ASSOCIAÇÃO TEN-CHI INTERNATIONAL

While the world seems to simultaneously globalize and divide, the multi-disciplinary activities of the Tenchi project aim at bringing together, approaching, interchanging…

The goal of this project is to give sense to the Arts of Movement as a challenge to East-West frontiers, a process of inclusion better than exclusion.

For some years now we see how the present and the immediate have increasingly dominated in some detriment of ideologies and utopia.

The sacred and the daily life tend to merge, taking over body, space and time. This fusion is becoming more and more entwined with social relationships each day. The immediate opens a pathway between the singular and the universal, between the local and the global.

The evolution of the different branches of the Arts of Movement reflects this tendency which we can recognize in the most creative side of dance, drama and namely the martial arts. In its expression of movement, space unfolds into the infinite and bodies become sacred in an aesthetic of great purity.

Could this be then a new way for the artistic expression and creation to reintegrate the Sacred in daily life?

However, some of the globalization could endanger the essence of the Arts of Movement, keeper of traditional richness which is itself part of the world's patrimony.

Danger lies in the mecanization of the gesture in profit of technical accuracy and efficiency; the loss of the movement's soul and the absence of reflection due to lack of time; the purely physical repetition, a counsciousless orientation would put to loss the awakened spirit, a mirror image of this beauty close to Perfection.

But the Art of Movement offers, beyond doubt, cultural crossing and leads to a unified symbolic universe, inhabitance for different cultures. Its contribution is a fundamental core.

Guided by this ideal, Georges Stobbaerts and the members of the International Tenchi association created a place, the Tenchi dojo, located in Portugal, Sintra (Várzea). The historical town of Sintra, which is part of the universal patrimony, is 25 km away from the capital, Lisbon.

Nowadays the Tenchi center provides regular courses in its facilities surrounded by a garden of more than 5 acres.

It's here that the Arts of Movement are taught : the Arts of Budo (traditional japanese martial arts), Yoga, Ikebana (the art of flower arrangement), Calligraphy and Tenchi Tessen. International workshops concerning these arts are periodically organized - Seminars for actors' education, Dance and Music forums. The association regularly participates in international demonstrations. An interdisciplinary approach between martial arts, music and dance has grown into huge success through the production of the show "Dança do Sopro" (The Dance of Breath), presented at the "Centro Cultural de Belém" in Lisbon and the "Tenchi Festival 2002" held in the "Centro Cultural Olga Cadaval" in Sintra. Contacts with a wide range of research centres have been established - from Switzerland, Belgium, France, Denmark, Russia, USA, Brazil, Morocco, India, Japan, … The Tenchi project exists beyond the place of daily practices, providing an open space for reflections on our times, exchange of opinions and nurturing for the dialogue between different cultures and civilizations.