‘Being an individual and historical act, a performative utterance cannot be repeated. Each reproduction is a new act performed by someone. This performative act refers only to itself. (Peggy Phelan ‘UNMARKED. The politics of performance).

These are a compilation of texts, which reflect on the process of the performance ‘Basic Dance’ which was premiered in September’04 at the Gasthuistheater in Amsterdam.

I first created a solo. After that I asked the dance-maker Cristian Duarte to collaborate with me in the elaboration of a second solo, which should be, perform by Duarte. Both of us started this process through a system of ‘translation’.

This text reflects upon the problematics and ways of approaching the translation process of the first solo, which took part in Tallin, Estonia in June’04. It is also a reflection on what ‘collaboration’ meant as a meeting (unexchangeable) between ideas and people.

A map of events informing dance

In the first solo, I use as a source for its creation my own history as a dancer and dance history in itself. I perform a ‘trajectory’, like a map of events informing my movement. The aim it is not to tell a personal story, but to encounter all those signs and events that might have informed my way of moving and my understanding of dance and my reality as a dancer/performer.

The first solo is a series of ‘episodes’. They are exposed as a line in time. The movement is repetitive and in transformation. There is a beginning and an end in these events and no consequence to the next one. Some of these episodes are the concrete physical action that informed one day her dance. Some others are a response to her history or a metaphor of what the event was then.

Starting up a collaboration

With the condition of ‘translation’, I attempted to produce another access for another reality-history to process. Together with Cristian Duarte, we started our collaboration.

Our approach started by asking: How do we embody the ‘I’ differently? How do we negotiate with history? Is it more important the position by which we exist or to exist within the position itself?

With this process, I was interested on how the second solo would become different, becoming ‘an-other’ just by looking at the implications of our identity and our being as performers. The idea was to focus on ‘the being of things’, not the dancer, but ‘the becoming of the dancer’ at that moment.

A non democratic system

The ‘collaboration’ between Cristian and me hasn’t been a democratic one. The performance, as being partly the result of a translation, became also an encounter and co-existence of principles, which did not look for an integration or submission of one by the other. We were constantly dealing with what it was existing, and at the same time, we attempted to move it forward by constantly positioning ourselves in relation to the other.

We have asked to ourselves: how could I BE being (allowing) in this position I’m taking? How to encourage the performer to be and to remind other? How to encourage dance to be and to remind other? The encounter between two different performers implies that each one attends to reminding oneself, which is a paradox, since there is no such a thing as ‘you’ nor ‘me’ but nevertheless that was the contradiction we chosen to engage with the problem.

From this position, the challenge wasn’t about extrapolating into same essence (the one essence the original solo would be about) but about positioning ourselves in relation to each other and the shared solo in a critical movement for a return to ourselves, in oneself: a ‘becoming’ of oneself which did not stay in suspension in truths or essences but which provided a ‘faithfulness’ to ourselves in becoming.

In this respect, Basic Dance became a horizontal construction, which didn’t assume or integrate the original solo, it rather considered the nature and characteristics of the first solo and transformed it into the elaboration of a shared universe: Never definitive and always under construction.

Negotiating impossibility

Basic Dance attempted to do the impossible: what is supposed to be translated escaped to our own understanding: The means of dance are not language. Dance as such in fact doesn’t exist. What we do is utopian since we can say then, that there is nothing to be translated.

Nevertheless my attempt was to stage Dance, which could be the performer himself. The ‘Being’ being. The situation was about two performers working on the studio and sharing the original solo: Duarte as the translator, had to appropriate the first solo in order to misappropriate it again. In order for me, to let go of my solo, I had to redefine constantly my relationship to it.

In this dialogue, we were in search for words: how to attain the intimate in themselves and how to say it? How to communicate it, without obstructing the path to return back to the source?, how to listen and to open up horizontally?

We had to find out ‘verbs’: laying out traces, sketching perspectives, outlining horizons in order to mobilise our meeting and the meeting that theatre could be. In order to allow this to happen, the performer takes responsibility in the present in order to succeed in transforming what happens. It is a matter of ‘passing’ to another look, to another world that we do not yet know.

