In the Substance of Time
In the work I created together with Miguel Ramalho, inspired by the poetry of Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, I began by instilling in the creative process the feeling that her poetry instigates in me, inciting the dancers to be astonished and to let the feeling experienced inside our ontological conditions radiate moving images that, intertwined with the laws of internal gravitation of the dance steps, emerge as a transfigured substance.
And, each step being the slow or accelerated sequence of the previous step, it is in the chain of all of them that the work builds itself, expands and takes on a life of its own. This is the moment when the dance technique, being there, is diluted in the body’s machinery and in the strength of the muscles to give way to the emotion initially instilled.
Here, it is the moment when the choreographic discourse is assumed as a metaphor. Let’s imagine the fragile figure that dances around the suspension; a group of distressed people trapped within a tiny beam of light; the flight that crosses space with the impetus of a leap; the character who slides down an imaginary ramp to the ground; the one who hugs to talk about love, or who, in a gesture of abandonment and dismay, simply lets himself fall.
Saint-Exupéry once said of men, “(…) Only those whom the song or the poem or the prayer have aligned are men, those who are built inside (…)”. This is where we walked when choreographing this work: living within our conditions as artists the echo of Sophia’s poetry, and letting it build and settle in the visible world of dancing bodies.