17 OUT

CRISTIAN DUARTE X ANDERSON DO CARMO = 10 hot thoughts.

By Anderson do Carmo, around Hot 100 – The Hot One Hundred Choreographers, by Cristian Duarte.

1. “Contemporary dance is a kind of still dance, kind of weird, kind of not-to-be-understood… that’s it, kind of…” But no. The many trial definitions for contemporary dance extrapolate what we call dance and request the help of many. Giorgio Agamben becomes a constant and repeated presence whenever you want to find the obscurity of a time and because of it shed some kind of light. Regardless of who’s the interlocutor, chances of answers becoming a stutter as the one above between inverted commas are fat. But, as the Biennial begins for The Last Time it’s inevitable to think how/what-for/when/many-other-questions to revisit a repertoire is important. How and what for should we do what has been done for such a long time? Is it bad to dance a dance that’s 25 years old? Or 100 years old? No. What’s bad is to believe that you can have/be a body as, say, 10 years ago.
2. “So dance needs thinking? Like: high brow and intellectualish? Like really smart? It can’t be just pretty and happy, of course not!” Not at all. As a matter of fact, it seems that the more untamed by the current thought, the more beautiful a dance is, when you need a philosophical gym to reach a savage dance, a savage thought. This doesn’t mean that to dance is not to think, it means that to dance is to think beyond custody, beyond what’s certified, proved etc, etc, etc. To dance is to think about what’s not appareled with minute details and rigor. To dance is to make future archeology.
3. “Ok, I got it. So this dance is cool because it goes ctrl+c ctrl+v about good things and so it can’t go wrong, right?” A future inventory, a list vertigo: beautiful indeed. But even more beautiful is to see places in-between: the 100 doesn’t matter much, what matters is what out of these 100 become something else in 1. Recognize the emblems awesomely precise, the change of states, the network is a safe harbor, even ground. The vertigo comes exactly when instead of Mary Wigman, Cena 11, Wagner Schwartz, Joe Doe, Jonathan Williams come into the mind, the void. When we see something that isn’t recognizable and doesn’t allow us to understand what’s to come. When it seems that the mind activates a principle, legs dance another choreography and the back is engaged in another information piece. When something nameless appears, that’s when the fun begins.
4. Every poetic choice carries within a political implication. No inverted commas and no sarcasm intended.
5. Every ethical implication emerges from an esthetic choice. No inverted commas and no sarcasm intended.
6. Cristian Duarte’s dance is a nymph dance: its matter doesn’t shape up, its matter is the shape in itself. It’s a paradigm in the very notion of image: it’s political because it doesn’t exercise politics. It’s a protest that isn’t against anything, it’s in favor of something. Extreme difference, visceral difference.
7. Cristian Duarte’s dance is a dance in the present tense. DON’T think about past-present-future next to an arrow towards progress. Let’s think like this: the present not as a succession of the past and  preceding the future, but as a COEXISTANCE that has the virtuality of the first and the unpredictability of the latter.
8. When I watch the HOT 100 in Santos next to Sheila Ribeiro and we whisper into each other’s ear every time we recognize a choreo, I think: “This is a political work among the best!” Why? Because I see a dance that collects metamorphosis instants that precede institutionalizations. A tumbler in a explosion dance. An Atlas Mnemosyne of earthquake dance.
9. “A trace is something from another that remains in me and yet I am sure that I have always had it.”
10. A trace is the fulfillment of a promise that hasn’t even been made.

1 thought to heat up what insists on being cold

1. Every body and the body as a whole can only exist in the crossing of the world’s remains. Control escapes from us there. What doesn’t escape is what we chose to do when we understand that.

Anderson do Carmo is a dancer of the group Cena 11 Cia de Dança and a researcher of the arts linked to CEART-UDESC. He is interested in investigating, activating and engaging into proceedings that may produce a simple, honest and elegant dance.

Translation Portuguese-English: writer and poet Chris Ritchie, M.A.