The EmComTato Festival is an event whose main language is Dance to, from artistic and educational actions, promote and invite to poetics and reflections on Art and Life. To cultivate this purpose, throughout its history of maturation and mutation with each edition made (since 2010), EmComTato has grown towards a deep interest in the life of small towns and their surrounding countryside. So we came to live and work in small Palmeiras, in Chapada Diamantina, Bahia.

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The Fertilization and starting point of the Festival came from the proposal of investigation of movement and dance known as Contacto Improvisation (Contact Improvisation), which emerged at the forefront of dance in the 1970s and since then developed in multiple focuses in the context of an international community of practice.

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Both related to the somatic arts and to contemporary dance, Contacto Improvisation contributes in a unique way to the investigations of improvisation in dance as, at the same time, a process and a scenic product.

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The poetic interest in the movement's physicality and the complexity of the living body is, in Contacto Improvisation, intensely linked, since the beginning in the 1970s, to a symbolic context of intense questions about art and life, hierarchies, politics, gender, community.

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Thus, Contacto Improvisation has significantly contributed to the language and mode of production of artistic dance in recent decades, as well as bringing together and feeding, in practice and symbolically, a technically refined community of practice that is not limited to the professional field of dance. and even the arts.

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However, while curatorially and in the structure proposed for the Festival  each year we pursued the poetics and logics of encounter, sensitivity and investigation of the body and society, the EmComTato Festival grew towards the “periphery” of its own community of practice and of Contacto Improvisation.

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We progressively added social and educational actions that revealed to us the poetic and intellectual power – not welfare! - the encounter and shared artistic work with communities that usually had no access to or knowledge of Contact Improvisation or even of contemporary dance and art.

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So, we left Salvador, where the first two editions of the Festival took place (2010 and 2012) and came to hold the III EmComTato Festival in the interior of the state of Bahia in 2013, the city of Palmeiras, a welcoming and very common community with an extensive rural area, with its typical riches and abandonments in the backlands and northeast of Brazil.

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We brought with us the objective of working with this local community and, at the same time, sustaining that our poetic call and invitation to dance could continue to be heard in large urban centers, other states and countries.

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Since then, EmComTato's programming has not only had artistic actions and events, the traditional “jams” and the rich training program dedicated to the practitioners of Contacto Improvisation, but also the poetic research on the local reality, the artistic residencies, , the interaction and meeting with residents and their multiple arts.  

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Thus, other arts began to be increasingly incorporated into the Festival – such as audiovisual, performance, clowning, music – keeping dance and improvisation as training for a sensitive encounter and a poetic look at the body and society.

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After an interval of evaluation and readaptation to changes in public policies for the arts in the state of Bahia and in Brazil, the EmComTato Festival was once again held from 2017, annually, continuing its path of maturation and mutations, taking over for its sixth edition , in 2019, the new name “EmComTato Festival Arte Movimento e Vida”.

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Today, the EmComTato Festival is part of a larger project called NAU Nascente Arte e Utopia, anchored in a small site in the rural area of the municipality, on the margins of the Chapada Diamantina National Park, in which we progressively build structures and calls for multiple creation residences. areas of knowledge, from the arts to technology, passing through the environment and society.