Chair: Silvia Citro and team: "Body and multiculturalism in contemporary socio-esthetic practices" (Universidad de Buenos Aires - Universidad Nacional de Rosario)
Due to the global and multicultural processes associated to postmodernism, it is possible to appreciate the spread of body, drama and dance techniques linked to non-Western performance traditions, like Eastern, African or Amerindian. When these practices are learned in urban cultural contexts, performers usually are resocialized in body gestures and representations different from their own habitus, especially because those traditions generally involve holistic approaches that redefine body-world experiences. This group explores the consequences these training and formation practices have upon the performers’ subjectivies. One of the main questions is if these "other" body poetics are able to transform the current body politics. In other words, can the re-appropriation of Eastern, African or Indigenous performance traditions changes the bodies of those who practice them in urban cultural contexts and are not acquainted with these traditions? And if they do so, in which sense these practices are able to reshape the hegemony of Cartesian dualism and the body politics of the everyday urban life? The production of other perceptive-gesture-kinetic modes can induce to create new sociocultural meanings and values in the intersubjective relations? or, on the contrary, it leans to ways that assert the postmodern Narcissism?. Finally, we propose a critical discussion about the effects of the exoticism and the neo-colonization processes of the performatic poetics on "cultural Others" engaged in these appropriations. The presentation of research experiences or performances will create a proper atmosphere to discuss the impact of teaching non-Western performance traditions in different urban cultural contexts of the Americas.