Performance Art as Spiritual Practice

Abstract

The text discusses performance art as a spiritual practice, considering the interweaving of ethics, aesthetics, spirituality and politics. Based on the concept of itinerant performances and their relationship with the practices of meditation-in-motion present in Buddhist traditions, the text focuses on two projects carried out by the authors: Audioetica itinerante (Itinerant AudioEthics), by Gilson Motta, and The Dance Project / Brazil, by Tania Alice. The analysis shows that itinerant performance can affirm itself as an individual and/or collective political gesture that questions the control and the domestication of the body, proposing an experience of perspective conversion or liberation, in order to reinvent temporally the urban space. The itinerant performances seek to build the consciousness of freedom, an essential factor in the current Brazilian social and political context, which is marked by the resurgence of forms of censorship and repression.