This is a written reflection on my work as an artist before and during my four years of study at the School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam.
Since I started working on this paper while in the process for my latest project, From X to Z and back through Y, one thing influenced the other.
I can’t help. After all, my intention as a contemporary artist is to let it all be connected in this life.
Good intentions do lead to hell… sometimes.
Dissertation Fourth Year 2009 Gabriel Brito Nunes
From X to Z and back through Y. I came from X and have arrived at Z. I look back at the way and consider the Y.
Z is the audience that I imagine on the back of my head
Z is a friend who helps me see the thread that connects all the fractures of my life
Z is God
Z is my enemy
Z is the author of that book I’m currently reading
Z is my Yoga Guru teacher roommate with whom I practice every morning
Z is Aveline Kushi and her macrobiotic recipes, which help me to keep in balance
Z is Ellen Knops and her light design
Z is a teacher
Z is the theater and all its living ghosts
Z is dance history
Z is sometimes my body, sometimes my soul
Z is the 0 and the 1 of my computer system
Z is my feminine anima side
Z is my ex-current-only-one-love-of-my-life
Z is Madonna
Z is my alter ego
“I wake up and call B.
B is anybody who helps me kill time.
B is anybody and I’m nobody. B and I.
I need B because I can’t be alone. Except when I sleep. Then I can’t be with anybody.
I wake up and call B.
‘Hello.’ ”
From A to B And Back Again, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol
X I have never called my voice mail. I deactivated that service from my cell phone.
I wake up and call Z.
‘Hello.’
‘X? Wait and I’ll turn off the TV. And pee. I’m going through this new detox diet which makes me pee every fifteen minutes.’
I waited for Z to pee.
‘Go on,’ she said finally. ‘I just woke up. My mouth is dry.’
‘Z, were you already watching TV this early in the morning?’
‘No, honey, I actually fell asleep on the sofa while watching Ab Fab last night. They showed this great episode when Eddy has taken up Yoga and she says something like: “Soon I’ll be bendy like Madonna, darling. Then I’ll be able to kiss my own ass from both directions.” ’
‘Oh, darling, TV is no good for your brains. Jean Baudrillard once said: “Television knows no night. It is perpetual day. TV embodies our fear of the dark, of night, of the other side of things.” ’
‘Repeat that and I’ll have to go to the toilet again. But this time not to pee.’
‘Talking about fear, I woke up this morning and was overtaken by this fear that I’ll never be able to write down my dissertation for school. And I don’t even feel like I can call it a writer’s block because I’m not, you know, a writer.’
‘Oh, X, that’s nonsense. A lot of people appreciate the way you write. I loved how you came up with your blog while you were in your internship period in Indonesia. I adored the way you used the comic style in which you wrote about your research on gender and how it worked its way into how you composed the text for your last piece ‘The Transanima Project’. It was just so queer and fun and fitted the performance so well.’
‘Yeah… Maybe I just need to find the right style, a frame. You know how much I believe the form you chose to deliver the art work influences the way the content is viewed by the audience.’
‘Why don’t you just search for a particular style in one of your books that take over most of your room? I’m sure you’ll find something you identify with.’
‘But that just wouldn’t be very original.’
‘Please, X, get over that phantom they call originality. Nothing is original. And since you’re in a quotation mood this morning, here comes one from W. R. Inge: “Originality is undetected plagiarism.” ’
‘Sure. Tell my teachers that one.’
‘Oh, com’on, X. Are you in your room?’
‘Yeah’
‘Look around yourself. Tell me what lays on your nightstand. What have you been reading lately?’
‘OK… The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa – too depressive; The Annotated Alice – maybe but I’m already using that as inspiration for my next piece ‘The LSD Project – Loose Sense Dance’; The Oxford English Minidictionary; Love Speaks Its Name, Gay and Lesbian Love Poems – too queer and poetic; Rimbaud, Poésies – too dark and revolutionary; Allen Ginsberg, Illuminated Poems – too U.S.A for Europeans; Duchamp & Cie – the last thing I need now is an encouragement towards laziness; Antonin Artaud, Œuvres Complètes – I barely get 10% of what he’s trying to tell; From A to B and Back Again, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol – … of course! Honey, I gotta go. You just gave me a great idea.’
‘Wait…’
‘pip-pip-pip-pip-pip-pip…’
X “Fear is worst before the fact”
I judge everything I do. From the moment I wake up and scan my body for any unnecessary tension that might have gathered due to uncomfortable sleeping positions until the last second of the awaken state when I look for the best possible position to avoid that same tension. Sometimes I believe I judge even while dreaming. I judge because I make decisions. The process of decision-making requires a considered evaluation of evidence. After approximately 10980 nights of my life I have become familiar with my sleeping patterns. The problem arises when judgment flourishes before the seed is planted. In other words, when the only possible evidence is an illusion: Fear.
