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7×7 – Armazenamento de energia para quem…

It is my pleasure to present the series 7X7, in which I invite young artists to write their reflections about the work of other artists – in this case, those programmed at the second edition of Festival Contemporâneo de Dança, held in November in São Paulo. The idea is to create a synergetic action instigating sensitive a critical analysis of the art of dance by young artists that are growing within it. Sheila Ribeiro

about sheila ribeiro/dona orpheline’s diet subtitles

Our words make up our social identity as much as our appearance and our behavior do. (…)

(PINKER, 2008, p. 425)

fragment of a context.

diet subtitles was created in 2000 and throughout the years the piece has been through a number of re-constructions. In the first versions, the piece and interpreted by Sheila Ribeiro/dona orpheline and Benôit Lachambre, Canadian dancer, choreographer and performer from Canada Benoit, who founded the companyPar b.l.eux in Montreal in 1996.

The latest presentations of diet subtitles took place in São Paulo, Santos and Shanghai. The audience in São Paulo was able to watch Sheila Ribeiro at Festival Contemporâneo de Dança, at Galeria Olido. However, another performer was summoned for this ‘recent version’ of the piece, Elielson Pacheco, member of Núcleo do Dirceu, an important dance group from Teresina. Curiously, most of the rehearsals were held over the internet. Together they form a duo: billboard girl.

In this use of the internet as creation tool, maybe there is a number questions brought by the displacements (virtual and/or real) regarding difference, distance, territorialization, etc. It is interesting to observe that some of these aspects, which seem to be used only as training, start to take the stage itself. By living in transit between Brazil, Canada, China, etc, Sheila Ribeiro offers information that cannot be detached from the interpretation of her work. If we get back to Steve Pinker’s quote (above) we can suppose/conclude that Sheila’s words – considering she is an artist who creates/speaks/thinks/writes in more than one language – probably make up her dance. Thus, Sheila presents inventive ways of existing within art’s unstable ground.

the show.

diet subtitles exposes a number of speeches our bodies are used to digesting daily. Thoughts condensed in their utmost synthesis, without any excess. Speeches that are triggered to order, condition and regulate our social conduct, triggering a series of phrases that are used to cover someone’s power intentions towards the others.

I WISH I HAD A … TO STICK IN YOUR …

… starting with small linguistic constructs, Sheila Ribeiro seems to ejaculate a series of urban/human communication habits. Presenting a series of ready-made speeches we spread around culture environments, to promote ourselves at work, in the media, in art, among our friends or at the dinner table. Such phrases are projected on the bodies of the two performer and compose the billborad girl, according to the artist’s own designation. Possibly because the whole body seems to be something of an billboard-of-itself and the environment in which it lives. In case the body is understood as an evolutionary (media) support composed by an aggregate – of thoughts, emotions, sensations, experiences – that is in constant negotiation with information from the places that go through it.

… do we merely reproduce someone else’s ‘habits’ – speech or even behavior ones – through our own personal billboards, just following a flux inertia that doesn´t belong to us?

Don´t pretend you don´t know these lines or that you didn´t say them, because Elielson Pacheco will literally throw them back at you. Those who don´t agree should speak up. Put your arrogance aside and talk back. Or point your finger back. Or find your place of speech or simply leave the room, or…

DON’T TELL ANYONE ABOUT YOUR PROJECT. IT´S BAD LUCK.

drawing in space.

The spectator will not be able to keep up with everything that happens during the performance. Its chaotic structure is based on a juxtaposition of images, on the simultaneity of actions, on the impossibility of observing the whole thing, on the partiality of the spectator’s point of view. Maybe, an attempt to provide the audience with the same kind of experience we have whilst walking through the city/metropolis, an excess of signals that supposedly serve to guide us, words that indicate where and how we should proceed. However, in this piece such words seem to promote an intriguing state of disorientation in our perception.

