Artes e autismos: que danças podem ser?

Abstract

What dances can be woven together with neurodivergent people? Would there not be different worlds, corporealities, and poetics shaped in the relationship with these individuals? Walking alongside these questions, this research is born from a desire to share eight years of experience in engaging with autistic individuals from the perspective of bodily approaches, more specifically, dance. It focuses, however, on a specific period of my work during the years 2022 and 2023 at the Centro Cultural Bom Jardim, located in the Grande Bom Jardim—a peripheral area of the city of Fortaleza (CE)—home to the project “Dances, Childhoods, and Autisms” [Danças, Infâncias e Autismos]. The initiative involves weekly meetings with neurodivergent people from the community, which I term dance gatherings. I discuss these gatherings by addressing the need to rethink dance and its ontological openings (Lepecki, 2017), problematizing how art navigates between science and culture to establish different ways of perceiving. I also draw on Fernand Deligny’s thinking to explore the concept of “close presence” (Deligny, 2015), while outlining some methodological pathways tested in the dance gatherings, under the horizon of a poetics of relation (Glissant, 2021). Based on two presentations held at the Centro Cultural Bom Jardim, as part of the “Nothing About Us Without Us” [Nada sobre nós sem nós] and “Arts Showcase” [Mostra das Artes] programs, I reflect on a poetics of the open work (Eco, 2015). This analysis seeks to understand how approaches to composition and improvisation intertwine with different ways of perceiving and generating dance interventions: wherein relationships with neurodivergent individuals, with their unique corporealities, one can experiment with diverse modes of authorship and dancing.