From Far to Deep / Interview with Pedro Goucha

This interview with choreographer Pedro Goucha is part of a series of conversations on the works Butterfly Hips (2008), Amongst Millions (2013), and From Far to Deep (2014). These dialogues form part of the retrospective study within my research project, Problematizing Interdisciplinary Performance through Noise, developed in the CORPoREAL research group at the Royal Conservatory of Antwerp. This retrospective study runs parallel to my ongoing research through creative collaborations.

The project investigates how choreographic and compositional processes influence each other reciprocally, and how the materials generated in these collaborations can be rethought through the concept of noise. By revisiting notes, music files, rehearsal and performance videos, and engaging in conversations with Pedro Goucha, the research aims to reconstruct the artistic methods and embodied interactions that shaped each creative process.

The goal is to build a collective reflection that reconsiders these experiences beyond my original, individual perspective. Introducing noise as an analytical tool allows for a critical exploration of the collaborative dynamics and the ways in which meaning and experience evolve within them.

This interview focuses specifically on From Far to Deep (FFtD), with Pedro Goucha reflecting on the methods, aesthetic decisions, and conceptual frameworks that informed the work.

Additional descriptions and reflections are included in italics within brackets throughout the text.

“From Far to Deep is the step after Amongst Millions - where would I go from here?”

X Rays

Pedro: The use of X-rays was very important because I wanted to establish that connection between the experience of the dancer and the experience of the public, but also a visual experience. I was very much into the history of art at that time, and I wanted to create a triptych. So I created a triptych of three panels of X-rays, where I combined human and non-human skeletons, so I wanted to create my own beings.

In our development, we go through all those evolutionary stages - in the embryogenic state before we become a fetus, we go through the amphibian stage, etc. - we mirror stages of evolution. I wanted to have fun and create beings with a hand coming out of the head, or a foot coming out of the mouth, whatever, you know? Some of the figures looked like fish with human feet coming out of the pelvis. We had really nice images, I think.

It also gave a visual experience that related to the bodies that were on stage - everybody recognizes an X-ray. As a result, the tasks I gave to the dancers were somehow informed by the surrealistic quality of these images. The X-rays were a critical thing because of their aesthetics, which I think looked really beautiful.

I spent a lot of time working on the images and the panels in the workshop of the Gothenburg Opera. I brought like 500 X-rays and composed my own puzzles - I loved it. I was really working on it as a visual artist in that moment.

[Pedro created choreographic tasks inspired by the images but did not share the images with the dancers during the process.]

Workshops / Tasks

Pedro: We had very little time with the dancers, and about 75 percent of that time was workshopping because I had never worked with them before. There were three female dancers, and one of them was pregnant, which I had to take into consideration. So these workshops were for them, with methods I had developed, for them to connect with their body, with their eyes, with the space around them, to sense different things that I had explored in Amongst Millions (AM) on myself. I was transmitting a lot of the processes I went through so they could connect, and then I could give more specific tasks they could tap into faster. Then we had very little time to work on the choreography itself.

The processes I was sharing were about connecting with oneself and one’s own somatic experience, sensing one’s own body. So the workshops were very much about experiencing oneself somatically and trying to include body-mind centering, trying to connect with different structures such as skin, organs, bones - how far can you infiltrate yourself within the sensation of these structures? We went through these kinds of explorations of sensations, transitions of sensation from muscles to soft to hard - where are the borders of the skin of your face and the beginning of the lips, etc.? And then you go into the emotion.

Suddenly we had a palette, we could speak the same language. So they would not have to represent, but rather be able to connect to real sensation, and then once they had that ability, I could bring imagination.

Pedro: FFtD does not have a clear choreography of movement. They know when to come in and out, when to move left, etc. There is a structure to the path of the choreography but specific body movements are not choreographed. For example, there was one task where the tongue should push the top of the mouth, and that is what lifts up the whole body, that is what stretches the knees; there is focus on that sensation. The sensation generates the movement. Moreover, whatever the task is, you must always hide it. This was the same in AM, so what we see is what we cannot keep in. That is the tension.

