"Diluting" by J&J

DILUTING was presented in Arnhem, the Netherlands on the 16th and 18th of April of 2014. Watch it below! Or open it in this link!

Dance Composition

Composition is often associated to music but, in fact, the real meaning of the word makes it possible to apply in other arts as well. Composing happens in everyday life, it's about putting things together. In music, a composer collects and distributes the notes as she/he wants, in order to compose a piece as she/he wishes to. Applying make up in your face in the morning, dressing up, cooking, walking, are some examples that prove that indeed composition is part of our daily life even without us noticing it. So, as the examples given imply, composition is about choice making. In "the most perfect piece ever made", the best choices are taken at the best moments. In "the worst piece ever made", this choices are very questionable!

What we did in the composition of Diluting was using the elements of the deconstruction (see previous posts) to build the performance in accordance with the concept we had.

When deconstructing we aim to find what we considered the essence or the key aspects of each traditional dance. Not only the literal movement was deconstructed, but the spacing of the dance itself, the relation between the dancers, the colors of the costume, the feeling, the intention, the stories behind them, etc. 

For the composition of the piece, we started by planning two time lines that would represent the traditions of Mexico and Portugal. This lines starts to relate during the time line of the piece, to slowly become similar until the unison of the movement and costume would make a visual analysis of the place of traditions within globalization. When selecting and making choices we were considering: what is in this traditions that would make sense to us in the actual present?

The music was added later on the composition process. Kaspar Föhres helped us to elongate the traditional music of "Jarabe Tapatío" and a typical "Corridinho" song to 30 minutes without changing the pitch. The two songs are overlapped and create a special atmosphere in the piece.

We decided to incorporate a glass bucket with water. The bucket has a light behind that beams in the walls the movement of the water. During the performance we insert some traditional clothes in the water. This clothes had ink in them, which would color the water, thus coloring the whole white space. As different colors were combined, the water would change its color, thus changing the room color too. 

Is it the mixed of perspective? Syncretism? Globalization?... Where are the traditions?

The Portuguese seen by others

Julius Caeser once said: "There is, in the end of Iberia, a population that does not govern themselves and does not let themselves be governed." 
This population was the Lusitanian, the origin of the Portuguese. 
On the image, Viriato, Chief of the Lusitanians, described as Terror Romanorum, latin for Terror of the Romans.

Naturally, the view on the Portuguese varies a lot on the person's relation to the country, to it's people and so on. Caeser's opinion is, of course, a reflection of his difficulties in conquering the territory.

While researching about the way the Portuguese are seen by the others, it is hard to find an official source with scientific answers. Probably because there are simply no answers to such a broad matter. Nevertheless, by analyzing some of the testimonials and opinions, a line can be drawn tracing a fragile profile. Fragile for its lack of precision, but also for itself. 


Agostinho da Silva, one of the st incredible thinkers and philosophers ever born, much appreciated in Portugal and even more in Brazil, once said:

The Portuguese core is not speaking the language or not. It’s being being the Portuguese way or not, that is being many things at the same time, and sometimes things that seem contradictory, and it’s the possibility of taking a theme and looking in several ways, depending on the person’s temper, the time they lived, the language they used and the way they felt in life. 

But his view was not alone. About half a century before, Fernando Pessoa, a Portuguese writer who's complexity, as described by Robert Hass, goes to not only inventing masks like Yeats, Pound or Elliot but to inventing full poets. 72, to be more precise. 72 different personalities, with precise date of birth and death, job, family and even astrological predictions. When asked to preview the future of Portugal, he answered:

- The Fifth Empire. The future of Portugal - that I don’t preview, but know - is already written to whom ever knows how to read it, in Bandarra’s (Portuguese Prophet of the XVI century) and Nostradamus’s trovas. That future is being everything. Whom, that is Portuguese, can live the narrowness of one single personality, one single nation, one single faith? Which true Portuguese can, for example, live the sterile narrowness of Catholicism when, out of it, you can live all the Protestantism’s, all the oriental prayers, all the living and dead Paganisms, portuguesely mixing them in a Superior Paganism? We do not want any God to be out of us! Let’s absorve all the Gods! We’ve already conquered the seas: we must now conquer the skies, leaving the earth for the Others, the eternally Others, the Others born Others, the europeans that are not europeans because they are not Portuguese. Be everything, in every way, because the truth can not be in miss something. Let’s create the Superior Paganism, the Supreme Polytheism! In the eternal lie of every God, only all the Gods are true.

