PERFORMANCE

15 October at 5:00 PM

"Escape to the Present Time – The Gentle Power of the Moon Only Burns the Eyes"

by Hugo Calhim Cristóvão & Joana von Mayer Trindade

Synopsis

Here is dance. It is on this bare, fierce, gentle threshold that we remain impermanent. On the wounded blade where the instant offers itself in fullness, dissolving before it can mature. We bring together Dance and Philosophy – only the gesture that escapes, that fails, that lives at its peak before meaning is born, carries within it the power to make the impossible pregnant with possibility. We dance what is continuously disappearing. The disappearance that appears. What burns in the absence of permanence. What remains because it disappears.

The generative principle of the end is Fernando Pessoa: “The East to the East of the East.” We begin in what once was and in what is distant. We begin in roots and spiders that branch out like shadows, sweating and weaving fractured horizons. Paul Celan brings us the escape towards death and the “threshold” – suspended breath, apnoea of gestures, the space between falling and creation. Herberto Hélder brings us “metamorphosis” – everything is endless and continuous because everything dissolves. Within that endlessness, we dance.

“Impermanence: this is what structures us.” Nishida: “In true being, nothingness is not negation, but the primordial form of existence.” Everything vibrates, everything breathes, everything perishes – there is vibration, there is breath, there is perishing. Heidegger insists: to be is to be already given over to the end, to the horizon of finitude, already thrown into existence. Simone Weil, an attentive blade, says: “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

And we are attentive. Only by remaining attentive do we endure and resist visible dissolution. Benjamin: the event as a spark in the darkness of history. And Kierkegaard speaks to us of vertigo: “It is the dizziness of freedom.” We dance within vertigo as though caressing the act of walking along the invisible wire of a time about to collapse.

But the world. The world is a well. Genocides multiplying like echoes. Wars and stupidity. Fascisms, old and new, dance alongside dictatorships, hoarse cries of violence. Climate disaster devours the planet. Day after day, it expands its feast. Layers of crisis accumulate paralysis. Nausea, existential disgust, anxiety, dissatisfaction, mental illness, social illness. Cities, invisible prisons. Identity fragmented into shards, into rigid and impoverished replicas. The invisible chains of exploitation and exclusion tighten the knot.

Pessoa guides us: the East is within. To dance is to raise alternatives at the heart of decay. Moments that escape decay, that vibrate in the unbearable now. Nietzsche reminds us, and everyone repeats: “You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.” Chaos is here, magnificent in its indifference to rituals of salvation. But the star, fragile, is here too. It is unrepeatable: “The gentle power of the moon only burns the eyes.”

We plunge into the fragility we never left. The temporality of dance is not resistance. It is persistence. Movement that resists the end through the very act of becoming its own purpose. Dance is Being, already given over to failure, yet insisting on existing. Heidegger says: beings-towards-death. Herberto Hélder replies: “The dead never stop being born at the centre of the poem.” Poem-body. Dance summons ontology – being thrown into time – and meontology, the study of what is absent, Nothingness. Nishida: “In absolute emptiness, there is no opposition; only the place that allows being to emerge.” To dance is this. To fail at being. To transform explicit urgency into practice. To seek the artistic ethos as one who tries to ignite fire with bare hands, in an escape towards the present time.

The present dances, fragile. It grows from fears, from anxieties that devastate the human. It grows from fascinations, from shattered dreams. What was once utopian now slips through our fingers, stained with words, stained with indifference. But compassion? Compassion runs through the world. It escapes through impermanence, through failure, through loss, through what is suddenly murdered. It embraces. Geopolitics smiles: genocides, massacres, destruction. But Weil, the blade, says: “There is only one thing that matters: to learn to desire perdition.”

Conflict always is. Instant against Eternity. Permanence against Impermanence. Ethos, Pathos, Logos, and Nothingness. Dance, improvisation, composition, choreographic memory – they carry this struggle from river to river, from sea to sea. Every movement is already a trace of farewell and a cry of remembrance. Herberto Hélder: “Everything is immeasurable, but the centre is invisible.” And Heraclitus, from the fragments of his thought: “War is the father of all things.” To dance is this continuous struggle, where each gesture is born from what disappears. Where the body remains impermanent as it unfolds. Where “to inhabit is to be in transit, but with roots in the impossible” (Eduardo Lourenço).

From impermanence to impermanence, resilience vibrates in the fragile present. Dance is what remains to us. Because “The knife does not cut the fire”, because the knife, in the moment, transforms nothingness into being. Dance, continuous metamorphosis. Continuous metamorphosis that refuses disappearance through the immersed fragility of appearing. Because presence trembles, a diamond that shines. Because the fragile gesture, the one that escapes, is what remains impermanent. And we dance. Because only in movement do we refuse the end. And, in the end, here is dance.”

Hugo Calhim Cristóvão & Joana von Mayer Trindade

Artistic Credits

Direction, Choreography, Dramaturgy and Training: Hugo Calhim Cristóvão & Joana von Mayer Trindade

Dance and Performance: Sara Miguelote

Lighting Design: Luís Silva, Luís Ribeiro and Bárbara Falcão

Costumes: UN T

Set Design: UN T & NuIsIs ZoBoP

Music: Liszt, Études d'exécution transcendante

Sound Design: João Oliveira & NuIsIs ZoBoP

Theory and Philosophy: Hugo Calhim Cristóvão, Joana von Mayer Trindade, Celeste Natário, Carlos Pimenta, Cláudia Marisa, Cristina Aguiar, Ezequiel Santos, Rui Lopo, Mário Correia, Nuno Matos Duarte, Chris Page, Afonso Becerra, Armando Nascimento Rosa, Luís Ramos, Elter Manuel Carlos and Sofia Vilar Soares

Video: Os Fredericos

Photography: Alípio Padilha, João Peixoto, Luís Ferreirinha and Leonel Castro

Production: Cristina Aguiar & NuIsIs ZoBoP

Support: Festival Escenas do Cambio and Fábrica da Criatividade, Castelo Branco

Artistic Residencies: Centro de Criação e Investigação Nuisis Zobop

Duration: approximately 30 minutes

Age rating: 6+

Partners: WoW Porto, Fundação Marques da Silva, Centro Português de Fotografia, Instituto de Filosofia da Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto, Instituto de Sociologia da Universidade do Porto – FLUP, Escola Superior de Educação do Porto, Escola Superior de Arte Dramática da Galiza, ESMAE – Escola Superior de Música e Artes do Espetáculo do Porto, Universidade Lusófona do Porto, Forum Dança, Companhia Dançando com a Diferença, Junta de Freguesia do Bonfim and Casa Comum – Reitoria e Espaço Agra.

Nuisis Zobop is a structure funded by República Portuguesa – Cultura, Juventude e Desporto | DGARTES / Direção-Geral das Artes.

For registration, send an email with the name and day intended for:

info@forumartebraga.com

The visit is limited to 25 participants, in order of registration.

Upcoming dates: 09.06 | 30.06 | 07.07