ESTUDIO V

Choreographer Ola Maciejewska has conducted in-depth research into Loie Fuller (Illinois, 1862 — Paris, 1928), one of the most innovative and recognised women dance artists in modernism. Maciejewska’s piece Loie Fuller: Research (2011), was performed in the Museo Reina Sofía in the spring of 2018 and involved a succession of physical exercises which used the “dancer’s dress” invented by Fuller in a piece which tautened and related the sculptural with the figure that sculps and dances the fabric. And thus the idea of physical strength and endurance (necessary to hold the weight of large fabrics) revealed a unique concept of dance and the figure of the dancer: that of a body always related to other bodies and living or lifeless bodies.

FIGURY (przestrzenne) [FIGURE (SPATIAL)] broadens and gives continuity to these investigations, comprising a dance solo that enquires about the body’s relationship with its environment, which tries to incorporate, via gestures and movements, a series of porous sculptures or figures that come into direct contact with space or which, going further, are built by it. Corporeal work is activated around the sense of the deceleration of time and the idea of physical resilience; the search entails inhabiting, adapting, listening and producing new relationships between the body and that which surrounds it to reveal not only spaces but also co-existent temporalities. The interest in the sculptural in this piece is not only related to the artistic discipline but also the question around the commitment a body acquires to its more immediate — spatial, architectural, institutional, affective, physical, sensitive — environment. Maciejewska thus stresses the idea that all elements of the space in which the piece unfolds “develop verbs” that participate in the action and modify its state: a wall, an artwork, a cold marble floor, a dog, a tree, a spectator.

The word “przestrzenne” means spatial figure in Polish and, consequently, FIGURY (przestrzenne) alludes to the way in which the body is always dependent on something that extends beyond it, much in the same way that plants depend on light. This dependence is based on a double concealment: something we intuit as different from the human but actually exists within it.

Credits:

Concept and performance: Ola Maciejewska
Production: Caroline Redy. So We Might As Well Dance
Co-production: CND Pantin, Cndc Angers
Residencies: Pact Zollverein, Muzeum Susch (Acziun Programme)
Project carried out with funding from the Direction régionale des Affaires culturelles (DRAC) Bretagne – Support for choreography projects.

ágidxen is a phonetic transcription of a dialectical variation of the adverb agerian, which in Basque is a derivative of the verb ageri, an important element in the Basque language and epistemology. Possible translations of the verb ageri are: visibly, revealingly, either in public or openly, yet it is a term which, in this instance, refers to the learning acquired by the artist in the environment of the home to refer to the specific circumstance in which a member of the family becomes uncovered at night.

This fact (to become uncovered) prompts a simple form of care in that another person covers them, whether in the middle of the night or in the morning. It is a circumstance that is named — and is comprehended without any need for explanation — through the word ágidxen, which when pronounced creates a specific sound. It is a form of speech which transmits a particular state and makes the word and the tongue a shared place between bodies and voices.

A body is uncovered, unprotected, like a call to be assisted by others. The tongue, as a muscular organ of the mouth, is also exposed at the time of pronouncing words. To speak, say and name is to put the tongue (anatomical and linguistic) in contact with the air. To leave the tongue exposed, openly. ágidxen throws into relief phonation to observe how each sound is developed in the body, understanding that the voice is body and matter and here, in the Museo’s Garden, it is also foliage and half-light. Equally, it looks to be conscious of the time of emission and the semantic landscapes, at times abstract, that this invokes.

The act of creating sound through the voice, as a physical occurrence, also stirs an awareness of other forms of presence. Firstly, orality which, as a collective practice, notices and makes us notice what we are, producing memory and developing history. And secondly, because the space of action and pronunciation are shaped with the vibration of musical composition, in this instance produced  by Estanis Comella. The different morphologies of voice and sound are envisaged, remaining in the air or covering themselves in an action of listening and mutual care. Phonemes, words, phrases, ambient sound, air, birds and whispers open mental, imaginary and physical spaces. They make reality.

Credits:

Performance: Josu Bilbao and Estanis Comella
Supported by the Department of Culture and Linguistic Policy of the Basque Government, ágidxen had a first stage, askiè altu, held in the auditorium of the University of the Basque Country/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea, in Bilbao, within the framework of the Urak dakar encounters, curated by Bulegoa z/b.

“The coherence and persistence of Paz’s work has brought about vast and fruitful constellations crossed with questions on what dance does and the affective, political and aesthetic framework of choreography and its relationship to the forces and impulses of the capitalist system, with a view to delving into the possibility of a mode of subjectivation extracted from its regime of value production”.
Andrea Rodrigo

Lo que baila (What Dances) seeks, through a modus operandi rooted in dance, to make something present that is not there, since it has already been there and because, in not being, it is kept latently as an event to come, and can re-appear at any time and in many forms. This form, Paz Rojo tells us, is a found form, “a print or residue that can be enjoyed selflessly”.

This piece gathers and mobilises findings, also making them appear and disappear, and stays in continuous movement, akin to the movement of consciousness, which goes from one thought and observation to the next, without staying with any of them, letting them circulate in disregard, sliding in the direct sense of physical dance. It opens feelings and meanings that are dissociated from the aspiration of a characteristic subjectivity. To dance de-subjectivation to exhaustion. Letting, by doing so, the vibrating contours to be perceived of a body that does not end where the skin ends.

Credits:

Concept, dance and sound space design: Paz Rojo
Sound editing: Paz Rojo and Emilio Tomé
With the support of the Festival Domingo-La Casa Encendida (Madrid, 2021) and programmes of stage creation residencies at the Centro de Cultura Contemporánea Condeduque (Madrid) and Köttinspektionen Dans (Uppsala, Sweden).