The Young One
“La Loba sings over the bones she has gathered. To sing means to use the soul-voice. It means to say on the breath the truth of one’s power and one’s need, to breathe soul over the thing that is ailing or in need of restoration” (Pinkola,1992, p. 43)
Come with me next to the fire,
to listen to stories,
to witness a transformation.
As mentioned before, after the first stage of the project, the relationship between women and wolves became quite central to the research. Wondering about womanhood, I started to collect different political speeches that had inspired social changes. I became interested particularly in the ones done by young women from which I developed an exploration on how to integrate dance and spoken word. This inquiry led me to be interested in the aesthetics of the sound of the voice in relation to dance performance and became a new source of female strength.
WE ARE ONE
Six minutes, and about 20 seconds (Strong and high pitch)
I am only a child but yet, / I / know (Soft)
I am fighting for my future (Whisper)
But you don’t know (Whisper, Angry)
In my anger, I'm not blind (up) / pause / and in my fear, I'm not afraid (Up and fast tempo)
You don’t know (Direct)
I’m only a child, yet I know we are all in this together, together (Direct)
I’m thankful to my father for not clipping my wings, (Warm narration)
For showing me that a girl is not supposed to be a slave. (Low pitch)
She’s not only a mother, a sister, a wife. A housewife, a mistress, a princess. (Rhythm)
She can also be a hacker, a ray, a rock, a rockstar, a star, (Crescendo)
held / together by her own / gravity (Legato)
We have to speak clearly, no matter how uncomfortable that may be. (Direct and dry)
I feel more powerful and more contagious, courageous (Hight pitch, realisation)
And we are standing together,
to/ge/ther.
I´m happy. (happy)
In my anger, I'm not blind; and in my fear, I'm not afraid (Slow, going up and tense)
Would never -12 times- (Playing with dynamics and intentions)
I´m not happy. I´m happy -several times-
(Playing with tempo and language)
We cannot solve a crisis without treating it as a crisis. (Obvious)
But this is not the end. It's not the time to pity them, us, me, you. (Hopeful)
I have not come here to beg. I have come here to let you know that change is coming. (Up and explanatory)
I do not wait for someone else. (Hight pitch)
Not for a blue prince, I will not wait, (playful)
I jumped from the tower / and I escaped, (Slow tempo and stretch)
I took the toads out of my stomach,
I'm the beast they fell in love with, (Superior)
I tricked the wolf and I ate it, (Low pitch, sensual)
And I liked it. (Hight pitch, direct)
In that moment / I need to raise my voice (Direct)
-Silence-
ALZARE LA MIA VOCE -Italian- (Shout)
* In white what we added
THREE GENERATIONS
At the age of 10, I was going to ballet school.
At the age of 10, my mother was working at the family bakery.
At the age of 10, my grandmother was working in a potato field. (Factual and warm)
At the age of 3, I thought snowflakes were mosquitos biting my face. (Laughing)
At the age of 3, my mother was sent to a boarding school run by nuns. (Neutral)
At the age of 3, my grandmother rode in a car for the first time. (Up, Playful)
At the age of 12, I was suffering the change of school and city.
At the age of 12, my mother was suffering the death of her mother.
At the age of 12, my grandmother was suffering the second / world / war. (Legato and deep)
At the age of 5, I got my first yellow walkman. (Happy)
At the age of 5, my mother was watching the only channel broadcasted on television. (Surprised)
At the age of 5, my grandmother was listening to stories on the radio. (Dreamy)
At the age of 35, I will be finishing my second master. (Legato and thankful)
At the age of 35, my mother got divorced. (Realistic)
At the age of 35, my grandmother had already 10 children. (Heaviness, low pitch)
At the age of 21, my grandmother was afraid to walk alone in the street at night.
At the age of 21, my mother was afraid to walk alone in the street at night.
At 21, I am afraid to walk alone in the street at night. (Speed up and angry)
At the age of 14, I was hanging out, parting hard and getting drunk with friends.
At the age of 14, my mother was wearing her first miniskirt, driving eeeveryone in her village crazy. (Hight pitch, playful and happy)
At the age of 14, my grandmother was / forced to marry. (Surprised)
- The next part is said live by the dancer, so if you feel like it, you can read it aloud taking into consideration the notes-
(As yourself) At the age of 23, I’m here standing in front of you, I'm a freelancer, I know how to dance salsa and... (something about yourself)
At the age of 23, my mother had an abortion (pause) an illegal abortion.
(Crescendo and ecstatic) At the age of 23, my grandmother saw the ocean for the first time.
(Soft) At the age of 56, my great grandmother was not allowed to vote.
(Proud) At the age of 56, my mother received an award for the book she wrote.
(Suspended) At the age of 56 I… (something about your future)
(Screaming) At the age of 27, my mother had strong opinions.
(Whispering) At the age of 27, my grandmother had strong opinions.
(Regular volume and direct, make a statement!) At the age of 27, I have strong opinions!
1. Finding strength from the voice
What language and the body have in common is the voice
Thanks to the phase of reflection and evaluation, I had a very significant insight. All the elements I was experimenting with came together finally in the same purpose: this project is actually about looking for sources of female strength to present potent images. I use the word potency instead of female power after listening to an interview done to philosopher and art historian Didi-Huberman (2007) online where he distinguishes a difference between images of power and potent images. The argument is that power refers to a force that wants to overcome, it has a connotation of control, authority and status. Whereas, potency refers to a strength or capacity that does not need to be imposed on someone or something else to exist.
