F. Hola Fer. Tranquila, todo está bien -tenemos la cuerpa caliente y la cabeza tibia- I need to ask you come questions because we need to bolter, broaden, enlarge, grow, open, spread, swell, bloat, detail, diffuse, distend. Right now we have that space they so loudly ask you to claim, so let’s dance together, shall we? The dramaturgy of your work through the lens of the poetic, let’s think about that. How did you arrive at your current artistic research project ‘Ternura Radical’?
F: Gracias, compa. Trying to multiply the self feels like the right challenge now. Let’s dance. It all started when I broke my back almost five years ago. Working for a professional dance company in Mexico one day during a performance I fell; it was not a dramatic fall, rather it rendered explicit a reality: bones had broken because my body had become brittle. All the imposed pressures -- being thin and having a super virtuous body -- forced an absurdly oppressive, exploitative relationship with my corpo-reality until my backbone shattered.
When this happened I had a dream about a spider living inside of me that started pulling everything back in, swallowing it back to itself only to transform it; collecting long durational acute pain to digest it. The ideal of dance had killed the joy and the power that dance meant once for me and this was the beginning of the transformation of that. This forced pause gave me the space to think about dance again, to want to come to terms with it differently.
When I arrived at the masters program internally there was a conflict guiding the whole process, not wanting to let go of dance but also not knowing how to transform it. There was still something striking in dance that gave me the urge to embody alternative modes of being, to imagine different ways of relating to ourselves, to other people, spaces and things, that were not instrumental but imaginative. So I began working more on the values I deemed important within this practice, such as care, openness, imagination. I shifted away from finding prescriptions of what dance ‘is’, to experiment what dance can be. Ternura Radical was about paying attention to these values, as Dani d'Emilia says ‘Ternura Radical is about learning from the teachings of your shadows’.
F: Yes, the injury was rather significant, perhaps something about the title is in there as well… to be tender, to have an extreme sensation such as pain at the center of the experience. How has it been to work with movement practice and dance in this process?
F: It’s been a constant negotiation between knowing and not knowing. Attempting to use my acquired knowledge to arrive at spaces where a process of unlearning could take place. Using the movement tools I have in order to deconstruct the patterns that developed in my emotional self. It involved going from a state of extreme self-vigilance to an awareness of how my actions affect the surroundings and others. I started dedicating myself to look for better strategies to use dance as a channel to activate imagination. I relate a lot to a reading we had to do a the module in the masters (Dramaturgy through the lens of poetics) Towards a poetics of imagination by B. Cvejic. She mentions that ‘ideas produced by imagination provide conditions of experience’ and I was immediately drawn to the link between conditions and imagination. As a dancer for example, exploring movement by focusing on conditions (whether emotional, physical or situational) created a very solid ground for the research of movement. What happens if I move solely by following my breath? Can I dance in public space without anyone noticing? Can we engage in a contact duet only using our eyes? Can I dance outside my body? The types of conditions that I became interested in were the ones that directly provoked dance as I had come to learn it; codified, canonical, visible, prescriptive.
It has also been a constant conversation between form and formlessness. Before I had a relationship to form that was very disciplinary, so my first reaction was to completely let go form but, of course, that is not possible; there is always a frame, there are always conditions that determine or sway things one way or the other. Therefore my approach to dance (and to research) became more about figuring out how to go through different forms and expand them from the inside. For example, in the realms of writing I can hold a self interview, it is an imaginary practice, a form that enables certain things and exposes others, like experiencing the process of unfolding myself in order to speak to myself and others and the way these two voices relate to each other. I fear being a bit cold to you, like using you
F: Chill, being used is not always a bad thing and I don’t think you are being cold, perhaps the Virgo in you is coming out a bit more: pragmatic, to the point, and somehow still overly dramatic. Anyway, let’s continue. You created an imaginary dance company, can you explain why you decided this and how does it work?
F: I think in the beginning it was mostly a gesture. I thought: How better to contest an institution than creating an imaginary one? But in the process of creating it I had to decide how it would operate and function, it was necessary to make very concrete decisions. For example there would be no auditioning process, anyone who wanted could become a member, it was not even important if I knew about it or not. The core of it was a score system that would give premises for dancing: a set of three words, this system would generate an instruction for actions.The choice of words was intended to provoke the usual way we relate with our surroundings. Another thing I thought about while playing with the idea of an imaginary dance company was collectivity. Working as a dancer taught me that work is always collaborative but, how is a collective formed and defined? How do we rehearse if we don’t know each other? At the beginning of my masters I tried to establish spaces for collaboration: collective research groups and co-creative processes which gave me a lot of insight on roles and dynamics of collaboration. Then I realized that for my final experiment I wanted to try an expanded vision of collectivity so I inaugurated “La Compañía de la Ternura Radical”. After the invitation and the scores were sent the responses were amazing, friends from all over were sending me little videos and audios or notes as responses to the scores!
For the last experiment my closest collaborator Anna Riley Shepard and I did an installation and performed our friendship in the attic of my house, we opened access through virtual space. The event lasted almost two days and audience was mostly formed by friends and family, some of which were members of this dance company. Some of the score documents were projected on the walls and Anna and I danced together with this company. Again a gesture for imagination: audience came and left, having us at their background, we also came and left, we played, we worked, we laughed, we danced. My mom called me to ask when the performance would start, I loved that.
