The  decline of choreography and its movement: a body's (path)way

paz

This doctoral artistic research project (Doctoral Thesis) addresses the possibility of a dance withdrawn from that neoliberal scheme according to which self-performance, entrepreneurship and the production of subjectivity rule. Taking as a starting point the dissident corporealities that have emerged in the last fifty years in Western contemporary experimental dance; the project involves aesthetic, philosophical and socio-political perspectives, carried out on choreographic, performative, textual, audiovisual, curatorial and discursive media. This documented artistic research project (Doctoral Thesis) consists of three inter-related parts: first it invites the reader to see the performance's video "ECLIPSE: MUNDO". Afterwards, the reader is invited to read the book "To Dance in the Age of No-Future" and get a context regarding the rest of the audiovisual materials located on the same website. The exposed materials are displayed as an “essay written form” understood in the Spanish or French sense of the Latin word "ensayo / répétition" and its associated meanings such as try-out, rehearsal, practice, study, preparation and experimentation. To this end, the materials show an ongoing migration of concepts, practices and tools, through analogous forms, equivalences and contrasts that invite to see this project's genealogies and continuous iterations in formats such as video, testimonies, audios, scores, tool descriptions and images. Accordingly, it is the reader who –by viewing, listening to and reading these materials– can trace the diverse kinetic, political, aesthetic, discursive and conceptual layers linked to the practices and presentation formats specific to this doctoral research project since its beginning. About this Doctoral Artistic Research Project In late capitalism dance's commitment with the future (or its lack thereof) must find alliances with potentiality and nothingness. This is not a nihilistic affirmation, but an attempt to enable an interval: a dance whose value has to be apprehended there, where it is already happening. Kafka said that "one might have a goal, but not a pathway". The pathway involves a decisive cognition such that cannot be carried out without one becoming the path itself; without defying so to speak, the relationship of the dancer with dance itself. It is not about what the dancer can do, say or communicate in respect to dance, but what dance accounts for in itself. In modern's kinetic exhaustion, the latter is possible approaching dance as a presence-in-crisis. The semantic field of the word "crisis" and its associated words, –critical judgment, decision and separation–, defines the moment when something or someone has somehow one foot outside. The moment when one realizes that it is not the world that ends, but the linguistic constructions and the reality systems that had made sense until then. This proposal tries to embody that gap. It tries to reveal the somatic, kinetic, political and aesthetic implications whereby to dance on a limit that is both inaugural and terminal. Decisive. Although “deciding” will always be not knowing what will happen. It is a dance that, although it does not seem to mean anything, it does something. The moment at which dance let's go of being a product (a goal), to become a deposition. "Deposition" is a word that includes both, an abandonment and a position. At the same time, to take on a position implies a becoming: the (path)way through which the dancer coincides with dance's conditions. The moment at which the dancer abandons any intention to communicate, to propose or to interpret dance, to carry out kinetically and perceptually the non-significant, ephemeral, ineffable and impersonal conditions that dance implies as a presence-in-crisis. In short, the coincidence “dancer : dance” implies taking into account an experience of dance freedom that is fugitive. In the theatre apparatus it involves a dancing which ―by lacking recognizable aims, signs and subjects― gives way to an aesthetic paradigm which is not be construed as a particular kind of thing (a performance, a type of dancer, a subject, or even a social or artistic process), but rather as a gap's embodied experimentation. A threshold, a curve. A parenthesis. An eclipse. A void: the encounter with something which doesn't need to be produced, because it is already happening.

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of some of the materials contained in the printed publication were already published in Spanish in the essay “Dejar de, Dejar ser” (Let go, let be), as part of the book Componer el plural: Escena, cuerpo, política, 2017 (Composing the plural: performance space, body, politics) Universidad de Salamanca: Colección Danza y Pensamiento, Número 6. There is also a shorter version that was published as a booklet accompanying the performance ECLIPSE : MUNDO, entitled “What are we talking about when we talk about dancing on a plane of destituent perception?” also published in Conversaciones, anotaciones y dramaturgia en las artes vivas: España y Uruguay, (Conversations, annotations and dramaturgy in live arts: Spain and Uruguay) Montevideo: Casa editorial HUM / Estuario editora.

