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“The really revolutionary revolution is to be achieved, not in the external world, but in the souls and flesh of human beings”

The sentence was written by Aldous Huxley in the foreword of the book Brave New World. And this is the most important issue, and the greatest mistake, with which the subject of new narratives has to deal with in a world that is expanding and shattering in so many directions.

The revolution is internal, in the soul and in the flesh and it is personal, intimate and within the individual.

This statement has implications regarding the understanding of the artist nowadays and of the possible strategies to communicate art. Thus, we should talk about a personal art, about individual authorships that express urgencies of someone who has something to say and about participative communication.

1. What does this mean?

We are excessively focused in what is external to us. As if the potential of transforming creativity inhabited this exterior. Actually, the mystery of imagination and transforming invention already exists, since ever, in a place that is interior, either interior in each one or interior within a relationship. In the case of a relationship it becomes a space “in between”. In all cases it is potentially a place/situation of intimacy. Under the skin “in the soul and flesh of human beings”

2. Present

Drawn in very general traces, I am situated in the present.

We are in a moment post gestures that liberated from everything that was mere artificial ornamentation, after liberation of dance from everything that were formal obligations and convention, to meet again, in the body and in thought, with itself, with the self that exists in absolute human dimension, reconducting with autonomy this art to its poetic dimension and its essence. It goes back to connect with reality, sensitivity and re-activates this communication dynamic. What characterizes this moment?

Some general traces:

1. Critical Realism

Therefore, a re-approximation with reality emerges, a renewed implication of art with social, human and political context. There are artists – I recall Meg Stuart or Francisco Camacho, for instance – who talk about ethical responsibility of art. The truth is that this rekindling of art with life is not a mere decontextualizing relationship, as it happened in the beginning, or formal research, but rather a questioning of life through art, in mutual implication. So much so that sometimes the distance between documentary or documentation and fiction is not easily perceivable.

Apparently, there is a simplification of language and a more direct communication that makes the dialogue between artist and audience more immediate, apparently less complex and dense that the postmodern fragmentation. Something that is, despite this appearance, far from meaning that the concrete idea, the content that style communicates, is less complex.

“Postmodernist writing celebrates ambiguity and complexity while realism struggles for clarity and simplicity. Critical realism does not always achieve its goals in this regard(…)” but one thing they assure, is that if the ideas seem difficult to grasp, is because the ideas are, themselves “what is complex rather than merely their mode of expression”, from the book “after postmodernism”.

2. Continuity as rupture

Há uma revalorização do passado, do património, da memória. Não no sentido de a repetir, ou repetir os seus códigos, e certamente ultrapassando a antrerior atitude de ruptura ou a decisão de o ignorar. Isto tem várias implicações, desde logo na possibilidade do amadurecimento de conhecimentos. Cada artista parte de um patamar de integração destas liberdades alcançadas por gerações anteriores, desde logo dos formatos e dos códigos. Cada artista integra, em si, ele próprio a colaboração, porque é já um híbrido no conjunto de competências que domina e um nómada entre culturas, geografias, saberes e linguagens artísticas. Significa que não verificamos já exactamente uma ruptura relativamente aos que o precederam, são espécie de irmãos mais novos que prosseguem o sentido da pesquisa, afirmando de forma mais enfática a personalidade artística e uma renovada urgência de algo que têm para expressar. Há um reaparecimento de urgências. Isto ao nível individual, do artista, mas também num sentido mais colectivo, porque a história é constantemente convocada, reavaliada, reconstruída, revisitada ou questionada. Por algum motivo, a bienal de Lyon se chama «Retour en avant» (Return to the past)?

The past, legacy and memory have been given new value. Not in the sense of repeating, or repeating its codes, and certainly going beyond the previous attitude of rupture or the decision to ignore. This has many implications, as in the possibility of maturing knowledge. Each artist starts off with the integration level of the freedoms achieved by previous generations, in style and codes. Each artist integrates, himself, the collaboration, because he is already a hybrid in the whole set of skills that he masters and a nomad between cultures, geographies, knowledge and artistic languages. This means that we still do not verify exactly rupture in relation to those who came before, they are kinds of younger brothers that continue the sense of the research, asserting emphatically the artistic personality and a renewed urgency of something they have to express. There is a reemergence of urgencies. That is in the individual level, that of the artist, but also in a more collective sense, for history is constantly called upon, reevaluated, reconstructed or questioned. For some reason, is the Lyon biannual called “Retour en avant” (Return to the past)?

3. Narratives of movement

The poetic dimension/content has been given new value, even in cases when the conceptual aspect is evident and consequent. I could even say that, in same cases the idea of narrative is reclaimed, of telling stories, even if not in a linear or literal way. This also implicitly brings the rescue of a desire for communication, as opposed to a more purely experimental, fragmented and abstract phase of the last decades of the last century.

