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This column was written in the urgency of something in-between. I was arriving back in Rio de Janeiro from the VII Bienal Internacional de Dança de Fortaleza and was about to dive again into the pain and pleasure of the program of yet another festival, Panorama de Dança. Panorama came and went and along with it came the II Dance Economy Seminar which bore fruit, deepened and continued what was began in the previous year. We had a full house, live transmission via internet, strong speeches and a deep urgency for exchange about something that concerns all of us. Right this moment there is an ongoing discussion group; eight cities are slated to host similar seminars next year; the National Dance Plan is available and a lot of good people believe this set of themes can serve as currency for the necessary national barter of actions. I won´t write much specifically about the seminar for now. I summon readers for a retrospective of the events and to keep up with the next episodes at the Seminar’s blog. (Take part in this collaboration in progess!)

I want to remain true to what was assigned as urgent when I started this column. And the in-between world of dance festivals presented itself to me as an opportunity, more than a motive.

I always ask myself how much of a dance festival also, and maybe above all, takes place in the cracks of the program. Attending it is a wager. We count on the fact that the curatorship was able to weave good opportunities, good reasons for people to meet and thus the necessary sharing of the sensible , as Jacques Ranciére inspires us. From dissent to sharing. In sharing, a policy.

The wager is also in mutuality as the only and precarious certainty that dance can still be that which unites us in the construct of something in common. Small and strong encounters reassure a specific kind of friendship built in distance. Each of the partners, most of the times without knowing, collaborates with the other in the shared invention of the world. Moreover, partnership comes beforehand, it is the condition.

Often in festival, we discover someone’s partners. Before, from a name we know from a reference in the catalogue. It´s their work, their action in the world, that feeds a friendship whose silent exercise – exercise that is not exercised – unites us. It´s a network of potential affects, an unfulfilled philia that deconstructs the future in favor of world affects and dance affects. Without knowing, the program of a festival weaves, without aim or program, a silent network of affects. That is also politics.

It was like that, out of sheer luck, that a breakfast at Bienal de Fortaleza reunited me and my friend Vera Mantero, whose solos I had the pleasure of commenting during the riocenacontemporanea festival in 2005. I gladly realized how much our dance friendship continued to be weaved, in spite of live encounters, those that never happened again since. Our conversation actually became meta-conversation. We talked about the liquid symptoms (Bauman) that rule affections nowadays and how contradictory it is that our dance projects talk about mutuality as politics and how difficult it is for us to actually meet. Circumstance of the world, situation of dance.

I thought about the choreographer friends I seldom meet. By the way, meeting to rehearse has become a nuisance, I stopped and I thought. I remembered the European festivals circuit that more and more requires smaller and lighter suitcase; clothes with less gender differentiation, halfway between rehearsal clothes and casual clothes. The widespread of white, light and portable Macintosh computers, ready to weave relationships – almost a cool fetish of the liquid generation.

Without sorrow, I also thought about how much smaller suitcases are metaphors for a certain expatriation and how much it collaborates, without any cause and effect relationship, in constituting a network, a beautiful network, and in the likely de-constitution of a dance environment. I think about how much our dance relationships are always intermediated by projects; how much the risk of encounter is stolen beforehand by the compliment of collaboration. I thought about collaboration, so celebrated in dance lately, like a symptom. And how it is contradictorily supported by a network of relationships that are always intermediated by the cash of a project or grant program. I will meet you, unless the grant program won´t allow it.

In this virtual site, I already defended the project as standardization of the work and the economy in a time of decadence of the job. Invention as sanity test ! – paraphrasing the cannibalistic poet. I am not suffering from labor rights melancholy. By the way, for better or for worse, the Brazilian Consolidation of Labor Laws never actually consolidated (labor) relationships in dance. Faced again with contemporary liquidity, I believe in the strength of the construction of a world based in the indeterminism of the project and how much this indeterminism become economy and weave policy. But I´m inclined to say that the compensation of the project is the invention of new way of inhabiting. Inhabiting without residency, but with resilience.