In theatre, when you just cry when you feel like crying, it may look unnatural, but if you don’t want to cry, that’s life. Sometimes I don’t want to show that I feel like crying, and what comes out is real, true - it’s like the sweat of the experience, that thing that you cannot keep in. In the task of hiding, most of the expression comes from the fact that you try to omit your experience, and what transpires is like the last drop of lemon that cannot hide, and it becomes so powerful. That was the essence of AM that I was trying to bring into FFtD.

[In Amongst Millions the crescendo of the music and the approaching body move in the threshold of loudness and discomfort. It is always in the border of becoming a continues state, but it is microscopically subverted by it’s endless growth, internally in Goucha Gomes’ body and in the sounds. The sound can be felt as dense and continuous but there are always micro rhythms and new layers appearing through the duration of the performance. Close to the end, the sound and the proximity keep on growing and the tension of the listener keeps increasing. The earthquake seems to not recede. Earthquakes have a short wave in time. There is a peak and then one starts to let go of its imposed noisiness. In AM the intention is to suspend the sensation of the beginning of the earthquake in time, it is as if it was always beginning. Always at the threshold of becoming noise. This is a mere sensory speculation, or the description of my own experience, but it leads to the question is always noise in tension between excess and the absence of it? Is it noise the threshold between a sound and it becoming noise? How can this threshold stretch through time?

The body is threatening to erupt. It is the threat of nothing singular. It is solely the threat of an unknown output. The threat, as an alarm expresses the urgency of an unknown circumstance. Sirens are moving towards an undesired circumstance, to a particular situation that is very specific, is it a fire, an accident, or a police chase, but when we listen to the sirens we cannot immediately know the reason. Nevertheless, they always communicate a sense of urgency, whether we feel the urgency or not. Something happened or is happening. The bodies we see are going through an internal process. The choreographic task is very specific but it is formless in its exteriority. Only the threat can be perceived. Does the viewer feel the noise from the struggling body?

Then “the dike breaks”, but is not the collapse of the structure, it is a spasm, a piece of concrete that falls, or is a fissure, a fault that lets a small stream of water flow. However, it is almost blurred by the body’s resistance. Is only the trace of water, its vestige. Like a disruptive noise that emerges from the sensation of the siren. Nevertheless in these bodies, there are no sirens, there are no explosions. What remains is the visual sharing of those sensations.

The music uncompromisingly tries to resist the explosion. It is always at the border of collapse. It is always at the threshold of noise. A breaking wave is approaching the shore, but it never fully breaks and it never reaches its end. How can sound continuously remain menacing? Is noise in the context of performance only possible as a threshold? Or as a revealer of multiplicity? Is noise the insistence and permanence of that never ending increasing sensation? 

Where is the abomination or abjection of this smile? Presence or insistence. Interminable presence. The insistence of the smile beyond the face and beneath the face. The insistence of a scream that survives the mouth, the insistence of a body that survives the organism, the insistence of transitory organs that survive the qualified organs. And in this excessive presence, the identity of an already-there and an always-delayed. Everywhere there is a presence acting directly on the nervous system, which makes representation, whether in place or at a distance, impossible. (Deleuze 2003: 51)]

Red Paint

Pedro: Redness functions as a costume, as a mask, but in fact it was a mask trying to show the body under the skin. A body under the skin - regardless of the skin color, we are red or pink inside, the color of the blood is the same. The red is the body under the skin while simultaneously a mask and a costume.

However, the body painting itself was not good - we tried different things with shadows, earthy colors, but the red didn’t have the quality of all the other stage elements, like the set, movement, sound, and light. We ended up using it anyway; it had a visual impact but, reflecting on it retrospectively, I was not happy with the result.

