The letters below were written before the funding application was made and before the work on studio started. Therefore the frame of thoughts about the project has a different quality, more colloquial and dialogical, which I find very interesting as a contrast of the previous text of this catalogue. 

 

19 12 10

 

Hello Rob, today is 19 of December, one day before my 35 years birthday.

 

Following you reasoning about using hand writing only for lyrics or poems here I am responding with a typewriter letter. I like that idea indeed, to only use “real paper” for poems and lyrics. I am also using a typewriter because time has passed really fast and I am about to leave Buenos Aires in two days with no time to seat and post a “real letter”.  I assume my mind will be less serious today and a bit more vague. I always feel like this before to leave my mother country.

 

The abstract expressionism dichotomy is not an issue for me, but as you mentioned after, it is more a problem of elevating the “message mode”. As I wrote in the last email, I am interested to problematize the idea of communication and transparency that is so much asked in the performance market. I suspect there is something tricky and impossible for the nature of art: chaotic, unnameable, sensation based. To try to communicate it clearly to audience is to loos the vibration, oscillation, sensation “transmission” of a process happening there in front of them. I guess I talked about the notion of “transmission” versus “communication”. The act of transmission sends like an invisible web to the spectator, it touches his nervous system and viscerality.

 

Nevertheless, I am interested to problematize this issue. How can we still consider audience in art making, specially when the human body is in front of them and seems to require clarity?

 

And more broadly: How to give “direction” to movement expression? (What do we need to give direction: words, songs, cultural coded dances, etc?).

 

I really like the idea of lullabies and singing. I am happy that you like the idea of getting close to the threshold of language, as it almost talking, as if almost saying something although still moving. Definitively the idea of rocking to the melody of a song is a way to put words in the move.

 

I have a new idea of how the two parts of the performance could feel like.

 

Your solo I see it as an intimate concert or poetry reciting.

 

The group solos, duets and trios as a collective dance for each other without including spectators necessarily. A social abstract hybrid danced within a group.

 

In terms of what happen we can think: poetry (you) and dance (guys).

Although both activities trespassed by “movement”, one is more poetry/singing event and the other one “dance based”. 

 

I am happy to do this project with you Rob.

 


Love from B.A.

 

Diego.

 

23/1/11

 

Dear Rob,

 

How are you?

I am back from Cairo since three days ago. Since I arrived to Amsterdam I started to write the application for the new project with you. It is a good way to become more concrete on how I see the piece at this moment. I had been reading your texts in your new web page and blog. I like them very much.

 

It is important for me to understand which is your main concern when you perform. And from there start to think how to work in the piece. Otherwise I feel I am imposing something in you and it does not fell right. I want this piece to be "on you".

 

As I already wrote you and you wrote a lot in your blog previously without me noticing it, I am very interested in this two types of human perception produced by a concrete and virtual approach to reality. Thus here we have the first coincidence and axis of the work. We can call this problematic the problematic of the concrete-virtual, unmediated-mediated, volumetric-flatten, etc. With you I want to work in the "concrete" approach to reality and with the youngsters with the "virtual".

 

I also found relevant to think in the notion of "opening" of "gap" between audience and spectator which is needed to share a common experience of real present time. And as you (always!) mention, this goes hand by hand with sharing a gesture rather than saying a statement, having something to say, deliver a message.

 

Moreover you connect the experience of "the open" with Rilke's Duino Elegies.... The Eighth Elegy is about the difference between human and animal consciousness, what he calls the Open. The animal lives without concept, facing out in a now of bare perception with no future and no past. The human lives with something or someone always opposite, and hardly ever looks beyond this object of attention.

 

I am truly interested in the existential feeling of humans as beings that are still animals. Personally I think we have a lot of animality in ourselves and we can sense that when despite our "logos", our "rationality" the anxieties, dread, fears, desires takes us over, without reason. The understanding of our animality is not only an "idea" but an "existential acceptation" which comes through an incorporation of that fact. We are half animal and half humans. I find a very strong sense of "concretness" and feeling of the "real" when I think myself as an animal and human and therefore I can perceive the real space between bodies which open possibilities to share time.

 

Let me quote you a part of Agamben text about the gap between animal and human in his book The Open (Of course).

Although there is an idea I don't totally agree or understand completely that is that he finds "the open" in man boredom and in his inoperative state. If inoperative means to disconnect from common sense ideas and meanings to create a new space of possibility, then I agree. But to me this is still an active action and an operation rather than an in-operation.

