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HERE WHILST WE TALK - Brasilian dancer performs at the Chelsea Theatre
interview to Ana Wambier
How did the project "Here whilst we walk" grow up?
In 2005, I was invited to a 1 year project called Encontros/Encounters 05-06 promoted and created by Alkantara (Lisbon) in collaboration with Panorama festival (Rio). Three Brazilians and 3 Portuguese dance artists were invited and each of us could choose another artist from all over the world to be a partner in this project. I chose Andrea Sonnberger, with whom I had worked previously in a project in Munich run By the German choreographer Katja Wachter and with whom I shared ideas and walks. As a provocation, Mark Depputer, the artistic director of Alkantara, together with the theoretician Bojana Cvejic, proposed to us the following starting point: the black box of the theater normally thought as something neutral, that could provide an impartial environment no matter where it is located, Rio or Hong Kong, was actually a political and cultural construction, and as such, it would be far from neutrality. So, how to think presenting/performing a dance piece that would put this very situation into question? How to evade the black box and create/choose another environment for a dance piece problematizing the questions at stake in a black box?
We started then to look for alternative spaces to it. We realized though that it was not so much a matter of choosing a place that would provide a location for a performance, but rather all the numberless and fortuitous ways that lead to this place. We became interested then in roaming through these streets, squares, avenues and alleys that surrounded any chosen place. That’s how we came to a walk. A silent walk through the possible trajectories to this place, exploring all the visible and invisible aspects present in the fact of inhabiting that part of the city. Bearing this in mind we developed this performance we’ll be doing. We decided for a silent walk using a big elastic as a sensorial device to activate our perception of the nearby surroundings. Silence was thought as the basic condition for observation, for letting the senses free to engage in the perception of the places and people we passed by in our one hour long promenade. We thought that otherwise people would engage themselves in conversations and commentaries that might make them loose the chance of directly experiencing the city and everything that it includes whilst they walk, that is, seeing, hearing, smelling and even touching the immediate whereabouts.
Can you explain how it works?
It could be basically described as a silent group walk surrounded by an elastic, as said before. Inside the elastic groups of six to 22 people plus us two. 1 hour walk. During this walk the group stops at some certain strategic places in terms of urban construction. Places that are basic things common to any urban architecture such as streets, square, pedestrian areas, indoor public areas, entrance/exit to train stations, and so on. At the same time the people inside the elastic become the observer and the performers of their own experience in the city. Something rendered more acute due to the use of the elastic that frames them as well as the daily reality they see.
What kind of feelings/thoughts do you expect the public to have during the performance?
This is very much a private matter. Not mine or Andrea’s, but the public’s. I do hope they take the experience for themselves. More and more people are getting expropriated of their ability to observe and articulate knowledge by themselves. Walking has been since long related to the production of knowledge. The first philosophers advocated the walk as a condition to think. They would walk and have long dialogues. This method was known as peripathetic. Step by step.
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