To counter balance a little bit the heavy modernist and highly philosophical points of view of both Agostinho da Silva and Fernando Pessoa, I would like to share Erin B. Taylor's writing on the Portuguese, after moving to Lisbon in 2009. Erin is an Australian Anthropologist with background in Fine Arts. Here are 9 things she distinguished:

1. The Portuguese pigeons are the laziest ever. They rarely fly.   

2. The Portuguese mostly live in small apartments, but own huge dogs.

3. One must never, ever, enter the supermarket through a check-out lane. If so, a staff member will chase you and try to make you exit and enter the proper way. 

4. Eating or drinking while walking is uncivilized.

5. In average the Portuguese speaks far more english that they will let on. Far from trying to be difficult, they are actually very modest and shy.

6. Portuguese is not Spanish. The Portuguese understand them, but they don’t understand the Portuguese.

7. How you dress matters. No to ostentation but no to dressing down.

8. At the national level, the Portuguese are amazingly consistent with their material culture. 

9. The Portuguese tend to underestimate their own country. As a result, many want to escape to another country, while everyone seems to want in.

André Barata and Miguel Real, a philosopher and an essayist, share their opinion on soccer and it's fatal appreciation in Portugal. 

"Soccer is the last breath of an european conservative nationalism that instinctively appeals in an emotive and collective way to the most negative there is between the population. It puts Portugal against Spain, France or even Germany and Sweden which in the History of the World have never been enemies of Portugal. It evidencies what in a negative point of view is somehow barbarian. In Europe, the hospitals, the armies, the schools the students are all the same. But not the soccer players, that are nationalists. Until the moment another club pays better, then, regionalism and nationalism is betrayed." 

In a conversation on the train, Barata and Real's opinion is extended to the country's situation right now: "There are studies about the correlation between income inequality and distrust. As Portugal is one of the countries in Europe with biggest inequality in income, distrust is easily explained.".

It might be hard to link the dots when analyzing such broad opinions on such broad subject. But some aspects can be underlined.  There is a sense of pride and shame. A certain modesty that at the same time puts us against everyone. Fatality and laziness. These are some of the myths of national identity. Contradictory dualities that don't categorize the Portuguese but connects them. 

Mexico by other artists

"Alebrije", Pedro Linares López, 1988

The Spanish painter Salvador Dalí after a visit to Mexico said: 

“No way that I will come back to Mexico. 

I cannot manage to be in a country 

that is more surrealist that my paintings”

"Río Juchitán" Diego Rivera, 1956

"The Mexican, (…) seems to me to be a person who shuts himself away to protect himself: his face is a mask and so is his smile. In his harsh solitude, which is both barbed and courteous everything serves him as a defense: silence and words, politeness and disdain, irony and resignation. (...) He passes through life like a man who has been flayed; everything can hurt him, including words and the very suspicion of words. His language is full of reticence, of metaphors and allusions, of unfinished phrases, while his silence is full of tints, folds, thunderheads, sudden rainbow, indecipherable threats. (...) He builds a wall of indifference and remoteness between reality and himself, a wall that is no less impenetrable for being invisible. 




The Mexican is always a remote, from the world and from other people. And also from himself. Hermeticism is one of the several recourses of our suspicion and distrust. It shows that we instinctively regard the world around us to be dangerous. This reaction is justifiable if one considers what our history has been and the kind of society we have created."

"The Mexican views life as combat. This attitude does not make him any different from anyone else in the modern world. For other people, however, the manly ideal consists in an open and aggressive fondness for combat, whereas we emphasize defensiveness, the readiness to repel any attack. The Mexican macho-the male- is a hermetic being, closed up in himself, capable of guarding both himself and whatever has been confided to him. Manliness is judged according to one’s invulnerability to enemy arms or the impact of the outside world stoicism is the most exalted of our military and political attributes. Our history is full of expressions and incidents that demonstrate the indifference of our heroes toward suffering or danger. We are taught from childhood to accept defeat with dignity, a conception that is certainly not ignoble. And if we can be resigned and patient and long-suffering. Resignation is one of our most popular virtues. We admire fortitude in the face of adversity more than the most brilliant triumph."

"En la frontera entre México y USA" Frida Kahlo, 1932

"While the Mexican tries to create closed worlds in his politics and in the arts, he wants modesty, prudence, and a ceremonious reserve to rule over his everyday life. Modesty results from shame at one’s own or another’s nakedness, and with us it is an almost physical reflex. Nothing could be further from this North American life. We are not afraid or ashamed of our bodies; we accept them as completely natural and we live physically with considerable gusto. (...) It is not suit of clothes we are in the habit of wearing, not something apart from us: we are our bodies. 