Translating a ‘ghost’

We could say that dance, the best dance exist through her ‘invisibility’ and not by being trapped in academic steps or codes. The question then reminds: What is there to translate when it is escaping in front of our eyes? We started to reflect on dance as something that remains nocturnal and silent. I believed that perhaps silencing what I knew of ‘her’ was useful in order to let ‘the other’ appear.

Still there was a ‘what’, which we have to keep on relating to in order to materialise the performance and the construction of the event. - We ‘are’ and we are moved between ghosts. - It was ‘a ghost’ what we constructed and made visible.

To construct a ghost: Take the movement or event, look at it. Approach it from all those things that define it as what it is and not something else. Take ‘the investment’ and name it in order to pass it from ‘being there’ to ‘be here’ and to ‘be gone’ again: between seeing and hearing, a presence unfolds that we cannot anticipate through what we know.

A ghost: the apparition of something, which is absence. Dance reminds absence. Dance belongs to the world of what we are unable to see!

The first solo could be said to be about my relationship with the phantom bodies that informed my history. The solo of Cristian, as translation, could be his relationship with the phantom body that has left the space.

-We are watched bodies, watching bodies-. Our own body, then, is the one we have and the history of the ones we’ve lost. Our body is internal and external; invisible and visible; living and dead. Noncontinuous, the body moves, like a dancer trying to partner someone she can never see or hold of.

In Cristian’s solo we can appreciate the process in which the dance-maker fills in, defers, adds, displaces and produces its own elements: A matrix and a limited selection of elements from which to speak, which could potentially remind to what is lost, but also, which could remind a possibility of something new, unexpected to appear.

Participate! Collaborative process

The meeting: performer-History/ performer-theatre/ theatre-spectator.

The process of creation is a matter of questioning in regions not yet said. The process aims to show the encounter between ideas and people and their collapse rather than its celebration. The encounter performance-spectator; the encounter between makers-performers. People. Almost everything to be re-invented, rebuilt.

The performance corresponds to the building of a bridge-at the same time practicable and mobile. In order to be sure that this happens, I am, reminds through the impact of the other upon me. And so dance as well: ‘saying dance’ cannot happen without transgressing the already learned forms.

My interest is to reveal that instead for dance to remain imprisoned in ‘her’ past, it must make herself the occasion for an unveiling of what she partially is, reopening then a future. The meeting, which is theatre demands to think of us as performers on the stage and the spectator, in which our horizon and its constitution have to be examined. -It is logic itself what has to be modified, the grammar of looking and listening. -

In his ‘translated piece of Dance’, we see Cristian ‘working’ on the stage, playing the game and being the game (surviving). We see what he is by seen his loyalty to the material and to the way he performs it, we see and reveal his ‘Being being’ and the situation it ends up. In service of being, as if giving yourself up (offering idea). He gives himself up to the structure, existing and emerging from the different positions he adopts in order to come up with his translation. The audience immediately become his accomplice…or his enemy. The spectator in this piece is active in his or her own participation of the event, since they have to enter the game, there is no escape because clearly he refers to an original (solo).

This system makes the audience to identify with or to reject and so to participate actively between the memory of the original solo and the uncovering of the production process of translation. It is as if almost, the viewer is forced to position him/herself as much as Duarte to get the translation going.

The intimate

In a way the dialogue between Cristian and me could have been the one lovers have. We have been intimate and so the performance also. Intimate not in the sense of being sweet but in the sense of building up trust and honesty.

In a way the audience is ask to do the same: To be wise about the cost of what is lost in the translation and in the translation they make of the performance when they experience it. To love it.

I ask myself: It is strange, isn’t it? How do you convince the spectator to love it? To love you? How can I expect that you, who are looking, can possibly deal with long silences, long pauses, nudity, darkness, embarrassment, and disturbance? How you can let me take you by the hand and tell you- trust me, I’m telling you something I do not quite understand yet, but I’m working on it, I’m working it out, with you.

References

‘Unmarked, the politics of performance’, Peggy Phelan.
‘In the way of Love’, Luce Irigaray
‘Seduction’, Jean Baudrillard.
‘Tales of love’, Julia Kristeva.
‘On the line’, Gilles Deleuze