Intelligent Minds and Bodies Helena Katz / Estado de São Paulo
We all know that contemporary dance offers no easy answers – which is what makes it so difficult for people to accept it. In fact its most unique characteristic, and exactly that which complicates its communication, is to be always asking questions. It is up to those of us who are exposed to its manifestations to discover what is the question. Obviously the question is not necessarily indicated by a question mark. It is instead a way of transforming the topic of the performance into a question, a way of making it problematic, investigating it, reflecting on the paths it takes, where it leads to, possible results. Sometimes, as in the case of Dani Lima’s latest production, the explicit question in the title is more confusing than illuminating.
The title asks us: Do the parts speak of the whole? But when we enter, the hierarchy of stage/audience has been dissolved. Besides the fact that there are no seats to afford an observation according to the renaissance perspective, a play is established between what we can and cannot see. The space, occupied by Tatiana Grinberg’s sculptures, induces movement. The dancers explore the orifices and surfaces of her works, scattered in pieces, with parts of their bodies
Tatiana’s creations are not treated as scenery in the usual sense, but as other bodies, and as such, also in parts. The dancers take the pieces from here to there, and both in the to-ing and the fro-ing they close off or unblock some field of vision. In this voluntary act of mapping out the space, it’s as though they increase the amplitude of the initial proposal, when the company concentrated on exploring the form of the sculptures and filling their spaces with parts of their bodies. During the whole process they are underlining the fact that the act of seeing is not innocent: it depends on the point from which one is looking. What we actually see is merely what we can see. It is always partial, glimpsed through a slit or a window – we always see a fragment, that which can be seen by someone looking from that particular angle.
What Dani Lima and her company demonstrate goes much deeper than merely making it clear that we can never see the whole. Fortunately, though it seems more concerned, (as indicated by the misleading question in the title), with the relationship of the parts to the whole, what the performance suggests is the actual absence of what is called the whole. By means of its admirable scenic solutions, the production shows that the whole is nothing but an ontological convention.
When the discussion turns to the inexistent whole, concentrating on this other form of everything which we call a person, it becomes even more provocative. In a motion of continual putting together and taking apart, which echoes what is being done in real time with Tatiana’s sculptures, the company indicates that the concept of a person also functions in this way. By showing that exclusive identity tags do not exist, since characteristics are almost always shared, it delicately destabilizes the option of associating attributes with identity. Having mixed up who is who, there is a final blow: not even the body can escape. The bodies always need each other, just like the parts of the sculptures.
Regard, identity, pseudopersonal characteristics, suddenly everything is revealed as the fruit of contruction and not of observation. There are no ready-made objects in the world waiting to be collected and recognised by a regard. The excellent performances of Dani Lima, Clarice Silva, Monica Burity, Rodrigo Maia, Vinicius Salles and Vivian Miller are fundamental in ensuring that the formulation of such complex, necessary and relevant ideas should have encountered the clarity employed in this creation. How lucky that, from time to time, companies like this one remind us that intelligence, when it exists, is both in the mind and the body.
Helena Katz is a dance critic and researcher.
idança - 08/16/2004
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