João Martinho Moura
UNA is an artistic performance experience in total immersion taking place at the theater stage.
In previous work, Nuve, performed by Né Barros in 2010, the relationship between the
choreographic body and its artificial double was explored, in the space-time, projected and
extended in an intimate relationship with the virtual. In Co:Lateral (2016-2019), the immaterial
space expanded, the image became closer to the public, and between the moving body and the
audience, transparent, mixed, embodied realities were presented. UNA (2020) is a possible
continuation of this immateriality, this time, in total immersion, where the audience (one
spectator at a time, wearing a stereo virtual reality helmet) witnesses the body in movement,
again, expanding. Ten years after Nuve, one goes back to testing, to the laboratory,
transforming and questioning the performative and embodied space, where the spectator is
one, is not in the audience, but in the center, in a space that does not exist, and where diferent
understandings of the performative body are reflected. UNA breaks with the subject’s barrier
based on a principle of double immersion of the performer and the receiver and the performer
with himself. It is no longer the gesture gathered by the memory of an image but by a
kinesthetic experience of the movement reinforced and ofered by an embodied immersive
experience. All the incursions that these projects promote put performance and performativity
necessarily in tension with the notion of presence or interaction, preferring an expanded
domain as a territory for exploration and contact.
