Letter to performers (Desabar To Fall Over), 2023
Dears Julie, Lara, Sophia and Tiago ---
Two years later, I am finally able to gather a group of performers again. Blessed, is the word I have used to describe this year. The project that starts today is a manifestation of dear values and ideals, and I bring all of the pleasure and energy that my body generates when resonating thus. I hope this will rub off and spill over on you as we take on Desabar To Fall Over.
Desabar is a simple performance in both form and intent. We parade the streets of Christianshavn with samba music playing from our hips, our backs, our hands, from speakers attached to our bodies; and make our way back to O-Overgarden, where we stage a great confetti brawl. There are secrets and scenes and simple gestures along the way, but that is the gist of it.
When I met Julie and Sophia two years ago, I explained that I wished to have people around me, and to offer the time to share our stories, exercise and play, to use our bodies and imagination, with no further agenda. Add to this meeting a keen interest for the specificities of our context, what world we live in and the circumstances that bring us together (a Talking Heads song rings in my ears --- How did we get here?), and this is sufficient to elaborate powerful art. For Desabar, time had to be sacrificed in name of economic resources; and so my own personal desire of understanding and experimenting with two intuitions has had to step-in and take space as grounding and guiding force.
Why is public space in Copenhagen mostly undisturbed and what are the implications of this manicured precision?
During my time in the city I have noticed that, more than in other places I have known and visited, public space is scarcely the site of public expression. I haven’t come across spontaneous, disorganized, sudden and unexpected uses of streets and squares. The exemplary behavior waves at me like a red flag as a kid who grew up without causing much trouble; I cringe at the idea of a population disinterested in provoking friction and re-negotiating the terms of their lives, in taking over and proposing experiences to each other outside of the functional norm that designs the city itself.
Can samba support my body and those around me to break the patterns of our numbed senses and restore the possibility of a life otherwise?
I am also a wistful immigrant. I hadn’t displayed much appreciation for my country or my culture, or spent much time trying to puzzle out my own stakes in the national identity game before arriving to study in this land. But something was missing in the air, and listening to samba became a kind of necessity, same as eating and showering, and usually enjoyed while eating or showering. A form of nourishment. Suddenly this music, this beat, was affecting me and holding me together – so I could only stop and listen out.
I invoke each of you to perk up your curiosity and study samba and carnival with me. In many ways I am a novice when it comes to them; growing up my close friends and family had no interest in crowds, and my fascination with the party was limited to being a spectator at home, for the official televised parades. Only this year did I dip into the street parties and felt the mesmerizing motion and raw power of being a particle in that soup of people, wild emotions running from body to body, crossing the air, instituting a state of exception that charges us with potency.
Samba and present-day carnival are rooted in the heritage of enslaved people forcefully brought to Brazil, which received more of them than any other land: around 4 million. Their efforts to preserve their traditions miscegenated european cultural forms such as celebrations of spring, polka and the venetian carnival. Weaving elements of african dances and rhythms into the culture of the high-class whites became a tool to avoid persecution. By seducing intellectuals and authorities interested in fixating brazilian cultural forms as a token of “popular national identity”, black heritage was able to maintain its presence and strength. Toma lá da cá, as we say: negotiation is necessary to create the paths of living together. Sublimation and transcendence of the body, ethereal beauty and denial of the flesh have been dominant tropes of European traditions to this date, but when samba comes to play it seems to throw us back into ourselves and into the ground, the undeniable materiality of a body summoned to match the rhythm and complete the beat.
I have asked myself, and continue to ask, whether this piece is an act of self-appropriation. What right would I have to stage my own slice of carnival; and whether the operation will be immediately reduced to a process of cultural exchange, a harmless gesture that will be read as a funny summer diversion rather than as a container for a kind of power of societal transformation. (I have, of course, taken some measures to prevent this limited reading, which I would rather see play out than disclose at the moment). Regardless, I have no illusion that two weeks of intimacy with the material would be sufficient to displace structures that have been built in a lifetime; I am happy if we manage to create breaches of perception where a certain excitement of the body can create dissatisfaction and unrest towards the narrow space we tend to accept as “the way things are”.
And then, what is your role in this? I will go ahead and say that all physical tasks we propose ourselves are necessarily challenges for our own subjectivity. You are the first site of intervention. What happens when you, with everything that you are, your background and skills, get in touch with this type of music and beat? What happens when a passerby gets in touch with us excavating and exploring that relation? And what shines through when we do that committed to our togetherness as a group?
