ESPELHO MEU: Assumptions and contextualization
Espelho meu, - and other performances such as Quartas paredes (Pereira, Andrikopoulos, Marques, 2015) or Merce(y) (Pereira, 2016) – is a performance that allows us to anticipate, beyond a set of arrival points, a great potential for future exploration where these points of arrival also function as new points of departure.
It has a particular focus on the exploration of the improvisation as a tool of greater creative freedom, referring us to what seems to be one of the possible and most interesting ways to contribute for the continuous development of a performative language. In this perspective, Derek Bailey (1992) assumes that he could not imagine valid contributions to improvisation that were not based on practice and in a personalized view of an artist.
Thus, we understand fundamental this dichotomy between researcher/performer or performer/researcher, in the effectiveness of the experiment.
It is an eminently phenomenological approach that penetrates, looking for aesthetic and artistic comfort, in a more in-depth study that helps to justify, if this is considered necessary, the search for the construction of a new contemporary performative gesture. A gesture that appears and then fades away as an object in permanent becoming, in a metamorphosis movement, in a specific time, space and context.
Espelho meu is a suspension tattooed in the time that receives it, fruit of the artistic work developed within the scope of a permanent individual and collective investigation that unfolds in reflection and practice. We think it is relevant that the experiential side of the performer can also be shared in a written output. This is the answer to the challenge of putting into words what is born of a gesture, a non-linear thought that acquires visibility through a body and a voice as devices (Pereira, 2016).
These words are like another embodiment of the intangible. Thus, we share parts of the process of constructing objects that have reached their visible side by way of an apparition, "an appearance," as Susanne Langer (1976) would say.
This appearance, this "dynamic image" - to use another concept coined by Langer (1976) that, read by Deleuze and Gil (2001) is embodied in the "plane of immanence" -, is not only a set of physicalities that unfold before us.
There are virtual entities that, although they do not have a physical nature similar to ordinary objects, are real and perceptible.
Virtual, precisely because they exist only for perception. Real, when perceived.
Rancière tells us about this energy that escapes the physical nature of things, but touches a spectator who emancipates himself and accesses, individually, the unveiling of externalization that is manifested.
We seek to make our body and our voice, the materials of performance, as the vehicle of this energy that goes beyond the muscles and physical limits of our body.
From this encounter, between the physical movement and the perceptive reading of immanence, results the performance that impacts the audience.
As an assumption for our artistic practice we believe that the greater the possibility of supra-physical reading of the performance, the greater the potential for fruition of the artistic object presented.
Espelho meu is another small step towards the consolidation of a space of artistic practice that gives opportunity to multiple and diverse artistic manifestations treating them correctly in a regime of democracy of experiences and accordingly to a qualitative research methodology, within a contextual framework.
It is our way of finding, in line with Hannula (2009), a "plurality of ways and means of being-in-the-world, of reflecting and producing versions of the world" (p.31), a way of inscribing in our body, in our voice, in our ears, in our eyes, in our thought, singular versions of the world.
It will then be up to the other - the audience, the listener, the receiver - to decide what to choose in each moment, nothing restraining him from accepting, or not, the various proposals shattered in the various artistic concretions.
Rancière (2009) goes further by stating that “the spectator must be roused from the stupefaction of spectators enthralled by appearances and won over by the empathy that makes them identify with the characters on the stage.” (p. 4)
In Espelho meu it was decided to develop work in the experimental field of performance, breaking conventions, not by his denial at all, but by the need to confront the acquired models, as frames of artistic reference that nevertheless serve as a basis for their own unfolding.
The acquired technical and aesthetic models unfold themselves in order to confront each other.
The voice and the body unfold and gain a character of otherness.
The other voice (Pereira, 2016), which serves as mediator, in permanent interaction with the body, of the intangible of thought.
A voice that is close to the primordial root of expiration, close to an unfiltered authenticity, close to the authentic self.
A proximity that induces a greater depth of perception, a greater number of layers of understanding for those receiving the performance or the performative resonance.
In a foundational multidisciplinary perspective, we take as an example, among others, the dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham whose new choreographic language was born simultaneously from the "critique of previous [conventional] languages and a virgin soil" (Gil, 2001, 39).
There is, therefore, the will to concretize, in this performance, an “unusual spectacle, a mystery whose meaning he [the public] must seek out.” (Rancière, 2009, p. 4)
It is expected that this type of new performances may compel the spectator to “exchange the position of passive spectator for that of scientific investigator or experimenter, who observes phenomena and searches for their causes. [...] In this way, he will be led to hone his own sense of the evaluation of reasons, of their discussion and of the choice that arrives at a decision.” (Rancière, 2009, p. 4)
We deeply agree with Rancière in the way he sees the role of the contemporary artist. We believe in an artist who does not intend to moralize. An artist who gives himself intensely and genuinely to the action, sharing the moment with the other that is part of the process by its fundamental role, of individual reading of the events.
One search, in the performance, the construction of a moment other, a between, in the mediation performer-spectator.
We believe that it is through the creation of new performances that we can foster the development of a new language, with more or less universality. Cláudia Marisa Oliveira (2016) states that in dance (from where we can certainly extrapolate), these new creations were the main reason that made the dance reach an interesting degree of aesthetic contemporaneity.
What does it mean to express one’s idea of some inward or “subjective” process?
It means to make an outward image of this inward process, for oneself and others to see; that is, to give the subjective events an objective symbol.
(Langer, 1976, p. 80)
[...] artists do not wish to instruct the spectator. Today, they deny using the stage to dictate a lesson or convey a message. They simply wish to produce a form of consciousness, an intensity of feeling, an energy for action.
(Rancière, 2009, p. 14)
The appearance of new creations caused the dance to evolve. It was not the side of the interpreter. [...] [as an example] Merce Cunningham creates a school, creates a technique. He presents a new artistic proposal and the interpreter will find his way in.
(Oliveira cited in Pereira, 2016, p. 248)
Improvisation is something you must experience. We must do it! It's not just theorizing. And nothing is static. Everything is connected.
(Ninh, 2015, cited in Pereira, 2016, p. 289)
Theatre is the place where an action is taken to its conclusion by bodies in motion in front of living bodies that are to be mobilized. The latter might have relinquished their power. But this power is revived, reactivated in the performance of the former, in the intelligence which constructs that performance, in the energy it generates. (Rancière, 2009, p. 3)
[The performance] It is not the transmission of the artist’s knowledge or inspiration to the spectator. It is the third thing that is owned by no one, whose meaning is owned by no one, but which subsists between them excluding any uniform transmission, any identity of cause and effect.
(Rancière, 2009, p. 15)