Today, with the pandemic, raising questions about collectivity and community is really important. How to be together when we cannot be in the same place? How to care beyond ourselves?
F: Friends are important. Do you think the project has a potential for responding to the crisis we are living now?
This is a hard question that I am not prepared to answer. I thought a self interview was so I could allow myself to answer the questions I know how to answer… I have given a lot of thought about the relevance of any artistic project now, not only with a global pandemic but also the speed in which open spaces of collaboration and shared practices in the virtual world are becoming commodified. I know this is how capitalism works and opposing it is taking a binary stand which in the end is incorporated, just think of all the products with El Che’s photo! There is no point in opposing it. But maybe resisting is a different matter: a constant running towards utopia being chased by the ghosts of monopolies, a staying on the run.
TERNURA RADICAL MANIFESTO:
To become agile in order to run through unstable territories.
To dodge empty promises of happiness disguised by products.
To become attentive to real beauty like growth and rain and a distant horizon.
To become strong and tender.
To yield softly in the encounter with the other.
To have a porosity in our affection, a leaking of our imagination.
Anna and I started trying to ‘train surprise’. Because of her background in Neuroscience and mine in History we are really aware of how narratives of the world develop in patterns and assumptions. Human beings want to know what things are, apprehend, contain, and reproduce knowledge. But knowledge is always a process in formation there is a soma-aesthetic process in/forming our image of ‘self’ and ‘other’ constantly. We wanted to make spaces where to engage with these patterns and try to re-imagine them from a playful and physical perspective. To use our soma (Shusterman, 2008) (as the space where in relation to other things singular experience is formed) to enable meaningful encounters.
F: To leak
To drip
To open
To flow
To expose
Do you think dance practice can then be used to change the world into a better place?
F: I don’t think dance is instrumental in this sense but I do think it can evoke spaces where to rethink our ways of being. I find a strong connection between ethics and choreographic thinking. In a conference about expanded choreography Maarten Spanberg said that choreography is ‘engaging in a vibrant process of articulation’ and the choice of words is telling. Choreography– in its expanded sense– can become a framework of analysis to understand how things move and relate, the poetics of forms. It is interesting to notice how choreography has surpassed dance and became a field of research in itself; ‘is gaining momentum on a political level as it is placed in the middle of a society to a large degree organized around movement, subjectivity and immaterial exchange.’ (Spanberg, 2012) There is a close link between choreography and ethics as thought by Spinoza or later by Deleuze; they speak of active enjoyment as a central premise of ethical behaviour. What this active enjoyment means is not an individualistic approach to self-enjoyment, but rather that we can have actions that activate the enabling potentials latent in the world. A clear and interesting example to think from choreography is sustainable farming, with rotating crops and promoting biodiversity; attending to growth in relation to environmental conditions, to our needs as animals to feed and, the different strategies we can have for negotiating between forms of life. It's a bit stretched but there is also a parallel between that and dancing, attending to shifts in conditions, negotiation of forms, processual…
F: Okay now you introduce Deleuze, which is such an artsy trope to do these days, ugh… Also like why would you compare dance to farming? In any case I am a bit bored of this intense vocabulary and I just remembered that I am a voice inside your head, and that this is an imaginary space, so don’t you think we can do something more interesting with it?
F: Sure, what do you have in mind?
F: Well if you unfolded so that ‘we’ could co-exist on the same page, I wonder if we could expand this transformation of the interview even more? We could play with your scores which is what you seem to do every time you are blocked and need a prompt to move. Let’s see..
F: Ah, this is easy! — Tree — there!
F: Hmm... you make me wonder if words have a similar process of metamorphosis than a body... Similarly to you, I could ‘pose’ as a tree, call myself a tree and BAM! I quickly-embody-tree but I wonder if for a tree time feels different, so maybe quickly for a tree is rather slow for a human body. Are my molecules transforming, morphing into a tree? How does that feel?
F: I speak as an imaginary projection in the form of words but we meet in poetry… Poetics, both, in the realm of written language and in the realm of performativity, is a form of encounter, of knowing, a form that –different from the statism of grammar– reveals and evokes possibilities. Instead of responding to the question of what a thing is, poetic language focuses on the workings of its structure. The poiesis, creative aspect of poetics, marks the way in which form can be identified, utilized and understood. For Roland Barthes, for example, “poetics is a hypothetical descriptive model that allows the analysis of how (literary) works are constructed.” (Allsop, 2015) So I wonder in this poetic encounter what else could speak here besides us?
I: I can and I have to say the way you have abused my form is ridiculous.
We interviews are well respected in the body of literature as credible sources of information,
we bring a structure that helps two different visions enter a dialogue.
I feel uncomfortable now,
like I don’t know what I’m supposed to be now.
F: Sorry, we were playing with form
F: It’s also okay not to know what we are supposed to be.
*Text written in the context of the Master Theatre Practices, ArtEZ, for the module Dramaturgy through the lens of poetics.
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