Oneself and Others

Based on the premise that gesture, body and movement are languages of dialogue in a communicative process, the aim of this work was to understand the emotions, forms of contact, spatial organization, and bodily dialogues among 13-year-old students from a public school in São Carlos-SP, Brazil. Recognizing art as a motivator of integrative bodily experiences that evoke emotions, the proposed didactic sequences involve feeling, being in the world, compassion for the social weft to which we belong and are shaped by, and the connection with the planet’s biodiversity as forms of resistance against social relations based on competition and the exclusion of otherness. As social beings who inscribe themselves as subjects of language through statements materialized in the communicative process, as argued by Bakhtin, the students' productions and actions-also understood as intentionalities in Laban's view include actions of drawing, selecting words, and holding space through individual and collective bodily movements. The aim of the activities conducted during the sessions was to identify, in the various statements (verbal, non-verbal, intonations, emotions) produced by the students, a notion of self that is interconnected with society and the planet.