A Letter

We come into the stage with a pack of envelopes in our hands. We place them on the floor. We start to read. The paper is translated into the language that is spoken in the land where the performance is taking place. In the two languages (my own and the other) a letter is addressed to the audience.
This paper reflects upon the phenomenon of theatre. Phenomenon that speaks, creates, silences and transforms a meeting. As an offer, what I look for is a way for nearness in the process of looking and listening and the position we take in relation to our memory: our past, our history and our collective memory. ‘This is love’, as a public act, reflects upon an ethical moment in which we shouldn’t remind silent but instead make it a game of staying in silence.

Performed by: Paz Rojo&Guest
Paz’s performative intervention deals with the question of addressing the beloved, who is, but absent. So the addressed is both present in the writing and physically absent. It reminds of Laclos ‘Liaisons Dangereuses’ or Goethe’s ‘Werther’. Who is to be seduced in such a letter? The one who is reading the lines or the one who is writing them? The writer perhaps has to confirm her feelings and try to ‘express’ them knowing that discourse is incapable to do so, and exactly that rupture, the gap in-between, is the place where the emotion as the inexpressible can take place and is therefore reinforced as the other of discourse. As Paz puts it: ‘This is love’. This phrase can just point to it, with a verbal finger, THIS is love, and at the same time cannot name it. Pointing with a finger and showing it rather than discoursifying it. In such an extent, all words about it turn out to be a failure. What reminds is the rhetoric of a failure that is: ‘seduction’.
Peter Stamer, ‘At Home’, Impulstanz Festival, Vienna August ’05

Since 2004 Paz Rojo has been working on the series entitled ‘These theses’. These gestures can be presented in various venues and events. More than product oriented or participating in the industry of spectacle, These Theses function as productive machines which emerge out of different contexts and of different ways of creating a meeting. These Theses rehearse and re-labour-ate the space of performance upon which communication is challenged. Texts, letters, dialogues, postcards, presence…‘These Theses’ elaborate a ‘poetic autopsy’ of the act of performance itself. This series are deeply influenced by performance theorists and philosophers such Peggy Phelan, Lucy Irigaray and Jacques Derrida.‘This is Love’, ‘this is Hospitality’ and ’this is fidelity’ are part of this series.

This is love has been presented at:
Conference Pulses and Impulses in the Dance Community. Portugal. Oct’03
Impure Company Event. Oslo. Norway. Nov’03
Lignes de Corps. Valenciennes. FR. Dec’04
Invertebrados. Casa de América. Madrid. SP. Jan’05
La U.V.I Inesperados. La Porta. Barcelona. SP. Jun’05