[Making the inside visible creates a paradox - by turning the inside into the surface, it simply becomes the surface. When the red is seen, it collapses the sense of interiority that would otherwise remain imagined and/or perceived. The tension of the somatic tasks lies in the traces that emerge, in what is suggested rather than fully revealed. Leaving the skin’s natural color might have better sustained that tension between the visible and the unseen sensations that surface through the body. Exaggerating the surface with red may interfere with the noisy friction of this phenomenon. In retrospect, this created a contradiction that we did not recognize during the creative process.]

Arika’s Role 

[A body, fixed facing the back wall, moves slowly from left to right across the stage throughout the performance. The back remains in darkness until a red light reveals her presence, as shown in the picture below.]

Pedro: You have a sense that there is someone in the room but you can’t see them. You realize that there is something in the room, but you do not know what it is, and then almost at the end of the piece, you realize, shit, somebody is there - and so your intuition is confirmed.

So I wanted Arika to be in the dark moving really slowly, and I hid her on purpose. Then when the lights go all red, that was the highest point of tension and sound where there is an inflammation, this swell of light and intensity that then disappears. Some people are not able to see her, because you have the three panels with a little space between them - the panels partially cover the back.

I wanted this thing of: “Wow, did you see that person?” “What person?” “There was a naked person walking behind!” “There is no person, what are you talking about?” Everyone is looking, but there is a person you do not see, naked, behind. This person only becomes visible for each person only for an instant, as the panels cover the space behind, and the audience will be able to see from their own specific position. Suddenly someone sees her for a moment, and then she remains behind for the rest of the performance.

I needed a counterweight - everything else was so frontal. I also wanted something in the background. The area of the panels and the space that we used was very small.

Me: Arika in the back felt far from this space, like in another dimension.

Pedro: Yes, outside of that space. We had a stage inside the stage - very small. Then there was a big space of nothingness, and then there was her. Now I am remembering, within a small space I wanted to establish a sense of depth. So, if you put something downstage, how do you know that it’s downstage? You have to give a sense of what is upstage. If you just keep the small area with light, then the border is just the end. I wanted to give the sense of the darkness behind, and so by having this individual there, it gives you a reference point.

As a consequence, the dark space between the area of the panels and the three women, and that reference point - that darkness becomes really loud and present.

Me: I see a connection between her presence and the tension with darkness, that sensation that in darkness there is something - a sense of fear, the not knowing if there is something there. That feeling is so common in children with darkness; it seems biologically ingrained.

On the other hand, in the darkness in theatre, we tend to remove its presence - darkness is there so we can focus on what we see. If a member of the audience manages to see Arika at the beginning of the piece, and then it’s dark but you kind of see or imagine to see her, it gives so much presence to that darkness. It’s almost as if there is life in this performative space.

As you were speaking, I was thinking also of when you are in a train and you see things moving at different speeds depending on how far or close they are. So Arika creates a sense of perspective and gives a lot of movement to the whole space.

[To place a body in darkness is to invite the audience into a problematized performative space. Arika's unstable presence disrupts the hierarchy of the visible. This choreographic strategy connects to André Lepecki’s proposition that darkness is not a simple absence, but a singularity: a space of potentiality and freedom. As Lepecki reflects, “darkness names a realm, or a zone, beyond the combinatorial of possibles and their pre-established pre-givens” (2016: 56). This zone disrupts usual paths of recognition and challenges habitual perception. The performance enacts what Lepecki calls the “full potentiality” of darkness, a place where “something has been set free, choreographically, from the reified photosphere” (2016: 57), releasing both performer and audience from the demand for full visibility and clear understanding.

