100 gestures: Dani Lima meets Flusser

"to think is a gesture that emerges from the body, not the head.”

- Dani Lima, choreographer

Dani Lima's work has inspired the methodology I'm currently developing to examine the work of contemporary choreographers working in Brazil and other places that are "far away, yet so close" to historical cultural centers such as Paris, Berlin, and NY.

In my research I have combined the work of artists dealing with the cognitive aspects of movement and philosophical propositions by thinkers such as the phenomenologist Vilém Flusser. For Flusser, gestures are the first and most basic code or the departure point for the constructions of mental processes and cultural productions (e.g. paintings, photographs, choreographies) are materialized gestures that present or create a particular universe, rather than represent reality.