4. The relationship with the other

This is one of the fundamental aspects, usually associated with the issue of interculturalism, but it is a lot more complex than that. I understand it as a symptom of the reconnection of art with reality that sometimes takes on a political, ethical character or at least a questioning one in some way. But, in the matter of the relationship with the other, we are not just talking about intercultural dialogue, we are talking about the most basic and complex issue, which is the relationship between individuals, the issue of the relationship itself, the issue of the individual with him/herself. It is problem that is present in many levels: in the multicultural level but also in the idea that the communication that takes place between individuals it is the sum of individuals that builds the community and the collective. And in the same way it becomes important to rethink issues like proximity and distance, center and periphery – there is a lot to say about that – or, for example, concepts like creation, it also becomes important to ask from which perspective do we relate with the other?

- Who is the other?

- That other that supposedly is supposedly in what is supposedly considered the periphery of this supposed centralism that is western culture?

We have been so worried about the production and the market trades, we hurry to produce the artificial. We unplug from the body. We automatize gestures. Reason, also a product, is produced mechanically.

5. Searching for the lost innocence

The issues I raised above are related with the urgency of something that is, if not true, at least honest.

Maybe the reconfiguration of the body, rehabilitating knowledge as power, in the other and in oneself, lies in something more essential and closer to a purity, honesty and innocence with remains that rest in us like shadows and ghosts. Ever more invisible and less tangible. In this Other, an other distant from the domain of political and economical strategies of art, maybe this innocence we need to reclaim still breathes. While we struggle in the conflict between the attempt to preserve memory and the attraction of oblivion. Because the dance that is also movement that produces thought is not merely intellectual, but is also feeling and poetic sensibility. It is dream and utopia.

6. Double exposure

After the rejection of representation, in the manifest of Yvonne Rainer in the 60’s, and the defense of the quality of a presence on stage, this – the quality of presence on stage – becomes both representation and presence. They co-exist, alternate or juxtapose. They do not fixate in only one, they are unstable flow.

Other elements I recognize, but will only list so I do not extend myself:

1. The notion of art implicates an idea of construction, but now it is about the construction of meaning, in which it is not enough to make an image present or to decontextualize an action or object, which had its meaning altered with time.

2. The recuperation of an idea of handicraft art, that resorts to many materials to execute, sometimes literally and manually, the construction of a fictive world.

3. The idea as a fundamental element of the object, either if it is fulfilled through the exposition of the process, in the shape of a conference or even a finished piece.

4. The time of the show as critical conscience of real time, thus a distinct management of rhythm, in which the peaks of intensity and the combination of more dynamic moments and more traditional contemplation can be rejected, proposing instead a time that interrupts the mental time of real life.

5. Praise of proximity and difference

6. It is still fragmentation, unbalance, instability and chaos that rehearse the establishment of a possible order, a place of utopia and criticism of reality.

7. Of shared intimacy, resulting from availability and desire to know the other, not a product of relationship activated in immediatism, because that is the dimension of spectacle and the entertainment market, which does not leave any mark in the spectator.

8. Praise of little perceptions, naked images and invisibility, places of shadows and out of the frame

9. Proximity, affection, dislocation of perspective and understanding

10. From the obsession for collaboration we went over to multiple personality and self-collaboration (from verticality to horizontality)

11. Precisely the proposal of interruption of the condition of spectator, which is the current human condition.

Issue that seem important to raise:

Wouldn´t it be about time to accept the ruin of the supposed recognizable parameters of the contemporary European frame?

If so, then how do we interrupt our prejudices? For they have been contaminated by the game of lies, of spectacle, of pure market strategy. None of this has sustainability or transforms the world we live in and that is the role and the place of art.

The issue becomes even more relevant when we talk about how artists should place themselves at risk, to make mistakes, that they should allow themselves to become vulnerable, share their weaknesses and expose something from the interior, delicate, pulsating… With so much make believe and lies, we need some honesty

It is not just the work that is open, as Umberto Eco asserts, but each one of us is an open possibility. And, even better, an open rehearsal.

Cultural dialogue must be constructed upon multiplicity. But it would be interesting if we could look at the other dislocating our perspective from where we are to a place that is open, a place that does not exist, or a place being permanently built. In this movement of the eye, it would be interesting to inhabit this place that does not exist but keeping the place where we are and the distance/proximity between the two.

But then, how to invent this place for the eye that is not a Marc Augé place but is an inexistent one?

Maybe an “in-between” place would be appropriate, as in these arts, a place between individuals. Giorgio Agamben speaks of the possible ways to travel, or the art of making the other visible within ourselves. Why don´t we set off in this journey with the same responsibility we would expect from politicians in the fulfillment of their duties? We complain that policies are outlined upon the ground, informed by the artists. Would we be hypocrites? The truth is that it is not with those eyes that we touch, or are affected, by an artistic proposal. We take a stand with eyes filled with established, formatted, crystallized references. Even if this look summons, in its discourse, categories that express a desire for freedom or words and concepts that suggest breaking away from those norms – as transdisciplinary, hybrid, indisciplinary, creation, piece, performance … – but, deep down, they are new and artificial prisons we use to restrain the movement of the body and of thought.