The devices (video, sound systems and the speakers, the lights, the slide projector) are placed in the room in such a way that all of it becomes the stage. Thus, the spectator is immersed in the show, aggregated to it. It is particularly curious to observe the audience finding its way around the space. Its displacement through the surroundings is an indication that there is a tendency of the body to organize itself when faced with chaos. The spectator is always seeking its place as audience, its reference point within any conventional show. On the other hand, the performer’s walk, their drawings in space and the arrangement of the objects are elements that seem to stretch out this comfortable logic, piercing through the audience and the scene.

sound design.

The sound ambience is an important aspect to highlight because it seems to contribute to the construction of this dream-like place, composing even more this post-punk, transsexual, sterile, sterilized and naked under an operating table. A show that has the participation of Sandra Coutinho, member of the band Mercenárias, the first Brazilian female punk band. From Elvis Presley to the noise of the bass and electric pedals. The sound establishes a friction between moments of pause, calmness and tension. Reinforcing the hypothesis that this show wishes to bring the feeling of walking through an urban space (sometimes stormy, sometimes welcoming, sometimes playful, sometimes aggressive, sometimes…). By using this sound project, Sheila offers us an example of how her work appropriates the advertisement language to skillfully display in one of her subtitles that the music was produced by none other that Edgar Scandurra. However, the sound we hear seems more like an author’s fusion between Scandurra’s project and the live performance by Sandra Coutinho.

designation.

This dance is high tech, but probably not because it uses projectors, moviemakers, dvd, slide projector and other devices dear to any research involving art and technology as an ‘fashionable strategy’ to raise funds. Likely this dance is high tech because it rather developed another technology for the body: the task of pressing a ballpoint pen on white paper to write I am high tech in Portuguese, Chinese, Arabic, English…

Unfortunately we can´t say writing is technology available to each and every body. After all, illiteracy still prevents many from having access to this kind of apparently simple technology that is writing/reading. However, this dance work still reminds us that we are all illiterate of another order. Maybe we are cultural illiterates, immersed in distracting and ambivalent issues, seeking to belong between local and/or global levels. Still incapable of relating with others and their complexity of codes/texts/languages.

Maybe it´s important to remember that we are still short on readers and reading material about dance, because few have access to the (sensitive) reflection brought by this technology of the body. An art and a thought that should be as available as a health plan, a school, a house, a museum, a theater…

The elaboration of the ‘I am high tech’ sign can also be seen as an ironic and acid metaphor for rampant desire, both from the artists and from this consumer’s society, to always be fashionable/at the showcase. At the moment when Sheila Ribeiro displays the ‘I am high tech’ sign besides Elielson there is nothing left to do but to crumple the paper, throw away its historical remains and later produce a new sign in order to return to fashion/showcase. We don´t know exactly when fashion starts, if it´s during the drawing on the paper, if it´s in the catwalk, if it´s in the mall’s windows. But so it happens that exactly the second someone declares to be fashionable, automatically they cease to be and we start waiting for the next one.

Oh! This is so contemporary (Tino Sehgal)

THE UTMOST FUSION OF TECHNIQUE IN ONLY ONE BODY

Sheila Ribeiro/dona orpheline offers an opportunity to re-think the already washed-out slogans about what it means be contemporary and/or high tech so that we make an effort to study a little more, to propose other interpretation of the world, more and more coherent with what we idealize as futurepresent (or presentpast). To at least try to keep away from this cyclical attempt to associate with high technology when we are always lacking the most basic foods. And to stop inventing/pretending new successful shows when in fact this society can´t handle any more hits.

Bruno Freire is a twenty six year old male artist from São Paulo, the son of a woman from Minas Gerais, grandson of a woman from Alagoas. He is graduating in art from PUC-SP in 2009, where he researches and writes essays about diaspora aesthetics in Latin America. Member of GRiD, CCSP’s reflection group.

Watch  an excerpt of an earlier version of legenda Diet, with Benôit Lachambre:

This essay is (in)directly based in the following references:

AGAMBEN, Giorgio (2009) O que é contemporâneo e outros ensaios. Ed Argos.

HALL, Stuart (2006) Da diáspora: Identidades e Mediações Culturais. Ed. UFMG (p. 10 – 70).

PINKER, Steve (2008) Do que é feito o pensamento. Ed. Cia das Letras.