Fer González Morales

 POLITICS OF COLLABORATION

Dance is always collaborative, anyone who has ever been involved in any type of dance practice can tell you this, but as my research developed I wanted to delve deeper into the realms of collaboration, the politics behind it. How to actually work together with someone else? What would be the kind of roles and relationships that would unfold if we explicitly worked having collaboration as our first intention? During the years of the masters, I participated in different projects with an intention to discover this: I became a research assistant, a facilitator, a co-worker, a dancer, a teacher, a co-conspirator. I became curious to understand the differences of each role and how to move the expectations of each role within the practice, not only to deny the expectations but to probe the limits of each role, its responsibilities and the potential. Of all those projects three were instrumental for my research: The Tough Titties Revolution, a movement research collective I was lucky to become a part of; +31/20 Dance Collective, for whom I facilitated a choreographic process, and my ongoing collaboration with Anna Riley-Shepard.

What became evident by directing my research from a collaborative perspective is how strong the figure of ‘the author’ still is in the dance community. It is common to refer to a work by a choreographer’s name, not considering the authorship of other participants —such as dancers or light technicians— who in many cases bring the work into its final shape. Chrysa Parkingson has a notion she calles ‘experiencial authorship’ that contests the idea of a single author in the form of a choreographer. She claims that by experiencing a dance piece, a dancer holds their own authorial agency that is not isolated from the context or the other participants but rather is informed by them and co-shaped by the complete interpretative context of an art piece.

Within the practice of collaboration, my main focus was to understand and enable my role in each power structure not to impose my point of view but to help create and hold a space where different opinions would be heard and acknowledged as valid. With Tough Titties Revolution, we developed a multi-voiced way of working: each time we met in the intimacy of a studio we played it by ear: maybe someone would come up with an idea or a question and others would follow, expand or problematize. Building trust became indispensable for our way of working: ad my amazing tutor Joao da Silva reflects in his book ‘Risk-Taking and Large-Group Dance (Improvisation)’, there can be no risk-taking without trust. With +31/20 Dance Collective, it was a very different structure; I was asked to be the ‘choreographer’ of a piece for an amazing group of dancers. The group had been working with other choreographers who followed a very traditional approach of choreographing a dance piece; namely giving them specific movement sequences and organizing them however they saw fit. As a dancer, I know this way of working tends to be quite limiting and so I was more interested in problematizing this type of relationship. The risks were greater: not having a ‘final outcome’ to present at the end of our process, losing their trust because I was not telling them what to do and how to do it, lose credibility amongst my peers. The sessions with this group were incredibly rich for my research because not only were they super on board with the type of process I was suggesting but they were also actively participating in the conversation about the politics of our work. Our ‘final outcome’ was an Open-Form Composition that explored improvisation, repetition, transformation and agency within relationships as its main topic. Finally, the collaboration I have with Anna Riley has been of vital importance to the research for the many ways in which her perspective has nurtured mine and how we’ve managed to pursue and continue our research bout inside and outside of a studio. Her company turned the research to where it mattered; the place where the personal meets the political.

The final gesture of this area of research was the inauguration of a dance company “La Compañia de la Ternura Radical.” As I became more and more interested in removing prescriptions from dance, it became apparent that I needed to develop a type of work that was both systematic and open. Following the tradition in dance improvisation to use scores as prompts for a movement I explored the idea of the scores. I inaugurated the dance company with the sole purpose of enkindling a poetic questioning of the meaning of companionship and belonging. How does a group exist without even probably knowing about each other? How do we rehearse without meeting? I used the frame of a dance company because of the direct reference to a clear hierarchy.

In our company, there are no auditions, no prescriptions only a frame from where to play and explore together/in distance what can dance be for us.

(more reflections to come on this topic)