That which we make visible in ourselves, when we look at the other is usually the reflection or resonance of one self. Therefore, the challenge would be to destroy at each new look the specific references, to be creative in inventing ephemeral references that mean an approximation with the other, or multiple others, in “between” place.

The collective is made up by many specificities and many interlaced pairs, constantly trading partners and accomplices. They are webs. They are at least the webs that work.

We have a society model that is going through crisis, sustained by suffocating market logic. By opposition, dance, that is movement that is body and thought, in this invisible work of questioning, of liberating gestures from their functional logic, of experimentation, this dance wishes to travel into the unknown and to get the dream back and to overcome crisis, because the constant action of the contemporary is the body that places itself in unbalance and that finds, in an instant, a precarious balance that loses balance again. And in this balance keeps shifting position because, as choreographer Rui Horta wrote one day, dancing is shifting position.

There are many structures I know that talk about inventing something in a concerted manner, in the availability of organizing upon an artist or a project. Projects that work in the “between”, that “between” I mentioned, but also the “between” artistic definitions – theater, dance, music, literature, thought, plastic arts. They are porous to what exists in the outside. This space “between” is a privileged place to be for its inter-relational nature, and for that reason it is a place where exchange, sharing, discovery, hope and the future might take place.

Exemple and concrete proposals:

- Skite/Skite/Sweet & Tender

This project is symbolic of many of the issues I have traced and that identify the profile of the artist. It is a group of 40 young artists, it is neither a collective nor a structure nor a company, but rather it is the meeting of 40 individuals that come together in a common moment to, in this temporary collective, be able to achieve more individual power to individually accomplish their individual projects.

During a whole month, creators from different disciplines and from different geographic origins share the same space, this edition is in Porto, in a meeting that aims to experiment forms of artistic exchange, creation and production, in a constant dynamic of presentation, debates and feedback. It is a young project and it came from individual initiatives that is made possible by bringing back the historical concept of SKITE, organized in the beginning of the 90’s by Jean-Marc Adolphe from Mouvement and that had meetings and informal and experimental artist exchanges, which established a privileged dialogue with the place or the city where it happens but it is immediately inscribed in an international logic. The idea of shared research is one of the strategies used, one of the creative idea is to invite someone to adopt an artist, they estimated that the participation of each artist would cost around 2.500 euro and they invite, people, institutions, public or private entities, whoever wants to “adopt an artist” by paying for the expenses of the participation. They present themselves precisely as “ferment of new aesthetics and new models of creation”

- Artistic consulting and disconsulting

In the trend of artistic consulting, it is important to think about this counseling as an idea of being an accomplice who could be a generator of further creativity when allowing the artist the possibility of deciding not to be counseled, because he should have the right to choose.

This right to not be counseled is part of recuperating a notion of freedom as a right of any individual, which all should claim.

It would be important to explore creative strategies for communication. For example, apply the notion of counseling to the spectator. I refer to the case of Buda Arts Centre which has a “partner” program, in which the eye that follows and looks into artistic research is that of a non-specialized audience, that is available to be accomplice. It is important to think that the incorporation of knowledge we are speaking of, which is generated by this dance, can also go through the body of the spectator, in logic of participating communication, following the logic of the current information trends and even of art, which frequently makes the spectator an active participant of the artistic act.

- Therefore, we have the transmission and participating communication

Maybe it is interesting to remember that Plato used writing, supposedly a vehicle for fixation and documentation of memory, as a way to feed the most voracious and less experienced forgetfulness.

I am exploring an experimentation project for forms of transmission and proximity with the audiences of Laboral Escena, from Gijón, in which we discuss transposing to the relationship with the audiences what the arts have done: take over strategies and procedures from other languages. It means, for example (that is always under construction): exploring the notion of guided visit, but having a guide is someone who accompanies a group to a show and afterwards discusses with it the ways of perceiving, or the idea of audio recording, available to whoever is interested in listening to the artist talking about his work or listening to someone making a possible interpretation of the work, etc…

- Placement in public space

The importance of relating distinct layers of social dynamics, create projects that relate artists and, for example, private companies. The challenge is to find creative ways to place dance in public spaces in ways that are alternative to the traditional ones, which used to be the role of social communication, which have been quitting from these duties.

- Practical ideas:

a. More than the artistic cartography, I reckon in this moment it would be important to make a survey of good practices, of ways of working that are example in many areas of artistic action;

b. It is essential to build a relationship between artistic community and other communities, political, private economy, civil society…

c. Redefine the language and used concepts, questioning the existing ones and taking over to artistic discourse, in any of its levels (production, communication, theorization, foundation), expressions and terms that are imported from the language of the common citizen, working with him, and from the area of management and economy. It is the only way see to build a communication code that goes beyond the art environment.

Claudia Galhos is a Portuguese journalist and dance critic