Fuja: um chão para dançar com yoga

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the intertwinings between Dance and Yoga through a critical, historical, and autobiographical approach, proposing a sensitive listening to the body as a territory of creation, pedagogy, and care. The research, developed within the Graduate Program in Dance at the Federal University of Bahia (2022–2025), is rooted in the artistic-pedagogical experience with the project Fuja: Body, Movement, and Yoga, integrating practices of vinyāsa yoga, dance improvisation, and principles of somatic education. The first chapter presents a historical and conceptual analysis of haṭha yoga, distinguishing its premodern manifestations from its modern and transnational reformulations, highlighting the colonial, philosophical, and political influences that transformed yoga into a globalized and often decontextualized practice. The second chapter proposes a reconnection between Dance and Yoga based on the Nāṭyaśāstra, a classical Indian treatise on performing arts, exploring the concept of vinyāsa in its aesthetic and dramaturgical origin as a compositional and relational principle. The chapter examines how vinyāsa shifts from the theatrical scene to modern yoga practice and proposes an interdisciplinary reading that recovers its poetic and spiritual dimensions. The third chapter, entitled The Yoga that Dwells in Me, adopts an (auto)biographical perspective to present the artistic-pedagogical proposal mahābhūta vinyāsa, a practice developed from the four great elements of nature — earth, water, fire, and air — as qualities of presence, attention, and creation. The chapter articulates experiential narratives, formative influences, and pedagogical practices developed throughout the master’s program, configuring practice as research and listening as method. The dissertation thus proposes an expansion of the field of dialogue between Dance and Yoga, considering their historical-cultural, cosmological, political, and sensitive dimensions. By affirming the body as a living landscape and practice as a journey, this research inscribes itself as a gesture of re-enchantment and re-existence in the face of normative models of teaching, creation, and spirituality.