In A sociedade incivil – mídia, iliberalismo e finanças (The uncivil society – media, illiberalism and finance, in free translation), a book released this year by the publisher Editora Vozes, emeritus professor Muniz Sodré, from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, analyzes the voiding of values that sustain institutions and the loss of strength of democracy and parliamentary representation that have turned civil society upside down.

On the first afternoon of this Biennial, the intellectual from Bahia moves away from his recurring fields of analysis – the legal sciences, literature, sociology and anthropology – to devise on the topic of Dance and Corporeality, the title of his master class.

According to Muniz, corporeality is the condition of the sensitive, as in the Afro experience, in which feeling is the original communication with the world, it is being in the world as a living body. Feeling is the mode of presence in the simultaneous totality of things and beings, it is the human body as a primordial understanding of the world.

In turn, the author of 36 books argues that dance as a rhythmic integration of movement with space and time creates or “invents” actions from the temporal flow of the collective imaginary and, hence, produces an autonomous action of the dancer. Dance cannot be translated or explained – which means, it is not a double of the theater, mime, literature or history – because the action of the dancer is projective, inducing an experience that cannot be reducible to the concept. The creative possibilities of dance are endless.