"Llegada de Hernán Cortés" Diego Rivera, 1951

"The Mexican considers woman to be a dark, secret and passive being. He does not attribute evil instincts to her; he even pretends that she does not have any. Or, to put it more exactly, her instincts are not longer her own but those of the species, because she is an incarnation of the life force, which is essentially impersonal. Thus it is impossible for her to have a personal, private life, for if she were to be herself- if she were to be mistress of her own wishes, passions or whims- she would be unfaithful to herself."

"Mujer mexicana", Diego Rivera

"In other countries woman are active, attempting to attract men through the agility of their minds or the seductivity of their bodies, but the Mexican woman has a sort of hieratic  calm, a tranquillity made up of both hope and contempt. The man circles around her, courts her, sing to her, sets his horse to performing caracoles for her pleasure. Meanwhile she remains behind the veil of her pleasure."

"To simulate is to invent, or rather to counterfeit, and thus to evade our condition. Dissimulation requires greater subtlety the person who dissimulates is not counterfeiting but attempting to become invisible to pass unnoticed without renouncing his individuality. The Mexican excels at the dissimulation of his passions and himself. He is afraid of others looks and fore he withdraws, contracts, becomes a shadow, a phantasm, an echo. Instead of walking, he glides, instead of complaining, he smiles, Even when he sings he does so- unless he explodes, ripping open his breast- between clenched teeth and in a lowered voice, dissimulating his song:

Saúl López Payan,  Puebla México, Plastic artist

And so great is the tyranny

of this dissimulation 

that although my heart swells

with profoundest longing,

there is challenge in my eyes

and resignation in my voice.

Perhaps our habit of dissimulating originated in colonial times. (...) The colonial world has disappeared, but not the fear, the mistrust, the suspicion. And now we disguise not only our anger but also our tenderness."
"Our sense of inferiority -- real or imagined -- might be explained at least partly by the reserve with which the Mexican faces other people and the unpredictable violence with which his repressed emotions break through his mask of impassivity. But his solitude is vaster and profounder than his sense of inferiority. It is impossible to equate these two attitudes: when you sense that you are alone, it does not mean that you feel inferior, but rather that you feel you are different. Also, a sense of inferiority may sometimes by an illusion, but solitude is a hard fact. We are truly different. And we are truly alone."

The quotes were taken from the chapter Mexican masks from The Labyrinth of the Solitude by the Mexican  Octavio Paz (Nobel Prize of Literature) translated by Lysander Kemp, Yala Milos and Rachel Phillips.

Spanishversion: www.unive.it/media/allegato/download/Lingue/Materiale_didattico_Regazzoni/Lingue_lett_ispano_americane1/Octavio_Paz.pdf

English version: http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/s/a/sam50/readings521/OP_Mex-Mask.pdf

Dance Deconstruction

The term deconstruction is related to “a philosophical and critical movement, starting in the 1960s and especially applied to the study of literature, that questions all traditional assumptions about the ability of language to represent reality and emphasizes that a text has no stable reference or identification because words essentially only refer to other words and therefore a reader must approach a text by eliminating any metaphysical or ethnocentric assumptions through an active role of defining meaning, sometimes by a reliance on new word construction, etymology, puns, and other word play.”

In this dance research we deconstructed by looking close to specific aspect of the dances; meaning the use of space, parts of the body (arms, head, legs), attitude, music (rhythm, melody), relationship with other dancers. We drew the path of the dances using different colours to different sequences of movement and dynamics. We reproduced the movements of the original dance but only in one part of the body. We danced them horizontal and vertical. We exchange roles of gender, etc.

Trough the deconstruction of the original meaning and movement, we tried to turn the common aesthetic around offering new angles of interpretation. This material left will help us now to compose.

Here are some examples of what we deconstructed of what we found interesting in each of the mentioned Mexican and Portuguese dances.

Corridinho

   Rhythm of the movement

 Circular flow

  Physical contact

  Positions of the arms

 Spinning

Concheros

Path on space

Central concentration of the energy

Use of the heads

Fouettés

Inclination of the torso 

Speed of the feet

Jarabe tapatío

  Tapping

Attitude projected by the torso in relation with each other

Movement of the big skirts

Vira

       Space path

Use of the arms (square and strong)

 

Movement of the dresses by turning