As a contemporary artist in the performance field I deal with my body as an instrument of creation. Physical sensory stimulation plays an important role in my work. The senses are the most tangible mechanisms for relationships. Illusions are distortions of the senses. The senses reveal how the brain normally organizes and interprets sensory stimulus. Illusions emerge in my mind whenever I am confronted with something new. A feeling of fear usually follows facing anything new. That fear is an inherent aspect of the human condition.
As a contemporary artist, I believe I must be constantly challenged by new encounters, which turns fear into a regular element of my life. But fear tends to freeze development. Fear can put a stop to the movement of creation. Therefore, overcoming fear has become an essential part of my everyday life and artistic-work. I fear and handle my fears from the moment I wake up till the moment I close my eyes before falling asleep. Sometimes, I even fear while dreaming.
Y-The SNDO
The Philip Morris Manifesto
Philip Morris is the spectacle, the spectacular.
Philip Morris is a confirmation of the performance as a performative act.
Philip Morris is a performance, thus fake.
Philip Morris is a negation of truth on stage.
Philip Morris is pure honesty that relies on theatrical elements.
Philip Morris is a display of all but nothing unnecessary for the action.
Philip Morris is placed between the proscenium and the backdrop.
Philip Morris is drama and dance put into a rectangular ideal frame.
Philip Morris is a celebration of the Theatre as a gift to an audience.
Philip Morris is love and hate towards the audience.
Philip Morris is as honest and real as the audience’s imagination or lack of it.
Philip Morris is a live performance and can never be reenacted.
Philip Morris is theater’s intimate naturalism.
Philip Morris is larger-than-life.
Philip Morris is realistic as far as reality can be acted.
Philip Morris is convincing like painted-cloth-and-wings scenery.
Philip Morris is the most searching, rewarding, enchanting dramatic experience.
Once I arrived in Amsterdam for my studies at the SNDO, I was struck by the indiscriminate use of the term ‘concept’. How misunderstood the definition of Conceptual Art seemed to be. Apart from the fact that those terms have been used to denote a variety of contemporary practices far removed from the aims and formal properties it was originally intended to define, particularly disconcerting was the fact that those artists and students who called themselves conceptual were particularly permeated with their egos. After all, so I thought at that time, conceptual art was related to Sol LeWitt’s definition:
“In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.”
I believe the confusion comes from the demand of a constant line of thought and planning from the artist by the cultural machine and especially by educational institutions. However, I thought that The Stuckist group had already taken care of “The Death of Conceptual Art” by placing a coffin outside the White Cube gallery in 2002. At times, while making my way in the organization of the SNDO, it seemed to me that, first, I was required to stipulate a theme I intended to work with, then, to never deviate from what could be easily associated to it. Although decision-making does demand a certain amount of organization and structure of work, I have never been interested in restricting the potential of what an idea or desire, or planning, might lead to. I still want to be able to permit and choose which sort of direction of development my artistic work might take.
It was with the idea of development in mind, a maximum potential of it, that I decided, after some experimentation, to distance myself from that estranged perception of concept. Fear I had and still have especially when justification after justification has at times become an insistence. Fortunately, the program that I followed at the SNDO, not only provided me with varied kinds of tools, but also allowed me to build up my own way of framing my work as an artist in the way I comprehend as the most suitable means for its expression. I would not have carried out the program of the SNDO if I didn’t believe and experienced it triggered what I consider, as SNDO teacher Jeanine Durning has recently articulated to me, to be one of the most important motive for art making: the existence of an essential conflict.
XZSNDO=‘Fuga’
When I asked Susan Rethorst to give advice during the process of the project for a piece of my third year at the SNDO, ‘Fuga’, I had proposed myself specific visions which I intended to execute on stage. It is very clear to me now that, by having Susan as a mentor, I was actually looking for support in order to proceed in the other direction. After all, the reason why I asked Susan to come in the process was that her ideas on art-making had triggered me to formulate a way of working that diverged from the idea of ‘concept’ that seemed to permeate the corridors of the school. In fact Susan’s ideas diverged from that proposal I had so craftily envisioned.
Susan Rethorst is interested in exploring “dance that does/effects/says what cannot be done/effected/said in another form, and what this implies in the day to day work of the choreographer.” She proposes questioning how we can “use the communicative power of movement to its fullest” and how to “approach sequencing not as order, but as alchemy.” She suggests one to explore working with unknowing, perceiving and taking cues from what you are making while you are making it. Investigate ways to work with patience, humor, spontaneity and rigor, and address how to keep engaged.”
Though I struggled through some points due to the necessity of constant reengagement, the process for that piece was permeated with an exciting spirit of adventure. Not a blinding aspect but, on the contrary, a fierce demand for awareness of every sense – including the mind – and self-trust. I believe in the strength of Susan Rethorst’s approach towards the creative process specifically because of its playful aspect. And I like to link the idea of ‘playful’ art to how theater pieces are sometimes denoted – ‘play’.
