What makes you move

not what moves, but what makes you move.
Pina Bausch.

The work O Chão nas Cidades - Performance e População de Rua (The ground of the cities - Performance and Street Population) aims at combining empirical experimentation with ethnographic reflection on that experience in social space. The proposal is to create a performance on the ground of the cities, a place where I concretely intervene with my body in a reality marked by social exclusion - the reality of thousands of street dwellers who inhabit the grounds of the cities - simultaneously situating myself as both performer and researcher.

In the creating performance projects, I have always tried to foreground a quality that is inherent in the actor's physical presence: the pleasure in risk-taking and the hyper-circulation and exaltation that result from the presence of adrenaline in the body. To beperforming in the streets is to be at play and at risk, which requires my body to be in connection with the here and now of the experience and to be available to live the most complete and menacing emptiness. For me, play, presence and emptiness have been totally tied to the conceptual immersion in the language of performance and the ethnographic approach of street performances.

But my body is not only pierced by culture, it also is culture, rotating identity, organic matter, social representation, subjective and public domains; to experience the dimension of risk is also to engage in a dialogue with the multiple risks of the world and of my body in the world. The city's body is a body filled with exaltation and adrenaline. Risk is a condition that is imposing itself more and more on the modern world. The mere participation of the individual in contemporary society occasions a display of shock. When I lie down on the ground of the cities, I articulate the desire to experience the risk of being exposed to the wish for political transformation: to call attention to the fragility of social ties and the delicate balance of human coexistence.

I move because I want to be in the in-between -- the inevitable space of performance - but I also move because I wish to create new perceptions and affective relationships in a world that is pierced more and more by the shock of changes too rapid to be integrated into our perception and active participation.

—Andréa Maciel Garcia