971.1
The Senses in Scene

Wednesday, July 16, 2014: 3:30 PM
Room: 424
Oral Presentation
Rita DE ALMEIDA CASTRO , Scenic Arts, UnB - University of Brasilia, Brasilia, DF, Brazil
The senses in scene.

This article reflects part of the trajectory of the collective Theater of the Instant, associated with the research group Poetics of the Body, from the Department of Scenic Arts at the University of Brasilia. This group, since 2009, gathers researchers and artists around the processes of scenic creation, and exercises inter-disciplinarity through the interface of theater and other areas such as literature, music, aesthetic computing and new media. It also aims at experiencing processes of reception, with research dedicated to provoking the spectator's different senses, amid other aspects of experimental dramaturgical treatments.

This group's creation presents itself as a unfolding of the research begun in my doctorate in anthropology, which is described in the book Being in Scene: Flower in the Wind. Etnography of hybrid looks. The book took from training in traditional techniques such as the seitai-ho, a bodily education of japanese origin that aims at rescuing and maintaining the body's sensibility and the yoga of voice, a technique that unites chanting traditions of indian, indigenous and african cultures. The contact with these outlooks offers an exercise in displacement, the construction of a gaze and a body that transform day-to-day life and the situations of aesthetic performance.

In this friction between traditional and contemporary knowledge there is a focus on experience, with an emphasis on perception and the relationship with the senses, both in those  responsible for the performance and in those watching it. There is an exploration of new sensorial experiences and an intention of expanding the potentiality of interaction and communication with the other. A notion of body-memory is at work, looking to create a field of activating imagination so that the fragments of each other's life-stories emerge in the direction of a web of fictional dramaturgic constructions.

Keywords: experience, senses, body-memory, imagination.