From this perspective, ‘my inner wolf’ was definitely a source of female strength but also, I could look at my experimentation about movement and voice as a way to create potent images.
In the residency I did in Valenciennes, France with my Colombian colleagues Bellaluz Gutiérrez, Daniela Gomez and Dalia Velandia from the 14th to the 19th of May 2018, I started to experiment with the creation of a speech, given by different voices that affected the body. I composed a collage text using words from Nobel peace prize winner Malala Yousafzai, environmental activist Severn Suzuki, advocate for gun control Emma Gonzalez and in collaboration with the dancers, we added new parts. The aim was to appropriate, in a performative way the voices of these potent young girls.
The speeches I have collected have instigated a significant social mobilisation and place young women as a source of wisdom and leadership. A clear example are the recent events regarding the climate change movement. The words of Greta Thunberg, a Swedish teen, have started a global student mobilisation called Fridays for Future that is having a strong impact on the political panorama.
One after another, veteran campaigners and grizzled scientists have described her as the best news for the climate movement in decades. She has been lauded at the UN, met the French president, Emmanuel Macron, shared a podium with the European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker and has been endorsed by the German chancellor, Angela Merkel. (Watts, 2019)
Therefore, for my latest artistic work, I added words from Thunberg and I continue to develop this exploration in collaboration with professional opera singer Karin Deddens. With her coaching, we have been exploring how to play with pitch, tempo, dynamics, and tone to create a dance feeling to the use of voice. In this manner, different voice characters have been created to play with, having some words pre-recorded and others presented live.
2. Lineage
The second artistic outcome of this project is the piece for stage WolFLoW that I created in the residency DinO in The Netherlands during the months of August and September 2018. For that process, I was reading about the different waves of feminism which made me wonder about the impact of these struggles in my own life. With dancers Giorgia Belotti, Alice Gioria and Ewa Sikorska, we did a comparison between the life experience of ourselves our mothers and our grandmothers. It was a way to recognise ourselves as part of a female lineage. Hearing their stories brought a new light to our own history. We were surprised by some significant differences regarding marriage and motherhood for example, and we also discovered that we still face some of the same problems and fears. In three generations much has changed for our gender thanks to strong women that have been fighting for our rights, but still, there is work to do.
Using this inspiration, we created a second text called The Three Generations speech which was embodied by the three dancers.
3. Singing next to the fire
A major source of inspiration for WolFloW is the tale La Loba presented by Clarissa Pinkola. In the tale, there is an old woman who collects wolves bones in the desert and then she sings next to the fire so the creature can become alive. Singing next to the fire is a metaphor of transformation. The bones, what remains and can not be destroyed, become alive again thanks to this voice. From this inspiration, besides the spoken word, we involve a song that Ewa learned from her mother, who also learned it from her own mother.
In WolFloW, the song appears also as a metaphor of transformation. Because Ewa sings, she and the other dancers can transform the big origami sculpture that is on stage. The voice gives the force needed to disassemble the structure to create a new more organic shape. After the singing, comes a scene that is completely in the dark, so the presence of the sound of the crumbling paper becomes the protagonist as a way to express the struggle. This is a clear example of how the aural element became an expressive medium of this project.
Listening beyond the words
I address to the psychoanalytic concept of listening with the third ear developed by Theodor Reik that means focusing less on what is being said than on the movement and modulations of the voice. “It is not the words spoken by the voice that are of importance, but what it tells us of the speaker. Its tone comes to be more important than what it tells. ‘Speak, in order that I may see you’, said Socrates” (Reik, 1956, p.136)Derived from this notion, the speeches are constructed in a way that the real message is given trough the intonation, change of pitch, repetition of words, etc. The coherence between the phrases is less important. The relevance comes from playing with speaking while moving to affect the body, to allow for a specific state of presence to emerge. The strong words from the young women and the stories of our mothers and our grandmothers, became a fire, a source of movement and more importantly, a source of strength.
4. Listening with the third ear
The work around voice and sound brought my attention to the act of listening, which is part of this project in different ways.
Listening with the skin
Finally, in the project, an important kinetic concept was developed: listening with the skin. In all the stages different exercises around this concept were explored such as the guardian angel, the tree and the birds, the cavern, the wonder woman and the water under the bridge. Click here to watch a video of these exercises.
Listening with the eyes
The notion of listening with the third ear became also a guideline for the research process, used as a way to make sense of the practice. I followed my intuition in the studio, shooting in many directions without having a rational explanation for everything. After, I took the time to listen with my eyes to what I did, taking a distance from the created materials to look for what they were ‘really’ expressing. Like this, many of the understandings came a posteriori and actually the research question and the aims were written in the last stage of the research process. Even more, the exercise of composing this Exposition and the design behind it is also a way of expression, maybe even more potent that these words that I write… So please, activate your third ear and listen with your eyes.
Listening to the wild
Listening with the third ear also implies to listen to what grows without being cultivated, to what is wild. That is why for a significant period, I focused on an exploration with paper which was a serendipitous discovery of the process. While I was looking to develop a dramaturgy from the relations between dance and video projection, the transformation of the paper actually became the line that the piece followed. The presence of the paper became far too important to leave it only as a projection surface. Further experimentation with the paper opened even more possibilities in this direction but I decided to leave that for further creation and come back to the concept of Extimacy, the embodiment of the wolf and the search for the woman. Click on the animated image on the left if you want to know more about this exploration.
