Almada and the dance: gesture, form and color

Abstract

Time and movement are fundamental ideas for avant-garde thinking, from the last decades of the nineteenth century to the first decades of the twentieth century, having these principles occupied a central place in the scientific development and artistic creation of these years that celebrated newness, invention and transformation. Exemplify this affirmation: Impressionist quest for the moment; the technique of pointillism and its dynamism; Symbolist consciousness of the passage of time; modern poetry and its commitment to capture in language the rhythm of life in the cities; Muybridge’s series, both photographic experiments and studies of the physiology of movement; and, of course, the movies. In this paper, we are interested in studying a particular case of this link: dance and its representations, understood as visual symptoms of the inscription of time and movement on the body, on human form – tensioned to the limit of stability, recognition, identity; challenged in its naturalness, marked by a culture of boldness and rupture. Almada Negreiros was able to perceive the importance of dance for avant-garde movements very well. He even composed one of the most important manifestoes of Portuguese Futurism, taking the Ballets Russes as a motto. Above all, however, Almada left us bodies in dance in a significant number of visual compositions and in the poem “Mima Fatáxa”, works that we will read in the light of the reflections on dance and writing by Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Valéry, and in comparison to the plastic experiments of Edgar Degas, with his famous dancers.