In town for his solo performance, The Hot One Hundred Choreographers, Brazillian choreographer Cristian Duarte speaks to The Ridge about his performance and inspirations for dance.
Could you briefly describe your piece and the inspiration behind it?
The starting point – and inspiration – for this creation was the work of Scottish artist Peter Davies, who created a multicolored text-painting that lists one hundred artists/works of his preference, entitled The hot one hundred. My idea was to investigate how to transport this procedure of listing to my choreography environment. By doing that, I “devoured” various dance icons, choreographers and pieces that instigate(d) me. The Hot One Hundred Choreographers can be presented as a “choreographic game” of tendencies that accompany me. My attempt is to reveal the nuances of, how the moving body negotiates with its own patterns, repertoire, desires and memory. It is also an open invitation for the audience to accompany me, activating their own collections, knowledge and perceptions about dance and dance history. I am more interested in the gaps and distortions of it, in the impossibilities and transformations of this game.
How do you approach choreography? Is there a specific process that you use?
Choreography for me starts by creating dispositives to dialogue with the environment and history around me. Each creative process is in search of its relatives and holding hands with a previous work.
This solo piece was for me, and still is, almost like a manifesto. The intentions behind it were very personal, having as subject my own dance education, but it inevitably touched the dance scene I am part of with dance education/training systems and dance history as collateral effects. It was only during the process that I realized that echoing. In the beginning, it felt more like saying yes to a huge amount of information I was rejecting in my practice as a dancer and maker. Then, I had to generate a context where I could (re)visit not only all dance materials/techniques I trained, but also those I wished to have trained – how they exist or could exist in my body and the dance I was making or that I wished to be making? How could different types of virtuosity and aesthetics coexist in my archive? I wondered how a dance piece could problematize those issues, and how I could bring those questions to the scene.
Those were the type of questions I was posing to myself for this creation. I was also quite influenced by the book “Vertigine della lista” by Umberto Eco. Then, the listing process I was creating, oscillated between a practical and poetic list. The practical list was a textual list. Therefore, it was possible and finite: to define one hundred choreographers and one hundred existing pieces. But, in order to exchange-translate-transpose the list to a body in motion that could take shape as a choreographic formulation, it needed to divorce from any attempt of representation and to be understood as a list-index: a collection of et ceteras that would favor the in-betweens, the switching tonalities, maneuvers and articulations that happen when passing from one reference to another.
Rodrigo Andreolli collaborated with me during the creation of this performance. His presence not only made this solo to be less solo, but it gave me the right amount of tension to be clear and precise on my choices. As a strategy for studying, we organized the list contents in casts by choreographers-shows based on our understanding of coherence between them, or affinity of language, or time/context. The casts received nicknames, such as: primordial cast, Judson cast, impro cast, modern cast, companies cast, among others. These casts have become objects of study, which later made me understand that they were also clues or ignitions, something more complex and intangible.
With a series of casts in hand, I threw myself into a dance studio, in a virtuosity of fragmentation, which in addition to providing me with hours in front of a computer, also launched me into space, made me move, sweat, be more elastic in my possibilities, either physically and conceptually, and it was within this vertigo, watching videos, fragments, pieces, crops and trying/tasting them, that we visualized a form. The form we found for the practical list, dialogues with the colorful work of Peter Davies, but earned a radial format which lists the contents by color, without assessment by numbers and with unfixed places. The 100 color buttons with the choreographers/works-listed are repositioned at every entry in the webpage that hosts the radial list. Each button leads to a choreographer/work/link or site that was found on the internet (YouTube, Vimeo or similar). We did not upload any content. Our hot list is made by the already existing links in the virtual scene, and because of that it needs constant maintenance as the virtual scene is quite volatile and contents are deleted quite often.
What I call poetic list is the performance itself. There is an enlightening text by Brazilian dance critic and Phd Professor Helena Katz entitled “The Dancer is a Dj” – it serves as a great reference to understand one aspect of how I function in this solo piece.
What were some challenges you face with regards to this piece?
This creation raised two clear challenges as starting point: First, how to make a dance-list that it is not a representation of excerpts from works by other choreographers? Secondly, who are the one hundred?
