Patric da Cunha
- Salto no Tempo
Salto no Tempo (research) is an ongoing artistic
research situated between dance, voice,
sound composition, spoken word, performativity,
fiction, embodiment and moving realities;
The work emerges from a desire to hold space
for encounters between multiple temporalities,
presences and forms of knowledge that
inhabit the body. Earth body, room body, soul body,
cosmos body. Rather than operating through
a fixed beginning or end, it unfolds as
an appearance, a situation that gradually comes
into being through the relations established
between those who share the space.
The cheesy title, Salto no Tempo (Time jump),
refers to a movement beyond the idea of chrono-
logical time. The work approaches time as a living
force carried by the body, where memory, imagina-
tion, ancestry and lived experience remain in conti-
nuous negotiation. Inspired by Leda Maria
Martins' notion of the spiral time, time is understood
not as a sequence of events left behind but as a field
of active presences that continually return,
transform and reconfigure the present.
Within this landscape, the body functions as
a sensitive vessel through which entities appear.
It carries traces, it carries words, it carries
the moment, a myth perhaps and contradictions
that cannot be reduced to a singular identity.
Drawing inspiration from Akwaeke Emezi's
Freshwater, the research approaches subjectivity
as something inherently multiple. The self is not
treated as a coherent and stable entity, but as
a territory inhabited by different voices, forces
and histories. Dance, voice, sound, composition…
become practices through which these presences
can emerge without demanding resolution.
My(your) body, my(your) queer body, my(your)
dancing body, my(your)ancestral body are
world-producing bodies. Through willingness
and collective presence, the work investigates
how embodied knowledge can become
visible and audible on its own terms. The stage
becomes less a place of representation and
more a place of activation, where memory is
not recalled but enacted, where knowledge
has the space to transform and deananimate
structures of oppression.
It becomes a means of not only occupying
space, claiming existence and creating connection
across temporal and spatial distances but also
a space to simply exist. The performance
therefore proposes a practice of reclamation:
not a return to an original condition, but
an active process of reclaiming the right
to speak, to imagine and to exist beyond
imposed definitions.
Influenced by Sun Ra's understanding of
the imagination as a transformative force,
Salto no Tempo considers artistic practice
as a space for rehearsing other possibilities
of being together. The work does not seek
to represent alternative worlds but to momentarily
inhabit them. It asks how performance can
become a place where different experiences
of time, identity and relation can coexist, generating
forms of presence that exceed the logics of separation,
productivity and individuality.
Ultimately, Salto no Tempo is an invitation
to remain with complexity and uncomfortability,
as well as breath and compassion. It proposes
a space where memory and imagination, individuality
and collectivity, voice and listening are continuously
reshaped through encounter. A space where being
together is not assumed but practiced. A space
where presence is not understood as an individual
achievement but as something continuously produced
in relation to others.
