Hugo Leonardo
The dancer Hugo Leonardo is founder and organizer of the EmComTato Contact Improvisation Festival of Bahia, where he has been teaching for the last 10 years, besides of participating and collaborating in the brazilian network of events related to Contact Improvisation. PhD in Performing Arts and Master in Dance at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), author of the books (only in portuguese) “Poetics of Opportunity: choreographic structures open to improvisation” and “Shared Dishabituation: contact improvisation, a game of dance and vertigo”. In the present, dedicated to the outset of an Institute devoted to the creative investigation under the concept of “art and autonomy”, to be located in a mountain rural area nearby Chapada Diamantina National Park, in Bahia, Brazil.
Presence as the fuel of dancing
Perception demands a quality of presence that we could address as a kind of “energy”. Let´s accept this image, kind of a fuel that moves perception (let´s amuse us calling it percépton?). I am wandering about the potency of this “energy” in dancing. Precisely, how and when dance accumulates such “source of personal power” or just burns it out. Perhaps dance could happen either in the practice of concentrating or dispersing such energy (a “power of presence”), moving perception and experience in both directions.
We could say that the dancer, mainly the improviser, manages this energy for building up and moving through his poetics. The particularity of Contact Improvisation is doing that under strategies for a complicity of experience. It is all about a technical-poetic approach of dancing and improvisation interested more in “impressions” than in “expressing oneself”.