blog_ 7x7
CLARISSA SACCHELLI x PAULA PI = I searched for a little place in the sun in the most beautiful garden of the city.
By Paula Pi around Untitled (Sem Título), by Clarissa Sacchelli.
I searched for a little place in the sun in the most beautiful garden of the city. The day is so beautiful and there are many people on the streets. I miss you. I feel like talking for hours. I left with so many things unsaid… for now I say that I won’t tell you about my ways here. not today. these things left unsaid crossed the ocean with me and still crowd my days. today I tell you one of them. maybe not the most pleasant, but the most necessary! for me at least. you’ll understand. I start by saying that I feel guilty about the rush before the trip to come here, it swallowed me and prevented me from talking to you a bit more after the fateful santos biennial (the subject is on the table!). I know you needed me and I wasn’t there to listen, worse, I ended up going away without properly explaining my comments on your work and I fear having been misinterpreted. I feel selfish for not taking the time to share my thoughts with you. I hope it’s not too late.
so here I am sitting in this beautiful garden taking the time to solve this matter for once and all. let’s do it. wait! before I need you to know that what will be said will be said caringly and carefully, I wish some clarity and hope for few misunderstandings. ok? could you not forget that? could you? and I will say out of need – this is very important too, extremely important! – I wish to be precise in my writing because I need to be frank, I need to share and also to provoke you for provocation feeds any relationship. I want to provoke myself too! ah, one more thing: I’m fully aware that this thing of talking about somebody else’s work is super delicate for it’s like getting into somebody’s life, and getting into crises and dramas of creative processes is to pick a fight, a hell, a lack of control… but I’m not going away. do you know why? I think we should collaborate and get more into each other’s things… ok. that being said, I finally start. from the end. I’d like to know what will become of this work of yours from now on. deep down (wish for the deep) this is the point for me. I can’t stop thinking that you thought about keeping this work in the drawer. this is too strong. it makes my heart beat. I think about the conversations we’ve had about what to you seems fragile or uncertain in this work. I think about the clarissa that created this performance in 2011 and the clarissa that pulses in 2013. I think about how we keep interest in an artistic work and how we transform it or don’t transform it along with ourselves. I think about what sustains this work, which may be something different from when it was created. I think whether it would be the kind of work that, once altered, would lose its cohesion, identity and its capacity to sustain itself. (I myself insisted on that, you know, to transform a work together with me; but today I’m beginning to be more interested in creations for what they are themselves, endowed with their own inner logic that is able to give them identity and sustainability, as a thing in the world with its own existence to be affirmed.) it’s kind of in this place where (that?) I keep trying to investigate what’s this work of yours, what it puts or wishes to put at stake. (whisper: if I can get closer to the way you see and think your creation, I can get to know you better and that interests me very much, of course!) and if I try to understand your wish to quit it, I get to the following: you could either say that you think of quitting this work because it doesn’t make sense to you anymore (or the issues it puts at stake), or else because you don’t believe anymore in the way you chose to put the issues at stake, though still believing on the issues themselves. are you with me so far? in this perspective, to go ahead with it would be either to keep its format and ask whether it would be able to bring new questions up or to lean over the questions and allow yourself to change the format. can you understand? no, I lie, I think I’m being rather dualistic! because, in fact, I don’t think I believe what I just said… an artistic work may be moved both by questions and by forms/materials that appear along the creative process; there’s always some negotiation there as much as feedback and interdependency. both questions and forms/materials may be abandoned, transformed, recycled, imploded, relocated etc., etc., etc. everything depends very much on the artist, on the moment, on the context, on the winds that blow. so, I’m sorry, I think I got kind of lost in an analysis that I’m not able to undertake. or it’s because I like to inhabit doubt better than certainty… so now I prefer to stick with the idea that you will need to negotiate what you already have as form/material for the questions that are relevant to you in the work. you have changed, the work has changed, the contexts have changed. it’s a fact. but what in this performance makes you stick with this thing you entitle “untitled”? I really want to hear this answer, really do, please, don’t forget to write to me. it’s serious, ok? and while the answer is on its way, I will do here the exercise of looking at the work as the thing itself, look at the logic that it builds for itself, (this is obviously under my super affected vision – and seeing no problem with that! – for everything I know about you and this performance). no, forgive me, actually it’s not even just that what I want to do exactly. I want to throw at you my private delirium about the work from the logic that it builds for me. deal? well, I’ll take that as a yes… and I’ll start saying that in my view today, more than in all previous versions, the work puts several questions at stake: an inversion of roles of the spectators-performers, an insistence on immobility to move the other or the subversion of a modus operandi of dance, the construction of a contemplation place, the materialization of the symbolic idea that what attaches me is also what sustains me, the settlement of a submission contract between performer and spectator and the power relationship implicit there (the story you told me about the sadomasochist contract, which I took in the sense that to submit is also to take over the situation. that was it, wasn’t it?). what my delirious projection tells me is that these questions could be a lot more powerful if… you dislocated the performance from the outdoors to inside the temple of representation. yes! in a theater, italian stage, lights, roundabouts and all that jazz, the same strategies you already use would gain an explosive effect! of course, this would imply rethinking many details, not less important. but now I allow myself to navigate a bit without my feet on firm ground (by the way, this thing of the explosive effect makes me think of something I’ve heard one of