As an Uruguayan, and having achieved my artistic graduation divided between Uruguay and Brazil (I graduated from the University with a Degree and Master in Artistic Education – Performing Arts, UNIRIO), I feel involved and interested in the bridge that can be created through investigations and concerns we have in common as researchers, art educators, artists and people committed to body language.
This, in turn, must be seen as a place of communication and relationship between artistic processes and the way we place ourselves in the world, artists as well as non-artists. I believe that possible transformations in a culture can occur through art and dialogues with other human disciplines.
The repercussion that contemporary dance has, from the 1990s onwards, in Montevideo, of which Graciela Figueroa’s proposal was part, led me to get closer and interested in her way of exposing dance to the community of people who looked for their classes.
I am immensely grateful for the path started by Graciela Figueroa in dance, and which I soon noticed in several other artists who incorporated her work into their professional activities.
In classes with Graciela Figueroa I felt an atmosphere of acceptance and freedom of expression that I had not found in other spaces of teaching and practice of dance and movement.
There was in that space a respect and communion with different bodies and abilities that made us observe our way of moving, of exchanging affection in a group, of being present and of being responsible for the decisions we make, as artists and body education workers living in the same space, city and world