Art, education and the body in movement

It seems impossible to conceive of a look at the history of art without this path also pointing to the history of the body. In its vastest fluidity or even in the material rigidity that limits it, the body seems the most palpable space where art happens, where the senses are stimulated and perceived, and the immensity of another someone, object or space finds real possibility of interaction . Although there is no single definition of what art is or how it erupts, much less when its existence touches or coexists with what is conventionally called the body, the way in which educational processes present this relationship is still the subject of several questions. , considered by experts as fundamental to understanding and designing possible paths for education.

“All education is an education of the body.” This is what Márcia Maria Strazzacappa, professor at the Faculty of Education (FE) at Unicamp, preaches in her article Education and the body factory: dancing at school. “The individual acts in the world through his body, more specifically through movement. It is bodily movement that allows people to communicate, work, learn, feel the world and be felt”, he points out. All this possible interaction seems to intrinsically link corporeality to at least two different forms of education: one that encourages the body to speak, and another that educates towards non-movement, “for repression”, advocates Márcia Strazzacappa. “In both situations, the education of the body is happening. What differentiates one attitude from another is the type of individual we will be forming”, points out the teacher.

This projection seems to have a direct relationship with the way education was conceived in recent centuries, with the rationalization of knowledge, of the individual and with a Cartesian learning proposal, as stated by professor Alessandra Ancona, from the Department of Education, Knowledge, Language and Arte (DELART) from Unicamp, when considering that education, in general, does not think of the body as part of the being. The researcher highlights that one of the motivations for this bodily silencing lies in the fact that “a good part of the educational proposals value cognitive knowledge, thinking, the isolated use of the mind, reflection, ignoring the body completely”.

Alessandra argues that this trajectory placed corporeality in an untouchable and taboo space, and made the body an instrument of pain for many people, especially because knowledge expressed in a corporeal way is not valued in most schools, universities and even in social circles. such as family and religious spaces. This association between body and pain dialogues with the observation of professor Márcia Strazzacappa, who points out how even today “teachers and directors use physical immobility as a punishment and the freedom to move as a reward”, which highlights how, naturally, movement is a pleasure, but used as a currency of exchange; and that immobility, although uncomfortable, has repeatedly become a standard of good behavior associated with cognitive knowledge.

All these problems influence what Alessandra Ancona points out about the progressive loss of students' ability to express themselves. “They know little about movement, voice, about using the body in relationships. How can I explore my body in a way that establishes desires and connections? This would be a possible question given the knowledge provoked by the use and the very understanding of the structure that forms us”, she highlights. “It's an immobilization that comes from early childhood education, in which body work is already minimal and the value of words and cognition is very strong. At this age, children express and understand bodily, and the disregard for this way of dialoging with the world is very problematic,” she says.

For the researcher, this rationalization of knowledge also persists in elementary education, in which most schools do not understand learning as something that permeates the body all the time, making it restricted to the few arts classes offered to students. “From high school to university, the structure we have is one in which people sit in chairs all the time. Body movement is never requested. There is no understanding that the body can participate and propose. This absence makes people ignore each other. They internalize the idea of ​​taming their own movements,” she notes.

Márcia Strazzacappa sees the development of work with the teachers themselves as a path towards this corporeal recognition and a possible transformation of educational processes. “It would have a dual function: to awaken them to body issues at school and to enable them to discover and develop their own bodies, remembering that, regardless of the subjects they teach, their bodies also educate”.

Public policies

For specialists, this reflective proposal regarding what type of training the most different institutional spaces have promoted is important to understand how the body is understood or not as directly related to the arts, and how these same artistic processes, for In turn, they are seen or not as fundamental with regard to education policies and practices.

Although the National Education Guidelines and Bases Law (LDB - Law 9.394/1996) has provided for the mandatory teaching of arts for basic education since 1996, it was only in 2016, with the change proposed by Law 13.278/2016 , that visual arts, dance and theater became mandatory content in the curricula of kindergarten, primary and secondary education – music teaching was already part of the previous legislation.