For ‘Fuga’, while looking for the best manner to convey my ideas on the potential of movement in composition connected to the attempt of an escape from meaning and content, I realized nothing would suit the space better then an image derived from mathematical formulas; something that could and would have to adapt to the different possible stages where the performance would be enacted, something that could express and picture the notion of continuity and something that would also link up the physical space of the theater building with that of the movement of constant creation outside the theater.
After talks with a mathematician and thinker friend of mine, Mark Swaen, I decided to experiment with the golden ratio and its derivate – the golden spiral. Mathematics always fascinated me for its use of language, its clear definitions of Space and propositions of understanding of Time as well as its suggestions of different sorts of dimensions. Found in nature, common to many cultures, symbol of creation, the geometry of the spiral fit and inspired the structures and scores proposed for the creation of ‘Fuga’. It provided the movement composition with incessant conception while breaking out from the mark of meaning and yet linking the two performers with themselves and the audience. Also, the golden proportion is pleasant to the eye and, in the case of ‘Fuga’, triggered the public to accept the impossibility of sticking to a meaning for too long or labeling what was taking place on stage. The use of the golden cut was an extreme way of demystifying while emphasizing, through logic and science, the process of sensual connection that originates from the coming together of different beings under a common ground: space. It was a provisional solution to the quest of that something which is familiar and yet taken for granted, something capable of expressing life in its strongest aspect of non-attachment.
Here is how ‘Fuga’ was described for the press for Bilbao’s 2007 ACT Theater Festival:
Fuga attempts an escape from concept
Fuga escapes ease interpretation.
Fuga wonders without ever arriving somewhere.
Fuga is built upon the symbol of the spiral, our most profound image for the movement of Time.
Fuga has a Will of its own “which moves great and deliberate, unhasting, unresting, through whatever cycles, towards a greater and greater informing of its own figures with its own infinite reality”.
X – Letting go or not
In my letter of motivation to the SNDO, I affirmed that my desire was to deepen the research of my own movement vocabulary as a tool for the creative process. Once the curriculum started I recognized we were ten people from various countries with different backgrounds. The amount of education in dance and theater varied immensely among us. Nonetheless we were sure of our shared desire for adding to the development of dance. Appropriation of certain dance practices cannot happen immediately. Practice itself is required. Therefore, I felt lucky to have been able to experience some physical practices prior to my arrival at the SNDO. Even if I had decided to no longer be influenced by some of them, they certainly belonged to my luggage. Musician Will Gregory of the British group “Goldfrapp” once said while commenting on their successful debut album:
“There are things that you are into that you leave out. They have an influence by their absence… It influences by default by the fact that it’s missing.”
It is rewarding to realize how the body knowledge I’ve acquired through my practices supports my work in performance, choreography and directing. It allows me to have an availability that could be translated into a presence in space. On the other hand, I have come to the conclusion that each creative process requires and defines its own method for approaching the body as a tool equally to how it dictates a specific way to serve oneself in the mechanisms of Theater. When every aspect of the body is effectively connected there is an energetic movement, there is life and there is expression. Creation depends on that basis of confidence when the need to affirm a statement in your work triggers the artist to run away from something. Running away doesn’t always take place as a consequence of fear; it can sometimes mean exactly the opposite.
There is one method that I can pinpoint as a constant in my work as a choreographer and one that I have retained throughout my education at the SNDO; a practice that enables me to let go of all practices – Klein Technique™. Letting go of practices tunes the body – and the mindset – in order to make it available for the influences that the artist has chosen to allow in his creative process, or the influences that are demanded by a certain vision of work. Klein Technique is known as the exponent of what became tagged as release technique. “The purpose of Klein Technique™ is education, not on the superficial level of mimicking form, but on a profoundly deep level of understanding the full use of the body as an integral whole to maximize full function of each individuals unique movement potential.” I was fortunate to have been able to study with Susan Klein herself and choreographer/teacher/performer Barbara Mahler. I came in contact with their work during my dance studies in New York in the years 2001 and 2002 and can affirm that no other system has influenced my work as Klein Technique has. Klein Technique has opened up my body to a multiple of possible ways to relate certain visions or the primary idea that launches a creative process for compositions. It helps me to remain open to new possibilities while in the process of making work. I use Klein Technique exercises in order to establish a relationship with the performers. It enables me to build a common vocabulary. Because of its pliable characteristic, Klein Technique allows for and triggers a constant questioning of pre-established or newly established relations.
