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Diário de bordo.4 – Prisma Mexico

Monte Alban (photo 1) is an important archeological site located about 10km from Oaxaca, Mexico. It is one of the most ancient pre-Hispanic cities, the capital of the Zapotecs, whose peak took place between 500 b.c. and 800. Its population is estimated to have reached 35.000 inhabitants.

Well, we all (about 40 people, local artists, foreign artists, Prisma technical crew and friends) went to Monte Alban. It was a very sunny Saturday and the altitude made the sun feel even stronger. The skin color of most of us, the clothes, the sunglasses, hats, the group walking together, everything screamed: we are not from here.

It´s uncomfortable being a tourist when you don´t want to be one. It´s uncomfortable to feel like an invader, to feel bothered by my own camera, by with the group I´m a part of, by these clothes, by the guide struggling to explain everything in macaronic English.

Why does being a foreigner bother me so much?

The Mexican man who was guiding us told us some very interesting things about that place, the history, the people who lived there, their drawings and laws, he showed us a soccer field, he explained why they call the ball “pelota” (because they were made of animal hair, “pelo” in Spanish) and he made us clap our hands at the same time, so we could understand the amazing acoustic in that huge site. People took pictures, the group scattered around, I kept looking to the landscape and talking to a Portuguese lady. Afterwards we came down together and someone was telling me that things weren´t so expensive in Mexico if the Euro is your currency…

I read in Dom DeLillo’s book The Names that being a tourist may also mean to “escape accountability”.

He says:

“Errors and failings don’t cling to you the way they do back home. You’re able to drift across continents and languages, suspending the operation of sound thought. Tourism is the march of stupidity. You’re expected to be stupid. The entire mechanism of the host country is geared to travelers acting stupidly. You walk around dazed, squinting into fold-out maps. You don’t know how to talk to people, how to get anywhere, what the money means, what time it is, what to eat or how to eat it. Being stupid is the pattern, the level and the norm. You can exist on this level for weeks and months without reprimand or dire consequence. Together with thousands, you are granted immunities and broad freedoms. You are an army of fools, wearing bright polyesters, riding camels, taking pictures of each other, haggard, dysenteric, thirsty. There is nothing to think about but the next shapeless event.”

A day before this field trip to Monte Alban, we had a roundtable called: Roots for the future, culture, tradition and translation.

This roundtable was different, there was no table.

We formed a large circle with chairs and a microphone in a pedestal right in the middle. The moderator was Rani Nair (Sweden) and her suggestion was that whoever wished to could ask a question related to the table’s theme, but there was one condition: only questions, no answers to anybody’s questions, only questions. We were in that conversation for many minutes, we went through many different issues, of different levels of depth or superficiality, coming from very diverse contexts.

Are we forever seeking our roots?

Is Mexico in North America? Why do we have the feeling that Mexico is, in fact, in South America?

North, south, east, west: how much of these words are about power and domination?

As I wrote last week, many conversations around here touch upon issues of migration, frontiers, being from a country or another, the differences and economical power behind them. And these are questions that come not only from the Mexican that are here, they come from all of us, “the foreigners”, because we all feel foreign…

Your culture, not mine?

My country, not yours?

Who feels more like “the other” here? The Mexicans or the non-Mexicans?

Who disappears when we talk about “Mexicans” or “non-Mexicans”?

And, to change the context of these questions, we can always replace the words “Mexican” for “Brazilian” or “Paulistanos” or “Paraibanos” or “Venezuelan” or “classic” or “contemporary” or “non-artists” or “poor” or “rich” or “black”.

How many tools or traps can we have when we separate things in categories?

French-Bulgarian philosopher Julia Kristeva wrote on her book Strangers to Ourselves:

“(…)Strangely, the foreigner lives within us: he is the hidden force of our identity, the space that wrecks our abode, the time in which understanding and affinity founder. By recognizing him within ourselves, we are spared detesting him in himself. A symptom that precisely turns “we” into a problem, perhaps makes it impossible. The foreigner comes in when the consciousness of my difference arises, and he disappears when we all acknowledge ourselves as foreigners, anamenable to bonds and communities.”

Yes, after all, it seems that we are always talking about “the other” and the place this “other” comes from. And “the other” is all of us, whether we like it or not.

When we look from an outside perspective, why do we think we have a better point of view than the people from the local culture?

Concepts like nationalism and identity can add up to racism?

Are we open, curious, interested, in other cultures or are we just talking about ourselves?

Well, as you can see, many of the issues in that roundtable kept echoing within us in lunches, breaks, and I let them echo in this text too.

The works here in Oaxaca finished after 1 week. We had such plural things as a roundtable about Artists as artists, artists as curators, artists as institutions, another debate about Learning, researching and transferring knowledge – ways of sharing and instigating questions and Art as social and political agent of transformation.

We had shows by Tere O’Connor (USA), Xavier Le Roy (France), Jennifer Monson (USA), Miguel Gutierrez (USA), Jérôme Bel (France)/Pichet Klunchun (Thailand) and Thollem McDonas (USA) – Orquesta Libertad (Oaxaca).

I couldn´t see all the works, sometimes I was performing, sometimes I was participating in roundtables and, many times, there are things happening at the same time and we have to make choices or even rest a little from so much movement.

I had seen the work of Jerome Bel and Pichet Kluchun called Pichet Klunchun and myself, in Paris, in the premiere, in January 2006. Some things changed since then, about the text they speak, about the way they position themselves on stage and also about the impression I had at the time of the premiere that there was a lot of improvisation in all of that.

