What cognitive value will we find in this new annual call to reflect on the matters of the body, gesture, and articulation of the social imagination that is GUIdance?

A strong, speculative idea: the development of our self-knowledge must increasingly consider, as a fundamental energy, the relationship of curiosity and empathy toward all of our existential surroundings, which generates every context. In other words, it is essential to consider and foster all possibilities of interaction between humans, non-humans, inert matter, and cosmic matter.

We sense that this era, which already transcends our current understanding of it, forces us to acknowledge that identifying difference and the "other part" is no longer sufficient to resolve the great dilemmas that besiege us—dilemmas that cast doubts on our very continuity as a species.

After proposing, as a necessary celebration, the condition of "humanity" in dance in the previous edition, this year we decided to craft a program that encourages virtuous, poetic, radical, social, and political forms of expression through a commitment to an integrated relationship with the "other part," which may be human or more-than-human.

While we can identify a series of significant subjects (tradition, mythology, migrations, social patterns, transcendence, etc.) to be questioned in the creation of agency, what conceptually connects this edition is a neologism: otherness (outralidade).

Otherness is a basic yet simultaneously complex idea: it is no longer enough to recognize the place of difference. It is necessary to incorporate it into how we discover ourselves, renewing meanings from an interior that comes from the "other part." This otherness consists of all the humanity that characterizes us in its most striking diversity, but also of the (unknown) cosmos and all the living and inert forces aligned by the mysterious power of life.

What we aim to spark is a contribution to the expansion of the sensory field, whose poetry, sacredness, politics, and ethics cannot be fulfilled unilaterally, as an exclusive factor of the human being.

In all the pieces, if we make ourselves available, we will find an "other" reason beyond the visible—one that drives the unstoppable expression of bodies in the production of meanings. And if we wish to find an initial anchor from one of our great thinkers, here it is:

"It is in the relationship with the other that the 'self' is formed. A beam of affections is projected onto the body of the other, uniting and individuating them, forming the figure of a 'self.' The self is first the 'other' before it is mine (self)."
— José Gil, Chaos and Rhythm

Rui Torrinha