This space of seeing is not fixed or stable, but made uncertain by the shifting presence of darkness. It brings the kind of instability that Lepecki links to choreographies that work with the dark. In this space, the performer does not need to be fully seen to be present. The shifting visibility of Arika through the gaps in the panels is less an obstacle to perception than a way to create that uncertainty, where vision is constantly interrupted and repositioned. As Lepecki draws from Fred Moten, the dark holds a “liberatory value of ensemblic depersonalization” (2016: 81), where the person is less a fixed subject and more a part and a force of a shared, moving field. In this sense, darkness does not hide, but transforms how presence is felt. ]

The Title

Pedro: It relates also to the title From Far to Deep - there was depth. The dancers themselves were going deep inside, there was the sense of interiority and depth of X-rays, the sense that there is something deep inside and far. It was not just a pretty title; it is supposed to be strange. Far could be something outside and deep could be something inside; it connects those two points. It also connects the points in the outside space, but you connect through a deep sense of something.

Me: I remember us talking about this in relation to the audience, the audience watching from far having a deep embodied connection with what they are seeing. I remember that you chose the name of the piece from a sound file that I shared with you with that title - it was basically a transition of reverbs and filters that tried to create that effect explicitly, a sound that is heard far away and that gradually starts to feel like when we hear underwater.

To create sound design of distance, you have to create spatial relations, and then I was experimenting with transforming size dimensions and feeling different distances of the sound source. Changing reverb effect to emulate different hall sizes is quite common, but working with the perception of distance is a bit trickier.

This file was trying to make “far” transform imperceptibly into an underwater sound. I was trying for the sound to never feel close, trying to blur the sense of direction that a distant sound source might have and make it all surrounding in a muffled way. In underwater sound perception, it is more difficult to perceive distance clearly.

So in a way, it transitions to removing the sense of distance completely - the last sound can be as much inside of me or very far away simultaneously. This transition is a very strange sensation.

Pedro: It is strange because if I think about it, if I want to hear something very far, I have to really listen deep inside myself. I have to be in silence - where does that resonate within me? I have to be hypersensitive to feel that sound which is a resonance. That is why I have to remove every stimulus away so I can feel that very soft resonance within me so I can hear it.

It’s interesting to see that when we want to listen to a sound that is the furthest away from us, rather than coming out, we actually have to go into listening, because the vibration within our body is much smaller, so we have to take everything out - oh, now I hear it. You have to go deep in yourself to hear.

Body Presence / Projection

Pedro: This is also deeply related to some of the exercises about projection that I work on with the dancers. How much do you want to project your experience? Which is something that I worked a lot on in AM. For example, I can be having a really strong internal experience, but I can choose to project it a couple of centimeters away from my body, or to feel that this deep sensation almost reaches the audience.

So this is about my intention. I can project my sensation to caress the audience, or go through it, or go through the back wall. The question is: where are you projecting your experience? And this projection of experience can have many tones; it can be a soft projection, aggressive, etc. It is an amazing process to exercise this- it is like modulating volume in sound, you can modulate your presence and how far, fast, strong, or soft you express what you're experiencing.

This is also why this sensation is so linked to the experience of sound in this piece - the dynamic changes in sound are also affecting the projection of presence.

Me: All what you are saying is very related to the title and to how we worked with the dancers on listening and feeling these sensations. One of the questions that led this process was: how would the dancers listen and feel time?

[Considering that the music was very textural and continuous, it was not figurative and did not have obvious cues.]

So the same as in BH, there were different sonic layers. We had slow swells of very low frequencies, which produced a more embodied resonance - sounds that are heard more through your whole body than through your ears. And then there were the objects that vibrated in the hall as a result of these low frequencies. There were high frequencies, buzzing sounds from lights, beams, and other objects within the hall’s technical structure.

These layers became the main source of acoustic information for the dancers. On one hand, they had the sounds that made their bodies vibrate, and on the other hand, there were the resulting sounds of objects vibrating that they could localize in the hall’s space. Sometimes the noises would be quite present, and it was difficult to recognize the low frequencies in terms of sound, as if there were sounds that we cannot hear.