One of the main reasons for the successful functionality of Klein Technique is how it is a genuine approach for relating the body to the other aspects of the human being. Performance art, due to the necessary presence of a body of a human being, implies a direct relation between bodies; the body of the performer and the body of the ‘viewer’. This relationship happens via the space in-between the most external borders of the body, the skin. But in order for that spatial relation or communication to happen a deeper connection with other aspects of what composes a human being must take place first in the body of the choreographer in order to allow ideas to be expressed and eventually in the body of the performer who carries the task to communicate. Susan T. Klein, in her article ‘Dancing From The Spirit’ from 1996 published in the Movement Research Journal summarizes her views of how that connection happens:
“As dancers, the body is, in a real and certain sense, the most important aspect of our being. The body is our tool, our means of expression, and our vehicle of art. However, in the greater scheme, the body is the most superficial level of our being, acting mainly as a vessel which carries the deeper levels, the mind and the spirit, out into the world. The focus of my work, Klein Technique™, is the body – teaching people how to use their bodies in a connected, coordinated and efficient way. I have taught daily classes at studio in New York City since 1975, offering a process through which the body is explored analyzed and understood. Our concern is to help people get the most out of their physical structure in order to reach the fullness of their potential as dancers, movers and human beings. We work on the level of the body, knowing full well that as dancers it is through the body that we access the deeper levels of our being.”
Klein Technique is sometimes improperly described as a technique that forces a certain aesthetic to the work of an artist. It is said that everybody that practices it ends up moving in the same way and tending towards a limited range of what inspires a creative process. Some say that the artwork becomes a study of how the mechanisms of the body function. I remember being in class at Beach Street Studio in lower Manhattan with dancers and artists from various backgrounds and different minds full with different ways of approaching art making. One episode in particular proved those statements to be wrong and confirmed the importance of Klein’s work to me: it was one of the tow-hour Saturday classes and Susan was particularly inspiring that morning. While we were hanging with our heads upside-down, Susan mentioned how this young ice-skater had won an important championship the previous evening. Even those who didn’t watch TV and the one’s who weren’t that interested on ice-skating had no way of missing that event. It was the talk of the town. The young girl hadn’t been considered a favorite for the golden medal but surprised everybody with an outstanding and magnificent performance. Susan said that the reason why she had won was that, though some of her competitors were technically stronger and more experienced, the young girl, free of the pressure of being a winner favorite, simply entered the rink with the intention of doing her best and share her joy with the audience. In other words, Susan said, she was so connected and thus able to move efficiently through space and mostly move the whole of the space with every gesture she carried out. Susan then proceeded by referring to names of great movers that had or had had the ability of ‘moving the space’ with them. Names like Fred Astaire and Martha Graham suddenly filled the studio and seemed to inspire everyone there.
I now realize that this episode gave me the consent and paved the way out of the fear of judgment to let inspiring people from different styles and choices of field simply do what they do the best – inspire my self. How confident I seemed to be weeks later saying that I had just been to a concert given by Madonna and that it felt as if I had been literally given an injection of energy. It was rewarding to come into the studio some other day and be confronted with the following quotation from Susan T. Klein: “I believe the spirit level of the body is accessed through making and understanding the deep energetic as well as structural connections of the body. It is through these connections – the transfer of energy and force at the joints of the body through the bone – that the energetic whole of the body comes alive. Energy, like spirit, is un-manifest, unseen, and beyond our tangible hold. We know it to be true, and we cannot pin it down in any one definitive way. There are no ways to define it and many ways to define it. Energy is vibration. Energy is movement. It is experienced and felt.”
Z “To be perpetually reborn is the condition of a material immortality”
With so much need for adaptation in the space of this world; with the world’s intrinsic characteristic of constant change; as the necessity of the contemporary artist to stay tuned to the transformations of the world’s nature, to catch what is at stake, to recognize the issues that matter and transform them into ideas, artistic ideas from and of creation; what is it that keeps the contemporary artist on the ground while adapting to the different spaces, perceptions and stimuli? What is the force that propels the artist to fight his fears and adjust, look for what is under metamorphose, what needs to be altered and how he/she wants to contribute to the process while allowing the flow? What is this desire that keeps him on the go? What is the nature of this desire?
David Lynch, in his book Catching The Big Fish – Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity, while describing his methods as an artist, gives the following definition of ‘ideas’: “An idea is a thought. It’s a thought that holds more than you think it does when you receive it. But in that first moment there is a spark… You fall in love with the first idea and the rest will come in time.” He proceeds with his view on desire: “Desire for an idea is like a bait. When you’re fishing, you have to have patience. You bit your hook, and then you wait. The desire is the bait that pulls those fish in – those ideas. The beautiful thing is that when you catch one fish that you love, even if it’s a little fish – a fragment of an idea – that fish will draw in another fish, and then they’ll hook onto it. Then you’re on your way. Soon there are more and more fragments, and the whole thing emerges. But it starts with desire.”
Catching The Big Fish isn’t only about Lynch’s methods. Lynch also describes, through his own experience, how the practice of meditation has immensely benefited his creativity. Lynch articulates it in a very accessible manner in the introduction: “Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful. I look for a certain kind of fish that is important to me, one that can translate to cinema. But there are all kinds of fish swimming down there. There are fish for business, fish for sports. There are fish for everything. Everything, anything that is a thing, comes up from the deepest level. Modern physics calls that level the Unified Field. The more your consciousness – your awareness – is expanded, the deeper you go toward that source, and the bigger the fish you can catch.”
