My Body Temple

By Helena Theodoro

My terreiro body is the title of the book that Dance Professor Xandy Carvalho, responsible for the Africanity in Dance Education Project - PADE/UFRJ, carried out after ten years of research in Afro-referenced dances. This was also the title of his Master's thesis at the School of Physical Education and Sports, where I had the honor and pleasure of participating in the Examination Board.

UFRJ greatly enriches itself with this publication, which presents itself as a danced performance in memory through the pedagogy of encounter, being a support for existence, showing corporeality as a cultural crossing that culturally and socially dresses the body.

Xandy tells us that the everyday body is not the body we are born with, as it changes, but preserves information in the memory of different ways of presenting itself. The signifiers appear as the context demands. We know that dancers in general have mastery of this body. When it comes, however, to Afro-Brazilian traditional dance, this body is understood as a source of thought, being the body that contains Exú, the messenger, which is the word of yesterday and tomorrow.

As Muniz Sodré states in his book The terreiro and the city, the Western world deals with time and space differently from black thought. For the Yoruba tradition, space is fundamental, territoriality shapes a way of life, of living and thinking. Thus, the author took his dance to his territory of origin, to the terreiro, where the body is controlled by the spirit, where thought crosses the body, reaching other elements and other bodies.

Source Congresso em Foco

PADE (Africanity in Dance Education Project) - Photo Wagner Cria Avamunha - a fast-paced rhythm that marks the beginning and end of ceremonies.

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