About the choice of one hundred: The criteria adopted for making the list was to define the choreographers and shows that, somehow, I have experienced and informed my dance education. Some of the shows listed I had the opportunity to attend live, which makes my relationship with the choreographer/piece more complex in this quantitative puzzle. Other choreographers/works either I knew from books and other archives, or I met along our research in the virtual environment. Thus, another criteria was absorbed along the process – to list only the choreographers who had their work available online. It was hard work, because in some cases, we could only find the choreographer but not the piece I wanted to include in the hot-list. When this happened, we had the following options: to choose another work extract; to remove it from the list; to seek the chosen piece in another type of collection/platform. The latter option was chosen.
In my list there’re not only choreographies. There is a festival and a Performing Arts Forum for example. Therefore, a very personal list began to be developed, which allowed me to recognize and think about my aesthetic choices. During the process the hot-list showed some flexibility, gaining the status of a provisional-list, a list that could always be changed, and therefore always becoming another list. Perhaps, flexibility is a strategy to deal with the difficulty of making choices. Perhaps, flexibility is in me, to be able to find over a hundred shows and choreographers that I consider hot, or perhaps my concept of hot is quite flexible. In some cases, I found hotter the choreographer rather than the work listed, because of my perception of his trajectory, mode of existence, assemblage of what he/she has done or was still doing. In other cases the work would be hot even if it were anonymous. Some names and performances got in and out of the list a few times. The legitimacy of the hots was based on coherence in relation to my experiences, memories and perception as a dance artist at that time (2011).
I found myself in many contradictions, but I decided to understand such contradictions as part of a reflexive process, part of what put me in a state of doubt, and that could expand possibilities and experiences in my artistic journey. Making a list also means making a cut that separates what is outside/outcasted from inside/casted.
Therefore, this list is also a reminder that there are much more, so many more hundreds that could produce many other lists. The list I present in this solo, crops and demands, at the same time, a series of et ceteras, for the selected references and for what has remained off the list.
What do you hope audiences will take away from the show?
I believe after seeing this piece one can get either irritated for not recognizing most of the 100 references, or, hopefully, they will get away vibrating for being engaged with one body moving uninterruptedly for approximately 50 minutes, in a battle of sweating references.
Were there interesting/funny memories to share with regards to this piece?
The t-shirt I use as costume for the piece is from China. For real. It is from Beijing. I was there in 2010. Not thinking about the solo yet. So, I passed in front of a shop that had a mannequin wearing a t-shirt with Chinese handwriting. I asked for the price. The woman in the shop started to show me lots of other t-shirts. Then, I understood the one I wanted was not on sale. It was an advertisement for the shop. It says they produce them in quantities for schools, hospitals, etc, or something like that. Finally, I succeeded in buying the one from the mannequin. Only later I started the solo creation, and it felt just right to be wearing a real made in china t-shirt. It feels like I am wearing an authorization to be dancing this archive-piece.
Why do you think the arts is important, both for you personally and for society in general? For me art is as important as medicine, farming, fashion, engineering, politics and so on. It’s knowledge production. It makes human brain to exercise. It modulates our existence and perception in a river of contradictions. Like water. When we think of water, we picture it as liquid and with no clear shape, or in many shapes. Not as ice or vapor. Just water. Maybe in a glass. Or, maybe, just the glass. There we go! You can’t hold water itself in your hands. It runs through your fingers.
What advice would you give to your younger self with regards to dance? A quote from Brazilian dance critic and PHD Professor Helena Katz: “Dance is the body thinking” and “Dance is what stops movement from dying of cliché.”
What are some projects you would like to work on in the future? My notion of future is pretty much now. It’s related to how I grew up in Brazil – not knowing so much how next day would be in terms of financial support to make work and live. What I am engaged in now, defines what my future can be. Each work carries bits of the previous, and that sets one life of investigation.
The Hot One Hundred Choreographers will be performed at the SOTA Studio Theatre on 18 June at 8pm, as part of the line-up for The O.P.E.N 2015. More details are available at https://sifa.sg/theopen/
Image credit: Carol Mendonca