Um estudo fenomenológico-existencial sobre dança, deficiência física, família e saúde mental

Abstract

This dissertation aimed to understand, through the lens of existential and hermeneutic phenomenology, the meanings of the lived experience of dance and its interconnections with physical disability, family relationships, care, mental health, and life projects. This study employs a qualitative approach with a phenomenological-hermeneutic orientation, grounded primarily in the work of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, van Manen, and Sheets-Johnstone, and in dialogue with critical disability studies. The investigation was developed based on a family trajectory shaped by the experience of cerebral palsy and ongoing engagement with dance, utilizing narratives, memories, reflective logs, photographs, and audiovisual materials as tools to evoke and contextualize the lived experience. The analytical process was guided by movements of immersion in the narratives, holistic reading, selective and detailed approaches, phenomenological description, reflexivity, and hermeneutic writing, in a continuous interplay between the parts and the whole. The analysis revealed four interdependent thematic clusters: dance as an experience of care and resistance; disability as an embodied, relational, and socially situated experience; mental health as an embodied, affective, and relational experience; and the interplay of temporality, family, and life projects. The findings indicate that dance cannot be understood as a linear cause of transformation, inclusion, or mental health, but rather as a field of experience where movement, bonds, recognition, participation, and existential possibilities were lived and imbued with new meaning over time. The trajectory examined challenges normative conceptions regarding which bodies can inhabit the dance space, highlights the importance of pedagogical practices sensitive to bodily diversity, and broadens the understanding of disability beyond exclusively biomedical or individualizing perspectives. The study concludes that the experience of dance can acquire significant meaning in the shaping of ways to care, relate, participate, and envision existential possibilities, without these meanings being universal or automatically generalizable. The study’s contribution lies in deepening a situated experience that challenges dance practices, research methodologies, critical disability studies, and contemporary understandings of mental health, embodiment, and inclusion.