Since then, public and private schools have had five years to adapt to this new format which, at the same time as it contributes to opening up the range of artistic possibilities within teaching spaces, also presents problems with regard to the training of specialized teachers for such tasks, as well as the possibility of these contents being treated only transversally, and not as subjects. Still according to experts, it is important to point out how much this questioning of how the arts can be treated at school, without graded subjects and specific projects, becomes even greater with the recent proposal to reform secondary education, sanctioned in February 2017. .

The limitation of the basic education curriculum as a whole for the inclusion of visual arts, dance and theater, as well as the problem of a teacher taking on multiple contents for which he is not specialized, are directly related to another issue, pointed out by art teacher Lucila Andreozzi. “The school spaces are all occupied by tables and chairs, and free spaces such as patios and courts are not ideal for body work and art, as they are places of passage, with a lot of information”, diagnoses Lucila, graduated in Arts Communication with a degree in Theater and Performance from PUC-SP and now a teacher at the Nossa Senhora das Graças Education Center, in the city of Jacareí in São Paulo.

Professor Milena Pereira, graduated in Dance from Unicamp, points out the difficulties of establishing artistic practices in such small spaces, especially in public schools, such as those where she has worked both as a teacher and through the Teaching Initiation Program (PIBID), in which there are several daily challenges, including the need to “prove to the rest of the teaching staff that their projects are relevant”, he states.

For both teachers, the ideal would be to follow other training possibilities, in which art is integrated into the daily life of the school, with places dedicated only to these classes, teachers trained with specific knowledge, and meetings that are not limited to just once a day. week.

Although most professionals and teachers recognize the need and importance of specific disciplines that do not make arts education a superficial project, the relevance of other disciplines addressing artistic content or even using the most diverse arts to stimulate the exchange and production of knowledge, seems to have a great impact when it comes to building a more humanly open and democratic education. 

For Lucila Andreozzi, the use of performance activities with students, both in art classes and in other subjects, serves as a stimulus for the body to move and give new meaning. “Performance is in itself a hybrid art. I often tell my students that we have this tendency to work on everything as if they were in drawers – the theater drawer, the visual arts drawer, the audiovisual drawer, etc., as if things always needed to be closed. But the performance is like a bottomless drawer where a little bit of everything falls,” she explains.

        All this educational capacity that performance carries can also be seen from a political point of view, in an understanding of bodies, once again, as spaces where certain motivations, opportunities and even silencing are inscribed. Art, in this sense, as a field where performance normally takes place, would be a form of life, as advocated by philosopher Judith Butler.

Em Gender problems: feminism and identity subversion, Butler asks himself the following question: “if the body is not a 'being', but a variable boundary, a surface whose permeability is politically regulated, a significant practice within a cultural field of hierarchy [...], then what language remains to understand this bodily representation, this gender, which constitutes its 'internal' significance on its surface?” For the author, the answer lies in the everyday performative act, which is not predisposed somewhere, but contingent on a series of relationships.

All possible dialogues

Performance, in this sense, would present itself as one of the ways in which the body would find its own path of identification or even construction, of being and representing itself in the world. Art, in this context, would be one of the ways to encourage this movement to happen. Its relationship with educational processes seems necessary in disciplines that aim to provide a historical and technical review of the most varied arts, in their specificities, as mentioned, but also in all aspects of promoting knowledge and interaction, as pointed out by the professor Roberto Dalmo Varallo Lima, from the Federal University of Uberlândia.

 By presenting a study proposal that considers arts content in science classes, the researcher points to an approach that allows other areas to dialogue with views coming from art as a discipline or even from the contexts of experience and production of the students themselves. “This approach that unites science, technology, society and art, called CTS-ARTE, seeks to transcend the use of art in science classes only as a motivation provided by artistic work. We use art to encourage discussions of a political, social, environmental and ideological nature, and also to allow dialogue between different cultures”, he points out.

 For the teacher, the use of art dialogues with this possibility of making individuals aware of their spaces, roles and actions in society, especially because it stimulates creative activity, takes the student out of their place of comfort in strictly physical terms, in what he considers as “reflection/action for a plural society”. This trajectory may be capable, in the arts and other disciplines, of tensioning a traditional educational system, “denaturalizing its monocultural basis and discussing the role of school education in the emancipation of historically denied subjects”, he instigates.