Spiral Time Performances, Canvas-Body Poetics

Spiral Time Performances, Canvas-Body Poetics, part of Cobogó’s Encruzilhadas collection, features essays in which Leda Maria Martins explores the interrelation between body, time, performance, memory and knowledge production, particularly when instituted through corporeality. Through new dictions, the author consolidates the concept of spiral time: a cosmic and philosophical perception intertwining, in the same significance circuit, ancestry and death. In this conception, the past inhabits the present and the future, which means that events, devoid of linear chronology, are in perennial transformation and, simultaneously, correlated.

In her book, the author proposes that the philosophical experience and understanding of time might be expressed by a not necessarily discursive, and maybe not even narrative, inscription, which doesn't make it any less meaningful and efficient: the language constituted by bodies in performance, from the liturgy of Kingdom to theater and performing arts.

In dialogue with other thinkers, such as Alfredo Bosi and João Guimarães Rosa, Leda Maria Martins deconstructs the Western dichotomy between oral and written language, which prioritizes discursive language as the exclusive means of knowledge postulation. Spiral Time Performances, Canvas-Body Poetics presents a temporality curving forward and backwards, around and up, in spiral movements retaining the past as present (or making the past present) to shape the future. Thereby, the author decolonizes Western thought and requalifies Africa as a thinking continent. The word is also inscribed in the body, in memory, in time.

“[…] Ancestry is cleaved by curved, recurring, ringed time; spiral time, returning, reestablishing and also transforming, all-focusing. Ontologically experienced time, through continuous and simultaneous movements, through retroaction, prospection and reversibility, dilation, expansion and containment, contraction and relaxation, in synchronous instances of present, past and future.”

About the author
Leda Maria Martins was born in Rio de Janeiro and lives in Belo Horizonte. She's a poet, essayist, playwright and professor. She holds a doctorate in Letters/Comparative Literature from Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG), a masters in Arts from Indiana University, and a bachelor’s degree in Literature from UFMG. She has a PhD in Performance Studies from New York University and in Performance and Ritual from Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF). Leda is also Queen of Our Lady of Mercy in the Brotherhood of Our Lady of the Rosary in Jatobá, Belo Horizonte. Her thinking and theory are at the intersection of epistemologies and cosmovisions from various cognitive matrixes, such as those deriving from African knowledge transcreated in the Americas. Her work was the focus of symposiums Spiraling Time: Intermedia Conversations in Latin American Arts (University of California, Berkeley 2013) and Leda Maria Martins: Pensamentos e Poéticas (Leda Maria Martins: Thoughts and Poetry), Universidade de Brasília/Universidade Federal da Bahia, 2021. She has published, among other works, O moderno teatro de Qorpo-Santo (The modern theater of Qorpo-Santo), Ed. UFMG, 1991, A cena em sombras (Scene in shadows), Perspectiva, 1995, and Afrografias da memória (Afrography of memory), Perspectiva, 1995. In 2017 the Leda Maria Martins Award in Black Performing Arts was created.

About the collection
The Crossroads collection intends to build a landscape of Brazilian and foreign authors working with contemporary issues such as antiracisms, feminisms and decolonial thoughts. Edited by José Fernando Peixoto de Azevedo, a Doctor of Philosophy and professor at ECA/USP, the collection presents authors who think about the present, attempting to shed a light on how certain processes, as they're faced, understood and transformed, can change historical perception.

Specifications
Author Leda Maria Martins
Collection Crossroads Collection
Editor José Fernando Peixoto de Azevedo
Language Portuguese
Page count 256
ISBN 9786556910437
Cover Thiago Lacaz
Format Softcover
Size 14 x 21 cm
Year 2021