The night long reading performance Useless lands by Catalina Insignares and Carolina Mendonca, which is a compilation of fictional and theoretical texts that speak about a pre-industrial-revolution world takes place in the Music school in Žďár nad Sázavou on Friday 29th of March 2019 from midnight till the morning in the frame of the interdisciplinary residency Incubator organised by centre of choreographic development Se.s.ta in the castle in Žďár nad Sázavou. In order to introduce the way how both artists think choreography and why they consider expanded choreography as a tool to gather and act, we introduce the excerpt of their interview which was released in Watt - contemporary dance magasine in 2018 and which can guide you in the process of their thinking.
Catalina Insignares is a Colombian choreographer and dancer living between Paris and Giessen (Germany where she studied in the famous Choreography and Performance Master, just as Carolina Mendonca, choreographer and ramaturg from Sao Paolo. They met in Impulztanz (Vienna) during the 2014 danceWeb Scholarship program. us as a useless duet is the first piece that Catalina Insignares who often works in collaboration with other artists, signs as an individual author and it is Carolina Mendonca, with whom she collaborates in different ways since 2014, who assumes the interviewer’s role to explore the question of the how.
Carolina Mendonca : OK, I am recording
Catalina Insignares: OK
CI: Hello Carolina
CM: hello Catalina. Thank you for coming to my lovely garden. So we are here to talk about the project us as a useless duet and the ideas that surround it, trying to unfold the ideas that are related to the work. So maybe we start describing a bit what is us as a useless duet.
CI: It’s a place that comes from a practice. And this is one of the questions that i still have. What it is or what it should be. What is more operational for it to be. Itś a piece where we meet together to dance. Each of us will prepare something, will bring a proposal and we will both negotiate if we both want to do this proposal and then we do it. We also commit to meet for five weeks, once a week for two hours. So It takes this rhythm that is kind of closer to other practices like your weekly yoga or your weekly therapy or something like this. Even if the meeting happen again and again the point is not that they develop into something. After they are finished, they are what they are. It’s a way for us to meet, each other, to know each other in some way, in some sort of knowledge through dance.
CM: One thing that i find quite interesting is that the duets started from this interest you had of meeting new people but willing to find other ways of meeting them, and dance became a tool to create a different frame for this meeting. i have the invitation test here maybe i can quote you:
“I want to dance with you. I want to see you dancing and I want you to see me. I want us to dance together and at the same time as well. After a dance, I want to know more about you then before. This you can be a new one every time we enter the space. I want you to propose things that you desire to do, however simple, extreme or absurd they might appear. I want us to use dance’s capacity to let us be an unintelligible, unapologetic, whatever you.”
So somehow there is an ttemp to distance yourself of one idea of dance that you had before. Do you agree with that?
CI: If am distancing myself from one idea of dance that I had before?
CM: I was thinking about your training. You started training as a more classical dancer, then you went to university and then to a Choreography master program and my feeling is that when you started to create your own work somehow there was a shift in relation to the way your body was trained. Do you feel that?
CI: In the duets you mean?
CM: Yeah, in this proposition of using dance as this specific tool.
CI: Ah! I am not sure, how I saw it was like I was missing dance when I wanted to do this and I did t because I was missing dance. i missed the tools that I used to use but what I didn’t miss was the context where these tools where used. Yeah, you are right that there is a break because there is a break in the way these tools are used and the ideology in which they are normally prescribed, but at the same time there was a missing of the tools themselves in my life.
CM: How was the structure nd how did you organize the meetings?
CI: First there were these topics or titles that came to frame the meetings and that became these cards, which Zuzana Zabkova made. Because I felt when it was super open just like “do whatever you want” it became a bit too much of a creativity exercise, also because some of the people with whom I was doing it had no tools in dance. They had never experienced this so it felt like we needed experienced this so it felt like we needed something else in common to give us a base to imagine something to do with the body together. This is why these cards with these titles appeared. The titles were duets figures so that we would somehow be able to have a base to imagine and also to imagine in a way that was already common. The cards allow me to encounter the people before in front of a table and talk about what might happen without saying “you can do this” or “you can do that” but already talking through the cards, allowing us to start imagining together. We choose five cards from these duet cards, and we both agreed on the fact that we liked them or not. Then I gave the titles to the card and told them to the person. I asked them to tell me what they saw in drawings and I also said what I saw in them, this way we built a sort of common poetics. then we decided a “dramaturgy” or an order in which we would use the cards: each one of the five cards would correspond to one of our meetings. Every week before we met we had to spend maximum 20 minutes deciding what we wanted to propose to do to the other person, this proposal would have something to do with the title and the card of the day.
……. you can find more in WATT #2
link to order WATT #1 : http://w-a-t-t.eu/?p=116
link to order WATT #2 : http://w-a-t-t.eu/?p=118