When I first heard about meditation I had zero interest in it. I thought it to be a waste of time and that it only led people into a state of numbness towards the world. The practice of Yoga was what slowly leads me to that of meditation. I first approached Yoga as a means to help the body stay fit. But the ‘physical’ aspect – Asana – cannot be separated from the other ones that compose the system of Yoga. Meditation is one of them. Besides, BKS Iyengar defines Yoga as “meditation in action”. For the last years the practice of Yoga has nurtured my sanity amid my fears and the demands of dealing with them. I have lately deepened my practice of meditation. Yoga and meditation enable me to experience the flow of creative ideas. As Lynch says: “You must have clarity to create.” In his book, The Synthesis of Yoga, Sri Aurobindo proposes a “larger synthesis of the science of Yoga in order for it to enter more easily and powerfully into the reorganized life of the race which it claims to lead within into the most secret penetralia and upward to the highest altitudes of its own existence and personality.”
I believe it is this characteristic, and ability, of reorganization present in the scientific knowledge of Yoga, which is stimulated by its exponents, that establishes its value in today’s world. Yoga aids me, as a contemporary artist, to constantly restore my connection with life and that of my artistic work with life itself. Instead of alienating, Yoga, as affirmed in its Sanskrit meaning – to yoke –, sustains the coming-together of a ‘great whole’. As Aurobindo himself suggests: “The true and full object and utility of Yoga can only be accomplished when the conscious Yoga in man becomes, like the subconscious Yoga in Nature, outwardly conterminous with life itself and we can once more, looking out both on the path and achievement, say in a more perfect and luminous sense: “All life is Yoga.” ”
“It was a large room. Full of people. All kinds.
And they had all arrived at the same building
At more or less the same time
And they were all free. And they were all
Asking themselves the same question: what is behind that curtain?
You were born. And so you’re free. So happy birthday.”
Born, Never Asked by Laurie Anderson
XZ – Back to Fear
As a contemporary artist I yearn for a direct relationship to what matters in societies. I long for a connection to the human beings who walk the streets of today’s world and I also fear this because I know I will be judged. Theater implies to me the sum of the spectacle and the audience. I claim to have respect towards my audience. However, during every new creative process or at every perspective of a performance, I still find myself reconsidering what that idea of respect really means. Sometimes good intentions do lead to hell. No matter how much a maker may imagine what will go on in the heads of the audience, that feedback can only happen at the real moment of the performance. As a maker, I still have trouble in letting go of those pre-occupations. I still imagine the presence of significant others who are able to judge me. In attempting to silence those voices in the back of my head, I do not serve myself of the pretentious idea that one should have power over the audience except when it is a clear intention and supportive for the performance. I do believe in a manipulative approach from the performer towards the public as much as I agree that once the performance is taking place there is judgment from the audience. I also defend Jerôme Bel’s democratic attitude towards the relationship between the performer and the public. During his lecture-performance, “Pichet and Myself”, Bel responds to the traditional Thai dancer’s concern about whether Bel’s public never got bored of seeing something that they themselves could actually do in real life being acted out on stage in the following manner: “There’s given time and space from the part of the public. There’s a consent and a given intention for the action of the performance to communicate.” I suppose that statement could somehow resolve my fear of judgment.
Bel seems to have methodically built a more complex notion of stage presence throughout the development of his work. He challenges us to change the way we look at the stage, while submitting us to the experience of a construction of presences on the edge of what dance and theater most often supply. Tim Etchells, while commenting Bel’s 1997 work ‘Shirtology’, says that Bel succeeds in tuning the performers with the structure of the piece – “the rise and fall of breathing, the tics and gestures of faces and eyes” – in such a way that it provides us “with an openness” and “a spirit of ‘nowness’ that does not have a name.”
Etchells goes further by declaring that “it is the kind of moment that happens a great deal in late twentieth century performance – a theatrical structure that privileges the chorus rather than the soloist or star – the blank and confrontational democracy of the ‘line’, the point at which the stage looks most like the auditorium. Deployed by Jan Fabre or by Pina Bausch, by Peter Handke or The Living Theatre lines of this kind have been everything from revolutionary posturing to sculptural cigarette breaks – but in Jerome Bel’s hands the line takes on a new fragility. There’s nakedness in the performers, clothed, a presence, vulnerability and an unease. The public are uncomfortable too, not accused so much as worried, about the ethics of their gaze.”
