Everything, really. Our bodies are our own private flesh-ships. Our own watery works of art and in a perfect world, they would be our number one reason for living. We’d live to take care and nurture and revive them, never sacrificing them for someone elses benefit or greed. And yet, alas, we are here right now and we will try and do what we can with what we were thrown into. I will digress to go back to my intital point, which is, the body is the center of our human experience. Whether we love our bodies or want to add or subtract parts of it, its all yours for the taking, loving, abusing, and amusing.
Last quarter I took a class called Afro-Brazilian Dance with Janelle Campoverde which changed the way I relate to my body , how my body relates to itself, and the way I see dance as a tool for society.
Every morning when class would begin we would spent the first 45 minutes doing what we casually called “body awareness” practices. We would dim the lights and Janelle would guide us through seemingly simple movements that were often times quite complex due to the amount of muscles or bones that were being used and activated. All of the movements had some sort of benefit to the way our body naturally moves. After doing an exercise on one side, Janelle would invite us to walk around the room, or move our arms back and forth, and experience the difference in the range of motion that was now, suddenly accessible and moving so smoothly. Many of our body awareness exercises revolved around the hips, the back, and the shoulders, as those were the body parts that were moved the most in Afro-Brazilian Dance.
After doing these practices for a few weeks, I began to imagine all of the ways it could be beneficial and the two that came up right away were:
- Farm workers-who bend or kneel for eight to ten hours a day
- Women who are holding trauma inside of their body from assaults
- Individuals who are trying to escape their body to escape their pain
In my project this quarter, I want to explore the ways the body connects to itself, the way the body connects to others, and the way the body connects to the earth. And how all of these connections can aide in the healing process of our bodies, our minds, and our planet.
Dance has been and is a powerful tool in uniting people and empowering all bodies. Similar to the U.S., Brazil was going through social and political heart ache surrounding race and unjust rulers in the 1960’s. In the late 1960’s, music, art, and politics merged into the art movement that is known as Tropi
calia. Artists used rhythm and performance art to critique the oppression of the Brazilian dictatorship at the time. This art project spilled over into everyday life, people of all ages were dancing in the streets to communicate, to unite, and to show the government that they weren’t sitting this one out.
This art form opened the doors for other movements, and soon after Tropicalia the Black Consciousness Movement made it way to Brazil in the 1970’s, an organization dedicated to promoting and celebrating Afro-Brazilian culture in Brazil.
Image Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jongo
http://www.capoeiradc.com/class/samba-afro-brazil-dance
https://www.pinterest.com/drielyalves1/dan%C3%A7a-afro/