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Thematic focus on Time-Life and Creation

Vol. 3 No. 2 (2025): Revista Estud(i)os de Dança 6

Editorial: Lived Time and Creation — Six Proposals for Other Temporal Ecologies

DOI
https://doi.org/10.53072/RED202502/00101

Abstract

Throughout history, time has been conceived in various ways, in terms of its nature, movement, and modes of experience. In the Western tradition—rooted in ancient Greek thought and consolidated through Christianity and modernity—a linear and progressive conception of time has predominated. Conceived as a movement from a beginning to an end, guided by a sense of purpose—salvation in Christianity, progress in modernity—time unfolds historically, inscribed within a narrative that seeks to convey the advances of human action upon the world and nature. Eastern thought, by contrast, associates time with the cyclical order that governs the movement of nature and human life. Conceived as a continuous flow rather than a linear progression, time is understood as a temporality inseparable from a cosmology in which humans are not the center but an integral part of the natural fabric. Time does not move toward an endpoint; it weaves itself in the interstices of things—in growth, in the slow unfolding of what exists in potential. This particular understanding of time has profoundly influenced not only Eastern art and philosophy but also strands of Western thought and artistic practice that explore time as a living fabric—duration, repetition, and change—transforming temporal experience into a poetic, ethical, and political gesture. Lived time—distinct from chronological or measurable time—unfolds almost imperceptibly in the subtle variations of everyday life. It is the time in which we are immersed yet rarely feel: time as the very substance of existence and, simultaneously, its invisible dimension. Art and philosophy share the gesture of making perceptible what usually remains hidden in ordinary experience. Philosophers such as Bergson, Jullien, and Gil, alongside artists like Pina Bausch and John Cage, show that experiencing lived time may mean not restricting our observation of reality to its visible elements, but opening ourselves to the perception of the invisible that surrounds, traverses, and animates them. Such an experience of seeing transforms the everyday from a known and predictable time-space into a field of experimentation open to difference—to the observation of small events that emerge in the folds of lived time, causing reality to expand, multiply, and diverge from itself. In contemporary technological contexts—marked by the incessant succession of stimuli and the fragmentation of time into performance-oriented instants—recovering time as an experience to inhabit becomes both an ethical and aesthetic choice. This section of RED brings together six articles that explore lived time as a zone of suspension, where listening emerges as a sensitive form of resistance to the logic of acceleration, and a way of inhabiting minor worlds—worlds that contemporary tendencies toward speed and immediate visibility often marginalize.

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