There´s no improvisation and the work matured a lot over the years.

And for me, the gravity of the work matured, I mean, the gravity of the debate the work proposes about what is “natural” and what is “exotic”, about having access or not to dances from each place, or better yet, about having access or not to the symbols and values of each place or person, about the implicit power held by those who ask the questions and who answer them, about being a tourist or a local and about the search for equivalence or identification regarding the other…

These are all questions that fell on my lap while I was watching the piece at Teatro Macedonio Alcalá, at the same time I realized that dichotomies such as natural/exotic, tourist/local, dance/concept really do not leave us much room for countless other articulation possibilities…

What do we do with all those things that are impossible to translate or to categorize?

The work that closed the week in Oaxaca was Comprovisation, by Thollem McDonas (USA) – Orquesta Libertad (OAXACA). Thollem worked the whole week with young musicians from Oaxaca, in their own compositions, and assembled a small repertory of songs ranging from more melodic compositions, so to speak, and other atonal ones. All very interesting to hear from those kids.

A big line gathered in front of Teatro Macedonio, a lot bigger than ones in other days. They were the parents and relatives of those kids.

And when the concert was over, the crowded theater applauded very enthusiastically.

On Sunday there were elections here. 77 million Mexicans voting to renew the Chamber of Deputies, besides electing the governors of six states, 549 mayors, 11 local congress, the Federal District Legislative Assembly and 16 City Halls for cities of the Federal District. On that day we took the bus from Oaxaca to Mexico.

As soon as we reached Mexico City D.C. for the second week of Prisma Forum, we watched a show of Compañia Nacional de Danza Folklórica, at Teatro de Danza. Afterwards we went to the Anthropology Museum, in the Mayan and Mexican rooms, which were open just so we could learn a little of the history. A Mexican woman who was looking at inscriptions in a rock next to me in the museum told me that every time a new subway line is built in the city, more history surfaces from under the earth.

The week started intensely and with more people participating in the meetings. DF is absurdly bigger than Oaxaca and we spent the entire next day at Centro Nacional de las Artes, a building complex that holds the centers for investigation and propagation of music, dance, plastic arts, theater, the national for painting school, classic dance, theater and cinema training. A very large place. This week we had many dancer, musicians, actors, researchers, from DF and neighboring cities.

Yesterday, in the end of the afternoon, me and Mia Haugland Habib (Norway) had a roundtable to coordinate. Mia is my partner in my new piece called EU PROMETO, ISTO É POLÍTICO (“I promisse, this is political). She worked with me for a month, last September, in Porto, in a big Sweet and Tender http://www.sweetandtender.org/wiki/index.php?title=Mia_Haugland_Habib meeting. For the research for this new piece I keep spending some periods of time with partners from different areas and then later I go back to working alone.

We had this roundtable to “come up with”. At first we thought about speaking about our research together, but we felt that there were still some points left to discuss from the debate that took place in the morning about Art and Activism, because it was a debate with people from many different works, and many times in these big group talks, it´s hard get near someone and have a closer exchange. So we decided we were going to pick up a thread of this morning’s conversation, we told everyone we were going to keep on this subject in the afternoon and that all those who were interested were invited.

So there were 7 people in our debate.

We all set on stage around a table and we used a microphone because it was being filmed. And it was a very interesting conversation, close, a debate that took place among the 7 people, taking from their experiences and issues, adding up differences and affinities. In this group we had one person who didn´t speak English and one person who didn´t speak Spanish, so this made us wait, at each sentence, the translation from one of the participants who kindly did this job for all of us. It was funny, there was this time we had to wait until one understood what the other was speaking (in English or in Spanish) and it brought us patience with the other, with the timing and understanding of the other, it didn´t disturb the roundtable at all, quite contrary, it got us closer.

Do I bring some romanticism into all this?

Maybe, but I speak of this specific point because I also want to speak about the different kinds of meeting we had and will have here, above all in a city as big as DF. There´s place for a lot of difference here and sometimes, there´s also no place. So some ground must be open with a machete.

The week continues, Monday night we had shows of David Zambrano (Venezuela/Netherlands) and Keith Hennesy (Canada/USA).

This week in the morning I´ll have chi kun classes with Laura Casas (Mexico) and seminars in the afternoon. This Tuesday we had a seminar called Al sur y al norte desde este lado: Coreografia Latino-Americana (“To the North and to the South from this side: Latin American Choreography”), with Javier Contreras (Mexico) and Lourdes Fernández (Mexico).

Ok, this week I mixed the zapotecs with “being a foreigner”, with young musicians from Oaxaca, with the questions of a seminar, with a roundtable with 7 people, with the Mayan room in the Antropology Museum, with paying things in Mexican pesos having euro as original currency and with photographic cameras.

I feel like Tom Zé. (I wish…) making a torrent of references and ideas.

But it´s like that now.

I hope I can throw seeds so you can catch them there, out of the many I gathered here during these days.

PS Mutchas gracias for the emails and comments here at idança, they make my writing here richer and gives me “ganas”.

PS 2 No, no, people are not wearing masks in the middle of the day here on the streets. Life goes on normally.

PS 3 In that roundtable in which only questions were made someone grabbed the microphone and asked: What do you, with the green hat, think about all these people that spent the week here?

The person with the green hat was a worker of the house where we worked every day and earlier he was sweeping the floor, but stopped to see that circle of questions. This man only smiled embarrassed and didn´t answer. I looked for him later to find out his opinion but I didn´t find him.