I would have loved to be able to present this penultimate part of the puzzle I have kept lingering on, with the proper words to accompany the images I gathered. But a new form of life has outviralled the linguistic cognition. Isolation is the easy part; our neurological paths are being corroded through this matter of unknowability, despite our futile attempts to keep business as usual virtually. It is a problem of code. There is a big black hole now where I stored my tentative connections between ideas and things, the fabric of the world as I knew, the physical and metaphoric landscapes that I inhabited. I am back to my mother’s home for an indefinite time, and all I want to do is just to get at some sense of completion, even if it is weak and fake. There are already way too many interpretations of the pandemic condition, already too many things to consume under curfew. I won’t pretend this is one of those. This is more of an attempt to retain some personal memories from before my awareness of this “event.” An event that expands in reverse, not onward and outward from its reverberations and afterimages but toward its own ever-approaching threshold. Yet, anything I might write now will inevitably be impregnated with the sovereign RNA.
I was thinking of Brazil. Not only because of Jatahy, but also while reading an article on Pina Bausch’s relationship to South America for research, as well as through four other performances I saw in 2019. I also recently saw an announcement that Crowd would tour to Brazil. These were all less than two weeks ago, while we still could plan bodies to come together.
Lia Rodrigues’ Fúria @ Kunstenfestivaldesarts. Its last 5-10 minutes was a little bit of a didactic monologue about the colonialist legacy that, for me, didn’t do more than what went down until that ending: The rhythmic chant-like music makes one imagine that it is coming right from the Amazon, which of course slaps your very colonialist imagination to your face. The dancers are sometimes shaking insanely to this rhythm, sometimes forming groups that may or may not have ethnographic source material, or sometimes breaking formation into small triangles and duos and moving across the stage in a slow parade of a nonhuman royalty.
In the same festival, I also saw Marcelo Evelin’s A Invenção da Maldade and Alice Ripoll & Suave’s Cria. Evelin’s felt like a live installation with audience in the round, where naked bodies activate a sort of ritual with wood and salt. Cria abstracts a fusion street dance from favelas, called dancinha, to bare proscenium stage. And what connects Fúria to Maldade to Cria is not their geographic coincidence. During all three, I felt the redundancy of the fact of watching dancing bodies from the auditorium or in the gallery. They shared an oscillation between ultra-presence and abandonment in the pleasure of continuous movement: a consistent but modulating mixture of rhythm, stomp, shake, chant, a critical/fake/invented “primitive” imaginary, the sense of frenzy, the nudity and skin in its sexual and nonsexual expressions, gender fluidity, the body’s glorious strength and endurance, all to discover propositions about freedom. If Brazil overdetermines these works politically/dramaturgically, it is through the question of the materiality of human and the corporeal definitions of liberty (which we now ask as a question of immunity). Instead of watching, I just wanted to join these multitudes and merge and disappear in their all too coded and self-coding motions. There is something more happening here than just “durational” or “ritualistic” or “postdramatic.” These choreographies are showing multiple vectors of how biopolitics is investigated and overturned in performance [though perhaps this is outdated already, as McKenzie Wark asks a few days ago: “Can we go back to biopolitics?”]
That moment in Fúria when all dancers are in a frenzy of touching toppling looking at each other with passion hunger outrage, I couldn’t help thinking of Gisèle’s Crowd and Mette’s to come (extended) and 7Pleasures. The juxtaposition reveals a difference one might expect from a banal comparison between these colonized vs colonizing worlds. But what Gisèle and Mette did with the bodies they collected is the most honest thing they could do. Their pieces generate very strong affects too, but it happens only by way of watching. I have to look from a distance; the image that travels and the sound vibration that hits assault my bodily security and stability, but by virtue of definitively not joining in. They too design choreography as a flow but plan carefully calculated cuts to that flow, which is eventually what one ends up appreciating and feeling more.
Between these constellations I experience a personal schism, on the one hand wanting to run with the pack and dance in the communal delirium and loving the sensual and aesthetic extravaganza it promises, and on the other hand deeply admitting how impossible, belated, unaffordable our fantasies of ecstasy are in the late-capitalist perversions.
A month later, Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca’s film-installation for the Brazilian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Swinguerra, made this dilemma even more blatant. It was the only artwork in the entire biennial that Erika and I responded to viscerally. But I had to keep looking at the projection screen, and not to the art crowd in designer sale clothes swinging the biennale catalogue as a hopeless fan, to be able to do that. I was also annoyed by my own pleasure of it, which was a result of this by now pretty systematic re-packaging of “street” dance forms for the art and fashion worlds. Although the crews that danced in this short film had a say in how they were being filmed, I still think that there is a difference with a choreographer approaching other fellow choreographers and dancers to work out ways of bastardizing and disseminating these highly virtuosic and vital motions in a new performative context than visual artists reframing them for–let’s face it–market circulation.
Can you tell the difference? I will try in the next and final chapter, if I don’t lose language entirely by then.
UPDATE: The problem of staging the ecstasy and erotics of dancing together started, for me, with Uruguayan choreographer luciana achugar’s An Epilogue for OTRO TEATRO: True Love from December 2015. Funny that I just remembered it while looking for a good long house dance set to shake myself out of depressed curfew inertia. Also to this day, her Pleasure Practice workshop is still the most physically appealing and creatively triggering movement class I have ever taken.
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