A Fall into the self

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.34619/idiu-bk8a

Keywords:

fall, everyday language, love, dance, grounding

Abstract

The paper thinks fall and ascension as related movements. Their connection can be seen in various arts, such as painting and its motifs of Icarus or fallen angels or the descent from the cross, and literature (examples will be taken from António Vieira, Allan Poe, Fernando Pessoa,
Vicente Huidobro). In the last decades, dance has developed a unique attention to grounding and to falling.
Encouraged by the “Oxford Philosophy” and its search to respond to everyday language instead of refusing it, we will also search wisdom in common Portuguese expressions about fall as well as in the lyrics of popular songs that teach us how and why we fall in love.

Author Biography

Paulo Filipe Monteiro, NOVA University of Lisbon, School of Social Sciences and Humanities. ICNOVA — NOVA Institute of Communication, Portugal

Full professor of performing arts and of cinema at Universidade Nova de Lisboa, where he founded and coordinates the MA in Performing Arts. Has published extensively on performing arts, cinema and fiction. His book Drama e Comunicação was elected best book of 2010 by Coimbra University Press; it was also published in Brazil in 2012 by Annablume. In 2012 he published Imagens da Imagem. Among his recent writings: “An art in the rough: the cinema of João César Monteiro”, in Lucia Nagib e Anne Jerslev (eds.), Impure Cinema: Intermedial and Intercultural Approaches to Film, I.B. Tauris, 2014, Elogio do desconhecido, http://interact.com.pt/28/elogio-do-desconhecido/, 2018, and "El ritmo en el nuevo teatro y en el teatro-danza", in Salomé Lopes Coelho e Aníbal Zorrilla (eds.), Estética y Política del Ritmo, Paris, Rhutmos, 2020. He has given conferences and workshops in Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Belgium, Russia, Germany, Ireland, Brazil, Argentina and USA. Since it is impossible to introduce in due time all publications and conferences in this new and very slow template Ciencia Vitae, please see the post-its next to the titles "Productions" and "Activities". He wrote and directed two fiction films: Amor Cego/Three to Tango, 2010, 25’; and Zeus, 2017, 117’, which won 12 prizes, including best film and best director. As a screenwriter, he wrote for other directors 7 feature films, selected to Cannes, Locarno, São Paulo, etc.. And the TV series A Viúva do Enforcado, 10 episodes. He also directed 16 theatre plays. And he has been an actor in 11 feature films and in series and tv films of several nationalities. Has worked extensively with dance dramaturgy, especially after Pina Bausch invited him in 2000 to follow her work in Wuppertal.

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Published

2026-07-31

How to Cite

Filipe Monteiro, P. (2026). A Fall into the self. Revista De Comunicação E Linguagens, (64), 186–201. https://doi.org/10.34619/idiu-bk8a

Issue

No. 64 (2026): Cadences: Attentional Moves in the Arts and Everyday Life

Section

Visual essays

License

Copyright (c) 2026 Paulo Filipe Monteiro

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.