AUTHOR'S FOREWORD

      This book is an invention. In the sense of the words. In the sense of what Humberto Maturana points out in his “biology of knowing” that the explanation of experience is not experience, it is something else that uses elements of experience and makes reference to it.

      Artists are given to inventions, and I'm from the field. But scientists too, and madmen, and children and... who wouldn't be? What happens – recalling Maturana once more – is that there are different freedoms in everyone's passions to explain. And also different freedoms and restrictions offered by the matter from which the explanation is made.

      The dancer, who is the body, is the experience and is also the explanation of the experience in the matter of the body. The body is already an explanation! But the dancer, who is being a speaker, and talks about what he does, and teaches, and writes a show program, a project to work on, academic research, a book, is already some kind of artist in explaining the explanation of experience. And it does all this with the body. How could I do otherwise?

      As such, this book is also choreographic. Because I spend a lot of time in the dance experience and this activity contaminates all the explanations that occur to me or that I deliberately invent, in a body that you see, in emotions, in daydreams, in worldviews, in words, in drawings, in my flute, everyday decisions big or small... I have to admit that I can't stop dancing when I write, even if I wasn't talking about dancing, and maybe even more so in this case.

      Thus, this book brings and denounces certain options in operating on the freedoms and restrictions in explaining the experience it offers, that is, some measure of risk and rigor is always involved and reflects a path in dance that is simultaneously artistic and academic, but, before that, it's a context to which I converge my concerns, inspirations and flavors about being a body. Writing or dancing is always about this experience. And since I can't handle it alone, or because it gets especially interesting when stimulated by the experience of others, I joyfully celebrate the opportunity to write about what I find in the Contact Improv dance while feeling very natural and it is necessary to seek relationships with the experience and explanations of others, whether in dance, science, literature... in the body.

      That's why this book is an invention. Maybe it's not true. In fact, my living body seems to me so full of contradictions and inconsistencies. But it's concrete. I am concerned that it has enough “visibility”, that is, that it builds and offers coherence where the reader and I can meet and stimulate each other's experience, artistically, humanly and intellectually.

      It seems to me like a dance that I have been dedicating myself to and polishing for some time in my passion to explain and “see” the world as a dancer. Now the reader arrives.