The initial research behind this project began to take shape during the summer of 2010 in the framework of A piece....together? while working together with the choreographer Cristian Duarte. At that time we discovered the film Gerry and learned together with many others how gerry-ing could be practiced in countless, fun and inspiring ways.

I'm also grateful to my sister Ana Rojo, who invited me in 2011 to share the beginnings of this research with David León, Ana Sánchez, Ancor Lujan, Noelia García Baz, Marta Llorente, Fran J. Macias, Owen Clay, Nuria Anton, Miguel Buzeta and Maite Esteban. Their complicity and commitment at that early stage of my research has been of incalculable value for me.

Thanks to the testimonies and inspiring conversations of Peter Mills, Petr Ochvat, Costas Kekis, Anicka Prokopova, Amanda Piña, Mira Jo Hirtz, Júlia Abs, Clarice Lima, Daniel Fagundes, Bruno Freire, Carolina Mendoça, Leandro Berton, Rodrigo Andreolli, Júlia Rocha, Nuria Sotelo, Naiá Delion, Rodrigo Bolzano, Alexandre Magno, Eros Valério, Anabella Pareja Robinson, Layla Tafur, Claudia Delso, Úrsula Nill, Arno Bourgoin, Bárbara Foulkes, John Martín Cordero Peralta, Sara Gómez, Julia Rubies, María Hacha, Manon Siv Violette Duquesnay. I would like to thank, as well, all the participants from the laboratories who have contributed greatly to enrich the landscape of my study with their intense engagement and reflexions.

During the period of this research I have been fortunate to experience the talent and singularity of the dance practices of Diego Gil (2011), Carmelo Salazar (2013) and Norberto Llopis (2017) which have been a great source of inspiration for me.

During the previous years, but also throughout the many months in which I was involved in the writing of this text, I developed the contexts [CAMPO # 1] coreografiar la disidencia (Teatro Pradillo, Madrid 2014) and ASSIM NÃO, pero ¿cómo? (LOTE, Sao Paulo 2017) together with Nelson Avilés, Esther Blázquez, Paulina Chamorro, Bruno Levorin, Daniela Marini, Cristian Duarte, David Pérez, Tarina Quelho de Castro, Luis Alberto Moreno Zamorano and Diego Agulló. I am grateful for the sustained intellectual complicity of all these friends and colleagues, without whom this book and research would have not have been the same. This text is also the result of the continued conversation I had during the creation process of ECLIPSE:MUNDO with artists Oihana Altube, Jaime Llopis, Arantxa Martínez, Ricardo Santana, Fran MM Cabeza de Vaca, Carlos Marquerie and David Benito. Their friendship, artistic commitment, knowledge and insights have been of great significance to me and I am immensely grateful to all of them.

