Key Word - David - DANÇA PESSOAL

[The body], he is not dancing, he is danced. Tadashi Endo, Butoh-MA choreographer.

Dança Pessoal is literally translated from Portuguese into English as ‘Personal Dance’. In English and in other translations of other languages it usually has an obvious meaning – your own dance, idiosyncratic moves, movement from within, improvisational choreography, your own style of dancing, etc – which, even in Portuguese language if you are not into the Physical Theatre scene in Brazil, also means everything listed before. LUME (theatre group formed by researchers from University of Campinas, Sao Paulo) developed a methodology for actors to help their creative process, utilizing exhaustive physical exercises based on Grotowski’s studies and Butoh dance. Dança Pessoal was first conceptualized in the eighties in Brazil, and since then, it has been a theme or source for innumerous thesis and researches on Physical Theatre, Contemporary Dance, Performance Studies and Anthropology. Basically Dança Pessoal is not a kind of dance itself, it is the initial process of an intense and exhaustive sequence of physical exercises that help to improve actors’ awareness in their bodies limitations and possibilities – it’s the idiosyncrasy of what the bodies can and can’t do – it’s a decodification of spasms, dances, movements from a tired body to the theatrical semiotics on stage.

Example of pushing and pulling exercises in Physical Theatre:

LUME theatre performance created through Dança Pessoal:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QEoAXWUTzE

Laboratory Theatre of Jerzy Grotowski:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1p09ULGL0uU&NR=1

Butoh based theatre performance by LUME:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ChX3h3CJ6o