So the title FFtD became an analogy of the way the dancers related to their embodied experience and the way they listened to space through these experiences. Sometimes the dancers would be cued by the sensation of a low-frequency wave, and in other parts of the choreography they would recognize a high frequency from a vibrating object in some specific point of the hall.

So there was a synchronicity of listening to a sound somewhere and also an internal vibration. Their experience was continuously in two modes of listening, and in a way, the buzzing sounds are like a projection of their inner sensations into space.

I remember we talked a lot about this being also something that the audience would feel, as the low frequencies that make their bodies vibrate would also make the hall noises appear - in a way mirroring the experience of the dancers. That vibration that I am feeling through my body is what is making that buzz sound “there.” There is always a spatial resonance.

The dancers learned a sequence of these low-frequency sensations and localized noises to follow the timing of the choreography.

What is important to mention is that I spent time testing which low frequencies, at what intensities, and from which speakers in the hall would make the objects in the hall vibrate. So I had a catalogue of resulting noises, and I then composed the sequence of noises without taking into account the low frequencies that would trigger them. I was thinking of the hall as a musical instrument, and then I had the list of low frequencies that would trigger the sounds of the hall. So somehow the low frequencies also act as a performer.

What was very exciting was to create and listen to the result of the sequence of low frequencies that would activate the score of noises, and it was also very exciting to know that these low frequencies could only work to trigger the sounds of this particular hall. I really like to listen to the resulting music of low frequencies with headphones or in other spaces—it reminds me that this music was somehow given by the specificities of the original space. I love the reciprocity between my intention and a music that results not from my control.

Pedro: That thing about certain sounds that we can’t really consciously hear, but because the objects around us resonate, we can somehow locate them in space and make these connections. I was searching for something very similar within the body.

If you have a body in front of you that is not moving - because a lot of the things were very static - in other choreographies where you see people clearly moving and dancing, you have a direct impulse to perhaps feel something. But the interesting thing is when people are not moving - how can you feel something inside?

This was a whole experience - like, “but they are not doing anything.” They are not moving but I am feeling so much - just like those low frequency sounds. I can locate it, not just in space, but in myself.

A lot of this work was about somatic exploration: you learn about yourself by locating in yourself a particular experience. For me, this work, starting from AM, I go through an experience, I am able to locate it in me, and project that presence.

The resonance of this projection and sound is something that can resonate with the experience of the audience. They might locate something within themselves that they did not know existed before they came to the theatre. You come out probably knowing a little more about yourself - you are able to locate a resonance in your body, the source of an emotion, that was ignited by something invisible that was outside of yourself, but that your nervous system can detect.

Musicality

Pedro: I have a deep and long relationship with music. As a child I had a very rich musical environment in terms of listening and knowing about different styles. I could easily recognize many composers, styles, bands, etc.

Musicality in dance is something that is very strange for me, because I feel that the way we relate to music in dance is generally quite superficial. Musicality is not taught in dance; a dancer is just expected to be musical. That is why I have explored musicality through my somatic practices and I have given workshops about musicality.

There is a physical and emotional relationship with sound. For example, in AM there are no counts or clear musical figures. The engagement is in how you physically relate with the quality of sound, and how you are receptive to the tactile quality of sound - how and where.

If I hear the sound with my skin, it will have a different tactile quality than if I hear the same sound with my bones -they are different forms of resonance. If I touch a cushion or wood, I will feel something different; it is the same with sound.

That is why I liked so much your music, because it was so rich in textures and colors, and it gave many access points through tactile sensations. It allowed me to let sound infiltrate my body in the different structures of my body, find their way, and give feedback. So I had a tactile relationship to your music, and that is what I wanted to share with the dancers.

