THIS IS A SOLO
The starting point for
the creation of the solo 'Lime Green on Bright Pink' came from the
observation of my personal relation to the palce where the work was
being devellop in a specific moment in time. Coming out from a
personal feeling of isolation and enclosure in a particular physical
and mental space, the desire to open up to a wider frame of attention
and the question 'How can I displace my
subjectivity?' and as a pursuit for differentiation : 'What other dance schools and dance students exists in Wedding?'.
To begin to answer to
this question it was necessary to engage in field work, by firstly
collecting a list of the dance schools (dance school understood
broadely as a place were dance and choreography is approached as
practice) existing in Wedding and then to go and engage in a series
of visits.
What I found out in a
first moment was the prevalence of schools that have as main teaching
axis oriental dance which in itself resonates with the neighbourhood
topology since it is an area in its majority inhabited by turkish or
from turkish decent people despite being under an acellarated
process of gentrification of which the Ufferstudios project
necessarily makes part of.
During the several
encounters with a few of these schools in which the Showcase project
was presented and discussed, I had a captivating talk with Gloria
Barbin from Mobile-Studio fur Bewegung und Tanz and she agreed to put
me in contact with her students. I was contacted by Susanne Schubert,
a ten year amateur belly dancer practioner interested in the project
and I proposed her a structure for our Joint-creation.
We would have five
working sessions, three where we would talk about the project and get
to know each other, a general rehersal and the presentation of the
performance.
The three working
sessions where audio recorded in order not only to document the
process but also to have the possibility to use that material later
on in some form.
During our
pre-established encounters, I found out that Susanne had already
done a solo for her friend's birthday party and I became interested
in the possibility of having her performing her solo inside my solo,
once again the idea of a frame within a frame.
I was interested in not
interfering at all with her solo and present it as a kind of 'ready
made' through which Susanne would necessarily have a 'voice' even if
displaced from the original context.
In order to achieve this,
this relationship needed to be framed and so I went back to the
recordings and wrote a script based on our talks which meant both to
frame our encounter and to produce a game of representations (the
use of the characters names was here instrumental) creating an
ambiguity of relations rather than producing statements or positions.
In this respect, I would
like add that the ambition of this proposal was not to deal
directly with social issues , cultural stereotypes or enact a
criticism but simply to bring forward the relation that this two
people, as real as fictionalized, had during the singular process of
the encounter.
However, it remains
interesting to me the fact that this encounter might also
evoke broader questions in relations to local issues (as some of the
feedbacks from the users of ufferstudios that though about issues
related with fear of robbery and other intrusions from the local
community in that space) as well wider issues (emigration,
gentrification etc) but as a side effect or by product rather than coming from a
whish to provoke them.
