Teatro São Luiz is hosting a double session, with two performances by the collective Dançando com a Diferença: Blasons, by François Chaignaud, which debuted in 2022, and Doesdicon, created by Tânia Carvalho in 2017. The first one refers to the blazons (blasons), known as heraldic symbols that identify a family, a city or an organization, but also to the poems referred to by the same word, which first appeared in mid-16th century France. And it can be explained as follows: “Inspired by Clément Marot, a group of poets from the court pledged to emblazon parts of the female body, that is, to observe, describe and praise them. These blazons – dedicated to the neck, the lips, the eyebrow, the foot or the nipple – later led to counter-blazons, their satirical and critic counterparts. These literary blazons – contemporary of the advances in anatomical dissection – offer an unprecedented and disquieting pact between perception, objectification and aestheticization. The other’s body – the emblazoned body – becomes the object of field observation, divisible and open to appropriation. Historically, the literary blazon is, thus, the expression of privilege of those who discover and consider the world and others as their possessions, who regard them with superiority. Together with the artists from Dançando com a Diferença, we commit to recovering this blazon dynamics – and to reverse it. Dancers are no longer strange, magnificent or curious bodies that we proceed to observe and scrutinise – they offer to show us their way of emblazoning the world, of observing the audience in order to dance a eulogy or a satire. In this way, the blazon becomes an act of empowerment, through which the legitimacy of one’s own perception is recovered. It’s also a way to bring the notions of sovereignty, adornment and representation to their grotesque limits.”

Regarding Doesdicon, the choreographer writes: “Composition for designing fixed, not rigid movements. Working the rhythmic contrasts of the body, moving or still. A person walks by… Only not. It’s more than one person. A person here, a person there. What about that one? They were not there earlier. Or were they? They were fixed to a spot and I didn’t see them earlier. Fixed movements are then liberated. Not against those same movements. Not to be erased, but to extend them to. Someone else walked by…”