In the current state of the dance environment in Rio de Janeiro, resilience may rhyme with resistance. It´s a situation in Rio, but I see it as a possible portrait of a national circumstance. A certain atomization I dare recognize in the dance scene in Rio de Janeiro, a certain rarefaction of togetherness bother me. I ask myself if the logic of grant programs, for instance, somehow collaborates with this situation.

Since the dance sector has lately found sustainability in the grant programs that abound in the country, maybe it´s time for a reflection. Not that we question their existence. That would be a historical setback, a kind of shot in the foot. But maybe some problems can be at least outlined. Everything is still new for all of us and that is why I write this column in a summoning spirit. What is presented here is the writing of this moment, precarious, incomplete, uncertain. Full of questions, I feel like talking.

I wonder if the logic of the product present in the interstices of the words of the grant program regulations confronts the logic of the process so necessary in the constitution of dance writings and, upon them, strong dance ties. I also ask myself, even more strongly, how much the fact that we mediate our activities both by the logic and the temporalities of grant programs disturbs and even harm the creation of this dance philia I previously mentioned.

I don´t speak of an exercise of the dance class, because I already don´t know if I believe in this word, or in dealing like this with the problem. I am also not here, right now, to talk (badly) about the state. I want to talk about us and how much we are delegating to the state and its inevitable anonymity and impersonality, the management both of our time and our lack of patience to find, our lack of common sense.

I see an insidious and perverse management of affections according to a miserable competitiveness, upon which being awarded a grant means contradiction and immediately getting in the line of the forsaken again. When we fulfill a project, we meet the requirements of the program, in terms of deadlines and presentation numbers, for instance, and maybe we dangerously think this is enough. Thus, we give more satisfaction to the state than to dance itself about how much our actions collaborate or not with the common network of their coming to be. What are we doing after all? What world are we helping to invent?

I thought about how contradictory it is that we celebrate the grant programs and deplore the products that come out of them. Nowadays we become impatient with premieres. We almost never attend them. We prefer to postpone or avoid the encounter. Premieres scare us, surprise us and many times bore us. There isn´t much to celebrate. Grumpiness rules.

Maybe nowadays resistance is also to be found. Living together, that´s a sanity test! And it´s exactly at this point that resilience rhymes with resistance. Upon the togetherness of communicating singularities (Deleuze), dance, all of them, those fulfilled and those that have not (yet) been fulfilled can resist as a non-programmatic project of something in common.

That is why I talk about defending resilience, about new ways of acting as participants in the constitution of a strong network of relationships that work among themselves in the delicate meshes of a sensible in dance, something common. Such as Ranciére suggests, taking upon dissent and the inevitable sharing of the sensible to which they push us to, that this sense of community, self regulating and because it is not democratic, it presents itself as possibility and as politics. And I must say a dance festival is a festival of dissent.

That De Andrade from the sanity test is the same from the cannibalism that once said he went to France and discovered Brazil. Paraphrasing him once more, maybe I had to go to Fortaleza to pull out a veil of Maya and discover Rio over again. Maybe Vera Mantero’s sweet Portuguese accent also contributed to a certain mist of Iberian melancholy that took me over.

I thought about how tacky it would be to write a column in the middle of Panorama 2009 worrying about the dance environment, with some exercise of locale that already took place in the city of Rio de Janeiro. I also thought about tackiness as a sanity test. And I encouraged myself to write and remember.

I remembered many important things. I remembered Panorama, this huge meeting park dance people helped to build well over a decade ago in the city of Rio de Janeiro. I thought about the strong dance philias the festival helped to build. I remembered how we waited the whole year for that plywood of (de)forming dissents of dance. We knew that by attending Panorama we were sure to meet everybody.

I thought about the mutuality that speaks to us about a dance environment that resists. I thought that Panorama was a good (dance) reason, provocative enough to make us think together about mutuality as exercise of a non-programmatic dance future. Attending it is also political. I thought about this column as a warning. And I dared finish it without concluding it.