The fear of judgment always comes back and demands, while inspiring via confrontation, a creative way of dealing with it. I believe that involving the audience in the reality of what is proposed, rather than considering the theater as a sum of two realities, that of the audience and that of the performance, diminishes the space and possibility of judgment. And every proposal asks for a specific way of making that possible. Thomas Lehmen, in Schreibstuck, creates that common reality by including the audience in the process of creation of the piece in real time since audience and performers share the knowledge of the overall structure of the performance and the more specific instructions that the performers follow on stage. In Stations, though, Lehmen doesn’t aim on creating a new common reality but will, rather, overlap that of the theater with that outside the theater. He manages that by not only using everyday life professionals but also by promoting a meeting of systems: the social system and the theater system reduced to its functionality. No matter the formula, I believe that the performance can only take place in the moment that an artistic work is presented to an audience. The audience itself is the missing element, that which sets the spectacle free from the illusion, free form the non-reality of the rehearsal and directs it into the reality of the present moment when the viewer’s free-interpretations and free-associations take place.
It was with those ideas, questions and temporary solutions in mind that during the third year of my studies at the SNDO I proposed myself an exercise of theater in the shape of a video project. It served itself of Laurie Anderson’s song “Born, Never Asked” and featured the same person both as the performer on a theater stage and on the seats of the audience. It played with game of power-relationship between the public and the performer and with the idea of imagination as that which unleashes the doors of perceptions to another world, the common world of the performance. I decided to write a manifesto – The Philip Morris Manifesto – in order to inspire and accompany the video. Looking back at it almost raises an association with conceptual art. But that must only be possible as a result of the lack of the live body of the performer. The video doesn’t leave space for a shared experience simply because there is no space shared in between two bodies – the audience’s and the performer’s – but rather eyes upon the object of projection.
X – Y – Z – The Transanima Project
‘I dance because Dance brings movement into Life. And movement enables transformation. It’s just like the idea of the term ‘let’s get moving’. And movement, of whatever sort it might be, is something that can be easily experienced and thus shared with others. It will eventually inspire transformation in the ones out there in the audience.’ That was my improvised answer to the granddaughter of renowned Indonesian artist Kartika Affandi, Ani Affandi. A dancer herself, Ani came to me with the simple and sharp question of ‘why do you dance?’ during my trip to Yogyakarta as part of my fourth year internship period for the SNDO.
That journey was part of my research on gender that culminated in a performance, which carried its project title, “The Transanima Project”. Transanima is a solo from me and intended to be performed by myself. It features me in a white zentai costume which allows for assimilation by whatever space it is found immersed in the light of the theater. Ellen Knop’s light design was built to support that vision while integrating the audience in the space that the performance proposes the audience to enter. I eventually reveal my ‘male’ body stripped from the penis – or emphasized – by the bandaging of my crotch and proceed to lead the audience through an uncommon story telling of my trip in relation to the issues connected to gender, as Kate Bornstein describes, “this thing we’re all seemingly born with” and which “is a major restraint to self-expression”. The text, the movement and the images are combined and choreographed in such a way as to propose to myself, in the company of the audience, a play in between, around and into the many genders that form my identity.
Transanima was my response to the fear of taking risks and my effort to leave behind the frame I had proposed for myself in my first years at the SNDO. The research I did during my internship period in Indonesia guided me towards a specific format and aesthetic. The implication of so much stereotypical images around gender and the intimate charge of the final performance material demanded from me a new way of relating to the audience. The ‘performing’ and the ‘creating’ of the material were intrinsically related. It was necessary to become aware of how much the theater itself would be responsible for the depersonalization of the private context. Though I had worked within different audience-performer relationships, never before had the fourth wall taken on so many different shapes and textures while creating and performing this piece. This was not only a consequence of the use of text but also due to the use of less abstract and more commonly related material proposal.
I did not intend to be provocative by embodying sexual stereotypical images dressed in bandages on stage for the Transanima Project. Still, the audience perceived those same images as provocative. I rely here on how Pinna Bausch herself once mentioned that she had never intended the vision of her early work to be taken as provocation. I guess what I still have a hard time with is witnessing provocation for provocation on stage. I don’t really want my work to take that direction. But, again, good intentions lead to hell.
When I caught the first ideas for the Transanima Project I was overtaken by a fear of inability to materialize the work. Simply because none of the projects I had worked with and neither the methods nor systems that derived from them seemed to help me to access my ideas. I had made a very clear decision from the beginning of the process not to fall into the easy art of commenting. It was my desire to live, experience and stand for every common sense or universal knowledge I had chosen to work with rather than ironically and dubiously despise it. I feared those images but I was determined not to take the easy track. Fortunately, as part of the fourth year of my studies at the SNDO, I was encouraged to go on field research in order to support my artistic visions of that which inspired me at that particular moment: gender and different and alternative ways of relating to it through performance in the world of today and yet by serving oneself of an almost anti-iconoclastic approach. I spent twelve weeks in Indonesia under the guidance of cross-gender performance artist and choreographer Didik Nini Thowok. It was particularly rewarding and inspiring to witness part of the creation process of what was Mr. Didik’s current project during my internship with his company in the second semester of 2008. The use of humor, the choice of costumes and cultural images (Noh Theater, Disney movies, Javanese Traditional Dance and Theater) could turn any performance into a display of camp elements. But there was such a conviction in Mr. Didik’s choice making that made them as important as any other theatrical element and essential to the performer-audience relation. Why should we be afraid of telling stories on stage? Although, the way Mr. Didik does it gets translated through the traditional dance styles he has come to master. There’s more than literal transliteration of stories. Why are we so afraid of using such common symbols as the ones from Disney movies? They reach so many people. Mr. Didik uses those elements as artifices of performance rather than as excuses for commenting, which I most of the time sense, comes out of avoidance of fear in many performances these days. I was also able to follow him on tour and observe how he related to various kinds of audiences. He was always able to convey a respect towards them and yet propose new ways of taking into account more than imperative social issues such as beauty, cultural differences, gender, age and sexual taboos in a society like the one of Indonesia.
