As faces de Gaia: os modos de compreensão do corpo na Gaya Dança Contemporânea

Abstract

Before presenting the current configurations, Gaya Dança Contemporânea, an extension project that existed at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte - UFRN, underwent several significant transformations from its inception in 1990 to the present day. As the Greek goddess and personification of the planet, Gaia also responds in different ways to the situations it undergoes and reinvents itself as a new Earth. In the same way, this dance group has been behaving during its existence and, with each situation that it is put to experience, its ways of understanding the body that dance are being altered and they reconfigure themselves showing other different faces. In order to understand these modes of understanding, we will use Phenomenology as a methodological tool to propose cross-cutting and discussions based on concepts inherent to dance: dance and education, dance and performance, dance and creation. The results point to three distinct faces presented by the group in its timeline and that will delimit the text's chapters: the first face focusing on the artistic-pedagogical character; the second evidencing a search for an aesthetic standard of high technical and artistic performance and the third one for collectivities. From this panorama, we see the body dancing in the Gaya as a hybrid of itself, affected by its historicity, and by the range of references reflected in its faces from its emergence to the present day.