these days in a discussion about dramaturgy, something like dramaturgy in the sense of “the conditions that a work builds to guarantee the efficiency of what it puts at stake”; I started to amuse myself thinking about how to find efficiency in what constitutes or sustains a work, what goes towards the idea of the work as a thing itself, don’t you think so?). see where my journey heads to: if the performance happened inside a theater, what you say in your release about “what immobilizes to move and what moves to immobilize” would make a LOT more sense (to me, be reminded!) because the performance would actually operate in the habitual relationship between audiences and performers, inverting their roles. to state that it’s possible to move the other through immobility is much more powerful in a spectacular context and even more in a dance context precisely because this context generally assumes the relationship in reverse, spectators sitting still while watching people who move. in other words, there would be more power because the inversion of roles that you propose is based on the convention that belongs to the dance context (especially that made for the stage). if the performance happens outdoors, featuring a rather exhibiting character, as was the case during the biennial, a relationship is established with the white square of the gallery more than with the black box of the theater, and then the inversion of roles doesn’t happen because in an exhibit the given relationship is already that one of still works waiting for moving audiences. see? (briefly: on this subject about the relationship with spectators, I will open one more window to say just a few other things that are crossing my mind right now. I see great beauty in this thing of spectators needing to be engaged while performers need to learn to “spectate”. and that it’s only this way that the performance can happen. as performers of this work, I noticed that you, me and the girls are actually spectators, wouldn’t you agree? we are spectators of the reaction of the public that binds us to the glass walls, spectators of involuntary reactions of our own bodies and minds, spectators of the action of gravity too. of everything that moves around or inside us, while we insist on the immobility utopia. don’t you think that to “spectate” could be our assumed action in this work? would that make sense to you as an instruction piece to the performers? my intuition says that maybe some things would be clearer as internal motivation for us. my intuition… close the window). another point is your relation with the work’s release. I know how important it is to you to name things. it’s evident in your choice for title and in the release which I know you would like to have been on the biennial program, something new that you would like to have tried, but that was oddly censored (what a pity!) by sesc. if you are up to publishing (in the sense of making something public) a release such as “untitled/no release/undetermined duration” it’s because you’re dealing once again with other conventions proper of the spectacle regime, right? your release makes me think, for example, about artists’ obligation to name and explain their work and determine a duration that must be convenient to current practices in the market. now imagine a release like this on each seat of a theater. wouldn’t it be incredible?! it provokes me! I like this irony taste. then I ask you and myself: … don’t you think that questions that are important to you could dissolve because the performance happens in another space ruled by other conventions? ah, and there’s also the story of investment in immobility or in silence or in the “nothingness” that this work brings up to me: I picture the house full and nothing going on. I’d pay to see that! oh, and one more thing! I don’t need to say that if the performance happened in a theater you wouldn’t face problems (as the ones you had at the biennial) related to turn-off time and space. I say this mainly in the sense of how these variables ended up determining a public that wasn’t there to see the work, but was only passing by. the problem for me is that this performance NEEDS to be seen from beginning to end to constitute its internal sense, to be a happening/evenement and not entertainment. at least this is how I see it. the same way, the turn-off variables determined the impossibility of a vision with wider distance and breath in relation to the image that was being formed by the materialization of people’s action in the space – in that limited space, polluted by the multiple information in which sesc’s hall was turned into, what was left to us was the squeezed space behind the photographic exhibit, we performers and the audiences… it sure wasn’t somewhere people would like to be… and then comes another problem! in the crucial moment when we asked the public to stop binding us to the glass walls because there was already enough tape holding us, we actually gave them back their roles as spectators. and then we should all have shared the same long wait without an expected arrival somewhere or towards some result… and it’s exactly there that the distance of the public from the glass walls is fundamental! without distance, the public turns away and the extremely important link of your work’s dramaturgy is lost, preventing the construction of senses and affect… … but still on our roller coaster ride that this letter is becoming, I get back to the general view of my delirium – can you see where my reason travels through? think about how in a theater the audiences could walk around, cross the fourth wall and see the thing happening very closely, or how they could engage in the action of binding performers or of contemplating what’s going on sitting or standing in the back row or, or, or. don’t you find it interesting? to me this is all quite tempting… stop! I stop here (my intuition again), I think the provocation is cast! as you can see, I’m still the same confused person with few and far between flicking breakthroughs. but I tell you that this has been a very good sharing experience! I already feel a bit relieved, you know? even if right here there still lies a little guilt for again being so nosy in what you do… I can’t help myself! because deep down (wish for the deep again) your work makes me reflect very, very, very much. and this is really good! don’t you think? I hope that something said here can make sense to you and instigate you in a powerful way and, above all, push you into not quitting this work that, believe me, is indeed able TO MOVE me a great deal!
with love and in-motion,
pp.
jardin des plantes, montpellier
05.10.13
paula pi is an artist of dance, music and in-between. she has been developing her own projects since 2010, without putting partnerships aside. taking a break, she is currently taking the master e.xe.r.ce (FRA).
Translation Portuguese-English: writer and poet Chris Ritchie, M.A.