website

from now on please take a look at tarcha.net
thanks to Leo Antunes :)

Dance Unlimited

I am very glad to start in a few months the master course at ArtEZ in Arnhem - just now I came back from Brazil filled up with energy :)

Hölderlin

'It is through joy that you will try hard to understand the pure in general, men and all living beings; it is thanks to this joy that you will grasp all what is essential and characteristic, all of the successive chains: repeat to yourself in their conjunction all of the parts that make up this chain, until living perception bursts forth once again more objectively than thought, through joy, before the need arises; intelligence, which proceeds only from necessity, is always biased.
Still, at other times, looking out to sea, I think I am seeing my life over again, its ebb and flow, its happiness and mourning, and I think I hear.'

in Birth to Presence by Jean-Luc Nancy - page 81

highlight

in Oslo was Paulo Azevedo's speech - Cia Membros.
a tense start and lots of great considerations rounding up with
we wanna make a dance for a body and not a body for a dance.

...

by Theo Solnik

"(...) we must instead learn to think of the human as what results from the practical and political separation of humanity and animality. (...) on that caesura, on that empty interval between man and animal that is neither animal life nor human life. It is this state of 'bare life' (...)"

from the back cover of Giorgio Agamben's The open: man and animal

knowledge and fun

last few days at Tanz im August’s K.a.F.
around the question ‘What makes me show what I show?’

http://kaf-berlin.blogspot.com

.
we also got to act an intervention in Yvonne Rainer’s RoS INDEXICAL :)

Clarice

I couldn't resist to publish here this interview with Clarice Lispector, my favourite writer.

manifesto

written in 2004, mid-way through my studies at ArtEZ, task proposed by João da Silva


what ought we to do when we are at leisure?

what are the implications of the glass architecture that surrounds us?

what if history is not being taught anymore at schools?

what if perception is reduced to simple absorption of daily life shocks?

is there hope?

what about the responsibility of being hungry?

what about taking a closer look?



does the eye go blind when it only wants to see why?

what if all what is solid melts into air?

is there any one-way trajectory?

what do we speak about when we speak about love?

is it a long and widening road?

how much can one choose?

lifelessness in movement, or how do the dead move?



waiting for or waiting upon?

can we possess life?

is confusion the sign of our times?

how similar is octopuses´escape behavior, from the purely physical point of view, to the escape behavior of, say, middle-aged, middle-class American males?

how to accumulate?

how to practice?

what about taking some distance?

actualities of body

...glad to find one other text by Boyan Manchev.

Actualities of Body. The Contemporary Conditions of Dance

Kantor

from a talk with Maurits Cornelis,

who spent a few months observing

Kantor work in Poland in the 80's

it is not the appearance but what doesn't appear that one sees

using the emballage with the awareness that is not what it is about - and then it becomes more and more what it is about
not showing the emballage, but showing that the real thing is not there
how to expose behaviour so that what comes through is the lack of a real existence

the more one does nothing the emballage or behaviour becomes dramatic or comic

deny something and you start to address it

lack of something: drama

related to the piece X - below, maker section

on theatre and dance

"The performance civilization of European origin suffers from the division between theatre and dance, almost as though these two were two different universes of expression.
They are in fact a single world which develops into distinct genres and yet is rooted in the experience of how the performer's body-mind becomes scenically present.
Instead of theatre and dance, we can talk of deep dance and evident dance. Deep dance is typical of the scenic forms which do not appear to be danced. Evident dance sometimes separates itself from every mimetic or narrative criterion and presents itself as a pure expression of physical dynamism.
All performance, however, is dance at its physical and mental roots, a dance of energy and thought."

from the program of Ode to Progress by Odin Theatre

a few more lines

a performance at Odin develops out of many questions put together in a way they can't be separated.

long time not knowing what it is. actors who accept working like this. trust.


not how to interpret a text but how to create a context.

evocative dramaturgy: glides from one evocation to the other through association. evocative opposed to narrative; it is itself, self-referential.

the beauty of actors is not their face, but their spine.

Theatre is a subversive way of being in society.


note: all the pictures displayed in the section bits(i)blog up to now I got from the people who were at Odin Week. thanks for the sharing and hope you enjoy reading!

further notes

'I work, as a director, very mathematically. Building a performance is like building an enigma, a sphinx, which has to be alive, evoked in the flesh of the actors.'

Eugenio Barba

Barba defined the essence of human condition as a simultaneity of paradoxical states.
In theatre, all elements attack the senses of the spectator - information is contiguous, two things that are not related share the same time/space.
The spectator might not understand it, but sense it.

He also spoke about the range in which the Odin actors are trained and about the ablative presence of the actor.
score: psychophysical quality that allows the same manifestations every time one performs - not the same feelings, it is not psychological.
The actions must be motivated. And precise.
The actor works enormously in the kinaesthetic sense of the spectator.
how to destroy the predictability that the kinaesthetic sense of the spectator knows? the actor has to cheat: go a little away from where he actually wants to go.
microscopically, so that it is not bizarre.
One can as well call it verfremdung.

Odin Week

This is what is left on the stage when Itsi Bitsi is over.

Here follow some of my notes from the first talk with Eugenio Barba:
in theatre - (1) an emotional need to leave the 'safe' and (2) an alive universe of stimuli, imagination. Theatre has to do with sensuality, with bodies and with having an impact on other bodies - spectators.
Actors are living books. Tacit knowledge, a sort of knowledge that can not be formulated, nor taught. The real knowledge has to be incorporated.
The beginning of Odin Theatre: an orfan who wants to escape from the suffocating burgeois environment in South of Italy. To become an immigrant, loosing one's language. Starting as amateur.
You are what you do. Code of excellence.
See through the illusions: there is a lot of work, solitude and abdications behind the easinesss of it.

Below: Rusti, Augusto, Mykalle, Barba, Gustavo, Loren, Chuca, Alejandra, Nathalie & Deise

itsi bitsi

A little more than a week ago I was in Holstebro in Denmark. We were 45 people from all over the world who spent nine amazing days visiting the company by Eugenio Barba, in the luxury of having daily talks with himself, training with the actors and watching all their repertoire. Iben Nagel Rasmussen and her piece Itsi Bitsi impressed me most. She is an actress at Odin since fourty years, her energy on stage is really astonishing. Sometimes behind the mask one wonders if she is maybe twenty years old again, or five.
Seven years ago I took a series of workshops at Lume, in Campinas/BR. Even earlier I had read The Paper Canoe. It was great to visit the source of what has inspired me for so long.

More on Odin Week will come.