JORGE LEVILeviarte · Dancer · Choreographer · Filmmaker

Career

Poet in Love

By Jorge Levi

My name is POET IN LOVE.

And it is not just a name; it is a condition of existence. I introduce myself this way because I never found a word more fitting to describe the strange adventure of being alive. I am a poet because I search for meaning where others see only events. I am in love because I understood, too early or too late, that to exist without passion is merely to cross time without truly inhabiting it.

I walk between questions that do not wish for an answer and answers that never satisfy the question. I dwell on the border between dream and consciousness, between what I was, what I wish to be and what I will never manage to understand in myself.

I write because silence, at times, weighs more than the universe. I love because finitude has made every encounter sacred. I think because doubt is the only safe homeland of the spirit. And I exist, in spite of everything, like someone contemplating the infinite through the small window of a human heart.

If I am asked who I am, I offer no biographies and no titles. I say only: I am a man who turned restlessness into language and language into shelter. I am someone who seeks, in every verse, to reconcile himself with the mystery of being born, loving, losing and dying.

My name is POET IN LOVE because I believe that passion is the most courageous form of philosophy and that poetry is the most beautiful attempt to dialogue with the absurdity of existence.

And while there is a question without an answer, a love without measure or a star not yet contemplated, I will go on introducing myself in the same way:

I am a POET IN LOVE.

And this is, at once, my identity, my doubt and my eternity.

Jorge Levi (Porto, 1955) is a dancer, choreographer and filmmaker, with a Master of Fine Arts in Dance from Smith College, in the United States. In 1980 he created, with Isabel Barros and Manuela Barros, the embryo of Balleteatro in Porto, legally constituted on 11 February 1983. Between 1982 and 2005 he created more than thirty choreographies and, with Balleteatro, performed in Portugal, Spain, Italy, the United Kingdom, Brazil and the United States, while also working for television. Later, in Spain, he turned to film and art video. He writes, paints and composes music.

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