Corpo e imaginario Representacoes do corpo na danca independente em Portugal

At the end of the millennium, rethinking the body is on our everyday agenda. Along this century, we saw the transition from a culture against the body towards a culture of the body. But the paradoxes of our contemporaneous age may have created new dichotomies: those that oppose Man to his own body. In this process, new imaginaries will represent, symbolically, the new collective mythologies. As an art of the body, dance cannot be dissociated from the changing status of corporeality in present societies. In Portugal, dance is not set apart from this wider movement. Particularly, the new languages of dance, developed in the 80's and 90's on the fringe of established companies, have shown simultaneous reflections both of contemporary cultural trends and of the deep and sometimes contradictory changes in portuguese society brought about by the April revolution. The aim of this investigation is to identify - trough a longitudinal analysis of the "authors' language" which has characterized independent dance the occurrence of body metaphors, representative of generational themes. On the other hand, we do a cross section study of those creative works, looking for recurrences either explicit or symbolically significant of themes of national identity, post modernity and their cross over with the imaginary of the body.lAvailable from Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia, Servico de Informacao e Documentacao, Av. D. Carlos I, 126, 1249-074 Lisboa, Portugal / FCT - Fundação para o Ciência e a TecnologiaSIGLEPTPortuga