This thesis establishes the basis for a dance training methodology entitled
Towards Vivencia, which aims to allow performers to modify their initial state of being
in order to achieve peak performative experiences through the ritualisation of their
actions. This practice as research draws from theoretical investigation and, primarily
from the author’s current professional practice as a choreographer/director and from
his background in different somatic practices such as martial arts, sports, and
contemporary dance. The findings apply a new working term for the peak
performative state the author associates with performance presence: vivencia, to refer
to this particular state, as well as the experience that remains engraved in the
performer’s existence as a result of an episode of extreme awareness of praxis during
the continuous present moment in performance. The examination of whirling dervish
dance and research on ritual behavior explain the process of ritualisation as an
elaboration of the neurobiological propulsion towards constructing temporal
communities. The way in which ritualising can be used to reify abstract concepts such
as vivencia is explored. By contextualising what constitutes performance training and
by analysing the methododology certain other directors and choreographers have
employed to train performers, this research distils, condenses and reconstructs
selected elements from dance training as well as from selected acting methodologies
and adapts, synthesises and applies these for the purposes of Towards Vivencia. The
last three chapters of this thesis, together with the videos that accompany it, form the
kernel of a training methodology aimed at ritualising action in performance whose
objective is to render the concept of vivencia real