During my internship in Indonesia, I had the opportunity to attend to the Indonesian Dance Festival. I thought that would give me the chance to have an idea about the contemporary dance scene in that multi-everything country. Besides, my gender research would not be complete without witnessing which place issues, such as gender itself, identity and power, hold in the work of Indonesian contemporary artists. The proposition of curator and dramaturge Tang Fu Kuen for the Festival’s program proved to be especially inspiring for what I had in mind while formulating my ideas for the Transanima Project:
“At the heart of each reading and representation of ‘modernity’ lies the issue of power. As is the task of art that matters, we are drawn into debate. The links between ritual and modernity, and between self and other, enlarge and push us beyond our habitual myths and perceptions.”
Kuen’s words helped me to articulate what I had been going through during my traditional dance classes and through following the work of Mr. Didik from so close. They expressed how I was striving to relate to the experience of merging into ‘another’ culture and into the artistic work of ‘another’ artist. And also how my ‘self’ had been affected by the many ‘cultures’ I’ve been hopping from and to. And they consequently made me question: What do I carry nowadays from the experience of moving from my birthplace at the Northeast of Brazil to the South, from NYC to France, from Brussels to Amsterdam? How much have the ‘ritual’ and ‘modernity’ of each society or community I‘ve been to have I absorbed or rejected, kept or let go of?
The program of the festival was rather varied in style. What is usually called experimental theater, or ‘art that matters’ to quote Fu Kuen, shared evenings with performances on the edge of the traditional. I wasn’t struck to see Jerôme Bel’s “Pichet and Myself” listed among other ‘western’ works since Fu Kuen was the one who had originally commissioned that piece for the Bangkok Fringe Festival. But I was nonetheless curious to witness the reaction of that particular audience to Bel’s work. After all, the aesthetics of the pieces I had seen at the festival didn’t correspond much to the denial of theatrical conventions – or its overstatement –, which we, as ‘westerns’, seem to have adjusted to. I was amazed to see most of my questions enacted and discussed on stage. Bel himself during the performance breaks down his views and ideas about the mechanisms of contemporary theater making. He affirms the need for the contemporary artist to establish research that can transport him/her away from their past elements in how they represent today’s reality. Bel’s statement about the need for research made me feel as if I was on the right track of my pursuit. After all I was literally doing what he was suggesting: researching.
Yet, his account on the ‘search for the unknown’ made me consider and fear that there was a lack of originality in me. Gender is not an original subject. As well, his suggestion of a ‘democratic approach to the audience’ triggered in me the question of how I would be able to formally relate to an audience over such an issue. The later question provoked me to research my own relationship to gender as a creative tool. How would I be able to relate to the audience on a one-to-one basis otherwise? My own way of identifying with gender would make it all original.
I then looked at Kate Bornstein’s ‘My Gender Workbook’ and her performance work and found tools to communicate to those close to me and eventually to an audience. The following quotation from Bornstein’s own field research was particularly inspiring:
“Fear? There is always fear. Anything new is frightening. The only way to get over a fear is to shut your eyes and ignore the pit in your stomach. The second time you do it the pit will be smaller and one day you will have trouble remembering that what you are doing used to be hard.” –Laura Franks, Moscow, Russia
X- Z – Desire
If it’s kept alive, often it will be validated with an idea. When you get an idea, you know you’ve received a validation.”
The ideas that I use in my work happen to come to me in my life. Where else would they come from? But it wasn’t until I decided to work with a truly personal and intimate material, especially in the form of text, that I realized how much life repeats itself on stage; how much life is reflected on stage. Sometimes the theater is seen as the universe where fear has no saying. Thus a great place to sit back and reflect on life. If risen above, I believe that to be one of the greatest gifts towards the public. For The Transanima Project, I depersonalized private material and framed it in a theatrical format. In a creative process it seems to me that the prefix ‘de’ always plays an important role as it creates conflict with their counterparts. Depersonalization, deconstruction, d (e) discovery, de-emphasize, deactivate, destroy, deduct, decompose, decadent, decant, deceit, de-acceleration, debate, decipher, decide, declare, decode.
