I first saw Dore Hoyer’s “Afectos Humanos” cycle during a class on Tanztheater at the University of São Paulo. That was in 2011. I was strongly appealed by the video of her dances and felt that someday I would really like to dance them. It was not rational at all, something really moved me when I saw the video of her dances. So the whole process of learning these dances that I would go through 2 years later, ended up being an attempt to try to answer this question of why I was so drawn into the “Afectos Humanos”. But it is still a question that remains open to me and to which I’m not eager to have a definitive answer.

Yes, in the case of the “Afectos Humanos” cycle, I think she was really searching for universal gestures as the dances aim to express human emotions. This is why she also searched for a genderless body, hiding her hair and not searching for feminine or masculine movements. I personally think a show is always an event where many things are shared between performers and audience, that’s even the sense of it as I see it, this exchange of energies, emotions, thoughts, sensations… Dancing Hoyers’ soli is always a very strong experience. They were created more than 50 years ago, but they still can have a very powerful impact on contemporary audiences.