Over the last nine years I have also enjoyed a number of relevant opportunities to present different iterations of this research through a series of initiatives who have supported my work in Spain, such as the Festival SISMO Festival de creación in-situ,Festival Escena Contemporánea at CA2M, Naves de Matadero in Madrid. And La Porta ExFestival de danza...¿o no?, MACBA and Festival Sâlmon in Barcelona; and the Art Center La Casa Encendida in Madrid, where I had the opportunity to create the festival What can a body do?. I am immensely grateful to the organizers and hosts of these events and venues: Oscar Dasí & Ana Buitrago & Carmelo Salazar, Pablo Martínez, Pablo Caruana, Mateo Feijoo, Maral kekejian, Begoña Hernández Jiménez and Beatriz Navas Valdes. Without their complicity and care, many of the outcomes of this research would have not seen public light. I have also been invited to present my work in a number of lectures in contexts that have contributed to define and develop my inquiry, amongst others: Scores Nº 5: Chaos at Tanzquartier, Vienna; Cuerpo, Desórdenes y Democracia (Body, Disorders and Democracy) at Matadero, Madrid; Estética(s) de lo clandestino: camuflaje, encriptación y disidencia en el pensamiento y la cultura contemporáneos (Aesthetics of the clandestine: camouflage, encryption and dissidence in contemporary thought and culture) at Círculo de Bellas Artes in collaboration with Carlos III University from Madrid and Open lectures in Inter-University Center for Dance Berlin (HzT), Berlin. I'm grateful for the conversations that these occasions enabled with their organizers: Sandra Noeth, Victoria Pérez Royo & Fernando Quesada, David Sánchez Usanos & Lucía Jalón Oyarzun. I'm also grateful to Nadia Lartigue/collective AM, Elena Córdoba, Cristian Duarte, Beatriz Fernández and Mónica Muntaner for their commitment and courage to initiate collective learning research contexts and for inviting my research to be part of them: Festival 4x4 (Mexico City); Bailar, ¿es eso lo que queréis? Irrupción en la idea de libertad (Dancing, is that what you want?: Irruption in the idea of freedom) in Granada; LOTE #1 & #2 in Sao Paulo; La Poderosa in Barcelona. These independent artist's initiatives have been an incredible opportunity to learn and to develop my research.

I'm immensely grateful to Frederic Gies and Jefta Van Dinther for inviting my research to the MA choreography program at DOCH, Stockholm in 2012. Without Jefta and Fred, I would have not known about UNIARTS' PhD position. Thanks to their encouragement, for being amazing hosts and for trusting and supporting this research when I needed it the most.

I wish to thank my supervisors: Goran Sergej Pristaš, Chrysa Parkinson and Victoria Pérez Royo for their support, critical insights and companionship on multiple occasions during all these years. The conversations that I have had with them have resonated in various ways in this text. I am grateful to DOCH School of Dance and Circus, Lund University and Stockholms Konstnärliga Högskola (Stockholm University of the Arts) for giving me the opportunity to accomplish this doctoral studies. Thanks to: Cecilia Roos, Ellen J Røed,Jenny Tyllström, Anna Grip, Anna Efraimsson, Sissel Behring, Olof Halldin, Efva Lilja, Camilla Damkæjr; to my PhD colleagues Rasmus Ölmer, Nils Claesson, Alex Nowitz, Kerstin Perski, Jonathan Priest, Marius Dybwad Brandrud, Carina Reich and Bogdan Szyber who got engaged and discussed my work at the beginning of my doctoral studies. I'm also grateful to the conversations I enjoyed with my PhD colleagues Mette Ingvartsen, Malin Arnell, Marie Fahlin, Anne Juren, Stacey Sacks and Eleanor Bauer. Amazing women whose different approaches and artistic commitment have been of great inspiration for me. I'm grateful to the discussion partners that accepted to be part of my seminars: André Lepecki, Bojana Cvejić, Giulia Palladini, Rebecca Hilton and Kirsi Monni. Thanks also to Noémie Salomon, Myriam Van Imschoot, Rudi Laermans and Alex Arteaga who have accepted to be part of the examination committee of this research. I appreciate their time and generosity in entering into this body of dance.

Thanks to the hospitality of Leire Mesa, for letting me live at her place during my first stays in Stockholm. After all, everything comes down to friendship and joyful inspiring encounters and accompaniments, from close or far away distances. Thanks to the loving friendship of Jessica Romo. Thanks to Diego Agulló for inviting me to publish this doctoral artistic research project on a printed format. Thanks to Ana Buitrago, without her exquisite and careful attention to words, the book´s text would not have been the same.

Throughout the writing of this book, my family have been a constant source of rescue and support. I'm very grateful to my mother Maria Paz Caminos, my father-in-law and mother-in-law Emilio Tomé San Martín and Carmen Durán.

I will never be able to express all my gratitude to Emilio Tomé. Without his intellectual and artistic generosity, his encouragement, patience, love and continuous support throughout all these years together, this research would not have been possible.

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