Refugio do Pensamento

‘Journey of Heritage: Voyage of Culture’ and Refugio do pensamento are outputs of Perguntas (‘question’; Portuguese) & Atebion (‘answer’; Welsh) (P&A), an international investigative dialogue on cultural exchange among traditional and folkloric practices from Wales and Brazil. Capoeira, a form rooted in experiences of cultural loss, adaptation and hybridity, is often integrated into contemporary choreography as a performance style. This investigation uses underpinning principles of Capoeira as a methodological framework for creating contemporary dance grounded in cross-cultural collaborative dialogues. P&A extends Harrop’s encounter with Filipa Franscisco’s palimpsestic transnational choreography (The Journey 2012), and responds to Eszter Salamon’s Magyar Tàncok (Hungarian Dance 2005) in which professional and folk dance forms confront each other. Research Questions • How does applying Capoeira philosophies and principles to contemporary performance extend improvisatory possibilities in contemporary contact improvisation and Welsh Folk Dance (Dawnsio Gwerin)? • How can choreographic processes make the past visible and urgent in the present of performance? • What creative and critical processes best enable performers to engage with both the cultural particularity and the radical openness of folkloric practices, from their own and other cultures, during phases of making and performing? Methodology: Structured improvisations grounded in question and answer opened out movement and musical languages of Capoeira, Dawnsio Gwerin and Contact Improvisation. Emerging themes were used as initiating texts for original choreography, in which performers’ personal cultural legacies are foregrounded. Performances took place in North Wales and Brazil, separately and simultaneously. Insights: The folkloric forms used and the forms of cultural transmission through which collaborators have learned their practices foreground their origins in vernacular cultures in apparently contemporary performance events. The commitment to dialogue means diverse cultures meet not in a culturally ‘empty’ space, but create sites of ‘shared identity’ (Vargas, 2011) in which to articulate ‘meeting-in-difference' (Williams 1996, p.26).