As there are no clear rhythmical cues, the musicality has to be tactile. If you do not establish a tactile relationship, there is no musicality. Musicality is generally attached to rhythm, but there is so much more to music than that. For example, when you would say to the dancers, "feel the floor vibrating with this frequency," I would say, imagine that the floor is an extension of your skin, the hall is an extension of your skin, and that the vibration is something that they are generating themselves - their intention and musicality is making everything vibrate. It is a connection of both: it is the music, but try to be in tune with the resonance within your body and the space. You have to simultaneously sense that sound while vibrating and projecting that sensation.

Something beautiful about AM is that I was constantly searching for layers of sound and connecting it to my own script. I was climbing this music - it grows, and it grows, and it starts to become visible. That was a really deep relationship with sound, the process was a breathing of sound, a resonance and search through a cellular level. Sound gives shape to your body.

Reflections about Noise

Me: After all this dialogue, how does this work relate to noise?

Pedro: Noise is the context. For example, there is a building here that is being demolished - they are there every day from 7 am. They have been breaking the walls and you hear a [Pedro makes machine repetitive sounds]. This has been going on since I’ve been here, for the past two and a half weeks. I wake up with this. It is noise because of the context and because it wakes me up.

On the other hand, in my somatic practice we work with frequencies around 40 hertz, and the physical sensation is very similar to the machines here. But in the somatic practice, it made me fall asleep, and they are so similar - one is totally soothing, and the other one is so annoying. It’s noise because of the context.

The noise in the morning could be used in a piece and made into music. So I think noise is the combination between these three things: the context, the relationships between sounds and environment, and its potential to become interesting and aesthetic, and it is also your experience of it - it is what ignites within you.

Noise can be the remains of a gesture, something that anyone can produce, but actually musicians can create a context where the perceived meaning of the stimuli is charged with an aesthetic quality. So, it’s the context and the relationships of sounds and space.

In our collaborations we give a purpose to any physical or sonic proposal. So if you give me a sound and we decide we are going to use it, that decision already puts us and the elements of the work in a relationship - that is why I talk about context. The moment you establish a relationship, you give a different character to that experience of noise.

If I listen and my body relates to a given sound or noise and I feel its musicality, this might modulate the way the audience perceives those sounds - those relationships make noise into music (or vice versa).

When I performed AM in Portugal, it was in a small theatre, and behind it the old trams passed occasionally. They have very old bell sounds. I am so sensitive to sounds in this piece, so when those external sounds appeared, I decided to relate to them and had fun integrating them into my sensations.

A girl, daughter of a friend, who studies music, asked after the performances if the sounds of the tram were in the music or outside, and I said they were from outside. She said, "Oh, that is so perfect - I could feel how you reacted to it." So the moment I heard this sound, I decided to give purpose to the potential disturbance of those external noises, and by integrating them into my body I made them into music.

In performances, it really depends on how the performer embodies that sound, that music, that noise, and what role that plays within the experience.

Me: There is a connection about how the body generates movement from somatic search. What emerges as an aesthetic movement? What is the thing we see that we do not recognize?

In these inner explorations, the movements that emerge can easily be seen as something grotesque. I say this based on feedback I got from some audience members, some of whom seemed not to resonate with the work and the experience. They come and say, “the dancers look like zombies,” etc. The comments describe something external, something outside the language of dance and outside their own physical experience.

In my opinion, this relates to aesthetic expectations of the body in dance. This is where BH, AM, and FFtD interest me in terms of noise. What emerges physically does not relate to a tradition - perhaps they challenge more traditional expectations of choreographic methods and aesthetics.

In this constant somatic search and the search for acoustic resonance, there is an ethical stance to not easily become an aesthetic. We can choose to accept the emerging forms as an aesthetic, but the methods and creative processes are always in motion and transforming the way the body and acoustic relations emerge. It attempts to remain a search within choreographic paths. The inner search does not need to establish an aesthetic constancy.

In a way, what emerges can keep on emerging in different ways, and that constant threshold of indefinition can be perceived as grotesque. There is something about our expectation of what the body communicates in terms of aesthetics and what comes out from this type of search.