 

Insofar as the animal knows neither beings nor nonbeings, neither open or closed, it is outside of being; it is outside in an exteriority more external than any open, and inside in an intimacy more internal than any closedness. To let the animal be would then mean: to let it be outside of being. The zone of nonknowledge- or of a-knowledge- that is at issue here is beyond both knowing and not knowing, beyond both disconcealing and concealing, beyond both being and the nothing. But what is thus left to be outside of being is not thereby negated or taken away; it is not, for this reason, inexistent. It is an existing, real thing that has gone beyond the difference between being and beings.

 

....

 

To render inoperative the machine that governs our conception of man will therefore mean no longer to seek new-more effective or more authentic- articulations, but rather to show the the central emptiness, the hiatus that- within man separates man and animal, and to risk ourselves in this emptiness: the suspension of the suspension. Shabbat of both animal and man.

Giorgio Agamben The open, "Outside of Being" pag.91 and 92.

 


After this very long introduction there is something that I wanted to ask you.

 

I still would like to create the "movement material" of your solo and the "time-spaces" in which the piece will take place together with the audience, using as a choreographic object the written words of a poetic text.


The written poem could function as a blue print to mold the invisible forces trespassing body and space. 

I thought we could write on the relation between animal-human and the experience of the openness towards the world.

Using as source of inspiration Rilke's Duinos Elegies and Agamben "The Open".

 

What do you think?

 

Well, this is all.

Sorry if I send a too long mail to read...but I have many things to share.

I leave for Switzerland tomorrow and come back 4 of February, maybe we meet then?

 

Love.

Diego.

 

 

23 /11/ 10

 

Rob List.

 

I sat to collect written texts I collected in my notebook for this project from the last six months, only to realize that this notebook stayed in Amsterdam. Maybe my unconscious side wanted to give me a chance to totally disconnect from any type of artistic activity in Buenos Aires. Consequences are that I will write from what I remember today about that and probably bringing out what is only-still today relevant for me. 

 

In the last projects (Creating Sense, About falling, Outdoors, The Half) I was busy with the notion of "movement" as an activity that is continuously  transforming and with no representation. Falling into representation only when movement stops and visibility of the body becomes clear as something that signifies. It was important to me to state this way to see "movement" and to deal with it on stage as something unpredictable, chance bounded and transformative.

 

This erased the idea of the human being as something stable and fixed, and put me personally in a place off balance. I felt out of orientation dealing with this ephemeral notion of movement.

 

Thus I started to look for ways to see the body as something in movement but at the same time being centered, with a voice, being partially in control of the situation. I was also interested to move away from pure "abstraction" of the body and find a more "expressive" body. I looked for the possibilities to stage an "emotional body" avoiding to be pathetic. For me "emotions" are real. When I feel a strong emotional state I don't feel anymore out of myself but quite centered, almost too painfully.

 

I fought in my head about the notion of "emotion" because I had collected a lot of reading of philosopher  Brian Massumi where he says that "emotions" are already a point of capture and recognition and a stop of a movement dynamic. He prefers to talk about "affect" which is an emotion that has not been categorized yet. He stresses a lot those moments where movement of sensation and perception are on the go, without time to stop to look backwards on what happened. For him "emotion" is a stop. 

 

A way to approach the dilemma of "being" as something dynamic but with a voice and emotions...although in the move, is to practice the movement of the body when the performer "enunciates" or "talks" to himself. The "talk" to himself could be anything, and the sound of the voice does not have to be perceived externally. 

 


Performance

 

How does all what I wrote up till know was forming into an idea for a performance?

 

I am obsess to work with two types of "presences" and "forms of expression".

One having a deep, centered source of initiation.(This is the new quality I want to find).

Another having a descentralized and superficial source of initiation.

 

When I equated this notions with the practice of movement, I understood that I needed two different approaches towards movement practice. Then I thought about you for the first case.Your long experience with movement has this deep connection with movement as a source. I also think that by writing to each other I/we could find answers on how to work with movement later in studio. Also writing real letters gives me a more concrete feeling of myself, rather than communicating through email, skype or youtube.

 

For an off center practice of movement I want to work with a group of young dancers. They will write among themselves sending "lip sync" songs-dance videos in you tube, as if they will be creating an information society, with all the cliches, superficialities but also emotions that that brings. 

 

Well Rob, this is how far I can go today about the piece. Soon I will send you the first letter. Use this email as a broad panorama of how things are moving around my head. It is a point of departure.

 

Diego.