Over the next days we will dance, talk, think, share, eat and live together. Take note, I have not used the verb “to work”, not yet. If we simply “work together” we risk identifying work with life, supporting the commodification of life-force as necessary, fundamental or inescapable. Or even worse, moral. This commodification drives me insane. I see it as a process of careful specialization, isolation and ultimate exclusion & destruction, which sections and re-organizes life into a linear machine of efficiency for extraction, accumulation and senseless progress.
No, through the art game, I have attempted to steal back for ourselves hours of exchange and vitality.
What we will experience in our (however few) hours together is what I believe should be available to every single one of us, little human animals: the space to be in touch with our bodies, exercise awareness and agency, deepen our relations.
When I finally use “work” to describe the conditions of our meeting, it is with the intent to acknowledge some of those circumstances:
Please consider that I am currently receiving the same fee as each of you, 15.000 kr., for what has been a nearly seven-month relation with an institution, O-Overgaden, including not only the performance, but our joint fundraising efforts, an installation, and a workshop. In my current lifestyle (single, childless, and insisting in cheap rent, even if that means moving every couple of months) I consider the 10.000 kr. to 15.000 kr. range to match my needs for one month of comfortable living. In my homecity, I could afford to live from the same amount for two or three months. Each of you is receiving the same fee for two weeks of work, with the exception of Tiago – who is based in Lisbon and has had the plane tickets deducted from his fee.
I would be happy if you consider your own lifestyle and priorities. Can you do more with less? Can you liberate the “more” so it becomes available for contexts where even the “less” is lacking? I can’t help but to have the reality I grew up with coloring my perception of each danish kroner that crosses my bank account, including the ones that jumped over to yours. Minimum wage in Brazil is around 2000 kr. As of 2022, 38% of the population lives up to that threshold. Of those, 29,4% are below the poverty line, around 60 million people. I’m not sure what that means on a one-on-one basis, but it has certainly built suspicion within me toward the professionalization of art in general, and the professionalized dance field in Scandinavia in particular. Historically, properly financed and justly-paid wages within a capitalistic labor framework do not make good friends for experimental and transformative practices. The kind of work contemporary dance has taken upon itself since the first days of Judson Church Theatre sits squarely at that threshold. Everything that remotely risks the establishment, consciously or otherwise, will struggle to take root within what we, little human animals, personally would prefer to call a safe nest of economical security and future stability, a much coveted peace of mind.
Desabar is named after a lyric written during the 1964-1985 military dictatorship in Brasil. The song “Menina, Amanhã de Manhã” by Tom Zé describes a kind of obligatory happiness demanded from the population by the regime, simultaneously a source of tension and survival tool. Supporters of such authoritarian governments often hold dearly to the feelings of stability and peace the regime promotes.
But the body is never peaceful. It continuously re-arranges resources, shifts in disposition, and reacts to internal and external stimuli in surprising, upsetting, fascinating ways, returning to balance and quickly dropping out of it as circumstances demand. It finds its contours not on a fixed structure or framework, on a project, but in the limits of its exchanges and relations. Whatever remains of all that movement, whatever registers these experiences as ours, is what I call a body.
Back to the work at hand, I have chosen you to form this group because I believe in your training. Money is ultimately a form of trust bond. As professional performers (when in Rome…) I expect you to swiftly embody the physical elements, attention economy and spirit Desabar, requires and from that enhanced presence, connect with the people who we come across, resonate, amplify, and spread certain principles embedded in myself, my culture and my work that I wish to highlight, to plant within these flatlands we inhabit. As Alberto Lamego writes, and I quote from Muniz Sodré’s essay “Samba, the owner of the body”: “the apparent joy in Brazilian music is simply unrest.”
There are a lot of first times here for me: working with music, speakers, proper costumes, having a budget, collaborating with an institution, hiring people, having a score outlined before the work even begins… ultimately I am also a young(ish) artist experimenting art-making outside of school, and while I do take our time together, the engagement with audiences and the values here outlined very seriously, everything else is fluff.
So shake it off, back out of work and into living, experience: our time together is a time of constructing and restoring bonds, of undoing the processes of isolation promoted by hegemonic western subjectivity; by colonization, slavery and contractual mindsets, capitalist and individualistic values as they reflect on each of us. From the work of Fernanda Eugênio and João Fiadeiro, anthropologist and choreographer based in Lisbon, respectively, I have latched onto two questions that live and breathe in everything I do. The act of simply exploring them in earnest, I believe, is sufficient to engage in a transformative artistic practice. Imagine a world where each of us are committed to sensually figuring out “what affects me?”, what makes rise in my body a physical engagement with such power as to change my constitution and disposition, and “how to live together?”, not just you and me, but you and me and every body, every being, in our hopelessly globalized world.
Copenhagen, May 25