David Lynch, in Catching The Big Fish, explains how that form of study has a place in his working method: “And then you go to work”. The idea just needs to be enough to get you started, because, for me, whatever follows is a process of action and reaction. It is a process of building and then destroying. Out of this destruction, discovering a thing and building on it. Nature plays a huge part in it. Putting difficult materials together – like baking something in sunlight, or using one material that fights another material – causes its own organic reaction. Then it’s a matter of sitting back and studying it and studying it and studying it; and suddenly you find you’re leaping up out of your chair and going in and doing the next thing. That’s action and reaction.” It is a method not always appreciated in educational or other kinds of institutions. Most of the time, there is not enough time available, not enough money. Nonetheless, I consider that to be an essential part of any truly researched creative process, one that eventually leads to true production as contrary to reproduction.
After The Transanima Project, I decided not to continue using intimate material in the next project I had then proposed myself. Partly because I thought I had had enough of handling the thin barrier of the personal and the depersonalized. I had taken David Lynch’s advice when he so clearly says that if “no fish comes”, “you’re in the wrong area” and “so maybe you reel in the hook, get the paddle, and move to another place”. “That means you leave the chair where you’re daydreaming or you move on to another thing.” “Just by changing something”, the desire had got fulfilled. I had gone fishing and the idea that bit the bait asked for another way of approaching it.
I started working on that idea, built and destroyed it, sat back when necessary, studied it and studied it and studied it and leapt up out of the chair numerous times. At the moment I thought I needed a hand in perceiving the reaction of what I had achieved till then, I brought into the process two outside eyes. Though I didn’t know Jeanine Durning, I decided to trust the advice of my director and asked her for the job. She came in, sat back, watched what was there and gave me a feedback of what she had seen. It was delightful to have a validation of my ideas in the way they had been worked out and communicated what I had had in mind in the beginning of the process. Nonetheless, there was a clear need for enhancing what sort of relation I wanted to establish with the material from that moment on and how I wished the performer to relate to it.
Later on, Robert Steijn joined the discussion and shed a new light and way of approaching the search of those relations in the process. I worked differently with Robert. We first had a talk and then he came to see it. Because of Robert’s style of work, and due to a different and closer working relationship between him and me in comparison to that I had just started with Jeanine, he opened up a relation to the work I had been avoiding. Though full of fear, I knew what I was asking for and I guess I needed it. Robert brought the work back to the root of the desire, when I had reeled the hook, collected the paddles and navigated other seas, just before I had caught the fish. What Robert Steijn did was reconnect the work to my life, and to how I relate to the world at this very moment according to the circumstances. But he also let me the space and the choice to decide how abstracted I wanted and thought this particular process needs to be.
If you’re available to it and, in my case, I tend to always enhance that accessibility to that which happens within, without and around me, life finds a way of connecting the great whole. No matter how much you might pretend it doesn’t or how much you want to call it something else or how much you want it depersonalized in you work, life finds its way into the work of an artist. As Beth Orton has so wisely put in the lyrics of one of her songs: “nature’s got it all in hand / it ain’t free / it ain’t fooled you’ll see / … / and there’s nothing to hide / and there’s nothing to save /and there’ll always be something / your countenance to give it away / not much more to say”.
Otherwise, without that connection of life to the work, that would mean the work has nothing to do, or at least not explored to its full potential, with the world and society of today. It becomes an exercise of the past or a wish of illusion for the future. The illusion is oppressed, in other words, you haven’t been able to define the system of dealing with the inherent aspect of fear and suffering of human condition. That would mean for me that an artist has no way whatsoever to relate to the depths, beyond the sensorial, of his/her audience.
X-Z to Y Commencement
The day I set myself up to go fishing in order to write this paper, I was caught up in a demanding rehearsal period with the current project I was choreographing. I made myself available for the fragment that draw in fish after fish until I experienced the whole thing emerging. The process of this writing is now part of the performance that’s been created. One has been giving feedback to the other. It is all connected.
There is something useful that arrives out of the articulation of words in a similar way as to what surfaces from movement and composition. The gap that we sometimes create between the two forms and other forms of communication now appears to me less deep and is shortened day after day, reaction upon action. That particular gap and the ways to bridge those two worlds have been a constant in my work as a choreographer. It is also very present in this project.
When life forces one to let go of something; when something is about to be accomplished and you know continuation doesn’t make much sense; when a new phase starts to come into view in front of you, gaps hollow out everywhere. Some extreme circumstances of the last years in my life in the SNDO have led me to close my eyes and jump over those cracks hoping I wouldn’t fall but reach the other end and go on. Most of the time, realizing a new gap shaping in front of you compels you to acknowledge and deal with the other gaps you disregarded. I suppose my imminent graduation from the SNDO has done that to me. Rather than an end, I see this graduation as the synonym to that word itself: commencement. How wonderful it is to appreciate how much the perspective of a new beginning can trigger. I am left with the job of gathering the deconstructed pieces of what used to make sense and is no more. I see that as my job: to choreograph.