This is very speculative, but I perceive this tendency of the superficial grotesque perception of these movements that come out of these inner explorations because of this ethical stance. This is related to what you say - when you touch something that you do not know and you find a different way, there is a tension between your physically acquired knowledge, the tradition and the habits of experience, and the unknown that emerges within these physical explorations. There is a lot to think about noise in these kinds of relationships and frictions - not necessarily in terms of objectifying what emerges as noise, but that the phenomenology of noise resonates with how we experience and think of these relationships.

Pedro: There are a lot of feelings and emotions that we consider noise because they make us feel uncomfortable, because we may believe that there are things that we should not feel. There is a lot of self-judgment about emotions, feelings, and thoughts.

Because we do not know how to deal with them properly, it is like an aesthetic experience - it is outside of what we consider to be aesthetically acceptable, and therefore we judge them, and we do not want to face that side of ourselves.

We sometimes do not have the ability to converse in a healthy way with those things, so we need a psychologist, or we develop coping mechanisms, or avoid them through medications, or drugs, etc. We are immature to what it means to be human - it is grotesque to ourselves. So whenever we are facing that within our experience of the world, we fall quickly into judging.

Whenever we experience something outside the expected iconography, it becomes grotesque, it becomes bad, it becomes this or that. We often do not give enough time to ourselves to give sense to the diversity and the versatility of experience.

When we give time, those things may become no longer just grotesque, horrible, and dark, but they become part of who we are, and they are integrated as part of our lives. We remove our intolerance. Because there is an intolerance towards those things that we cannot locate - things that our culturally conditioned selves make us feel as noise, as dirty, as bad.

Me: In our collaboration, we see those frictions as opportunities of encounter - we embrace these unknown relationships. They are unknown for dance, they are unknown for music, and we are not intentionally trying to be disruptive, but it ends up being disruptive because of how the artistic material emerges from these methods.

There is a kind of noisiness to these relationships. The approach towards noise can be very positive in this creative context. The exploration of these noisy relationships may give us information about communication outside the traditional frames and norms.

Pedro: In BH, we offered a very aesthetic experience, which was very uncomfortable but yet attractive. It was like, “it is so disgusting but I cannot stop watching” - just like the abusive character of the story of BH. Like in From Far to Deep, there is a strong friction between the aesthetic presentation and the attention to all those visual and acoustic details, and the grotesque elements within it.

In BH there is a narrative with a very uncomfortable theme - the theme itself is very noisy, that adds up to noise and to the noisy relationships within the layers of the piece.

This also relates to the shadow of Arika in FFtD, but also to the shadow of our countries, of those histories that we share, that we spoke about so many times - how hard it was to be in Holland, how we both grew up in fascist dictatorships. There was always the shadow and the possibility of losing freedom, and there was also the responsibility of using freedom because the shadow of fascism was always there in my education, and it is still part of who I am. Every time I have the chance to do something, I ask, where does my need to go there come from? It is conditioned from that context where I was educated - that shadow is always there, it is unconscious. There is a need to claim your freedom. There is always one foot in the lack of freedom and the other on freedom.

And I feel that here in Holland there has been a longer stability, and perhaps the people - the audience - do not need to go there because they did not experience it, or those past struggles are not so alive in their current reality.

Once a programmer in the Netherlands, who programmed me and other Portuguese choreographers, asked me: “Why are you guys so freak? Why are you always so much like that?” (meaning disturbed). I don’t remember what I answered, but it is where we came from. It is so different than here - there it is so politically unstable, freedom is not taken for granted.

Maybe it is better now, but us - those of us around forty or fifty - we live with that history, dealing with the tension between the ugly and the beauty constantly.

Recorded on December 13th, 2023

References

Deleuze, Gilles. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Translated by Daniel W. Smith. London: Continuum, 2003.

Lepecki, André. Singularities: Dance in the Age of Performance. London and New York: Routledge, 2016.