Dancing: conditions for moving

Tanja Baudoin: I’d like to ask you about an aspect of your work that interests me a lot: the question of movement. It is present in the Workation videos that you presented in the exhibition Canseira at Centro Hélio Oiticica in Rio de Janeiro and at M KHA in Antwerp in 2019, and also in the more recent videos involving other performers, Superaquecidas (Overheating, 2022), presented at Galeria Cavalo and at KIOSK in Ghent.  

                 It seems to me that you are researching body movements. I believe it is a very profound investigation, but at first glance it’s not so obvious where it comes from, it’s not easy to identify its nature. I kept thinking about what kind of movement this is, what the context is of this body language. For example, in the short videos that make up your installation Workation, you are with a computer in a hammock or on the beach and you begin making a kind of sliding move, it's almost a fall, but it's not quite that. It's a directed and intentional movement. It looks like you are entering the movement deeply in a way that is rare to see in visual artworks. Saying it’s a dance or a performance doesn’t really qualify it. It's something else, which maybe has to do with your background, which started in dance, and then continued with contemporary art. 

           Maybe it is difficult to talk about this. Your practice deals with many other subjects, such as work, exhaustion, and how these forces impact the body. We can't leave this completely to the side, but I would like to see if we can talk about movement and the body without immediately going into a socio-political contextualization or an interpretation of the work. I would like to hear you talk about the relationship between the body and the object, such as the computer, for example. What movement can this relationship generate and what state of the body does it imply? 

          To start with, maybe you could talk a bit about how you entered the art field and the practices you encountered along the way. 

 

Sofia Caesar: This is a very interesting question because we’re talking about a place that is only of the body. What do I mean by ‘only of the body’? I mean a place that cannot be verbalized, a place that is experienced. What can be verbalized are the ways of entering this bodily state, the images, the surrounding things. The practices, exercises, and ways of approaching these bodily states that are difficult to put into words.

                My body has been conditioned since I was born. I am white, was born in England and grew up in the Glória neighbourhood of Rio de Janeiro. I was raised by a family of artists, art teachers, and cultural agents. What I bring to my work is also my background in dance, which is based on somatic thought, a practice that isn’t related to the perception of the body by an external eye, seen on stage by the audience. It is the point of view of the body as it is experienced or seen from within the body itself. This is Thomas Hanna’s definition of somatic practice(1), and the term is usually attributed to him, even though the history involves many other people. I studied at the Angel Vianna School(2) in Rio de Janeiro, whose origins go back to the 1960s and ‘70s. In this period of the military dictatorship it was a place of resistance. The school was founded by Angel Vianna, a classically trained dancer, and her now deceased husband, Klauss Vianna, who worked a lot with actors and the theatre, and their son Rainer Vianna was also involved. In 2009 Suzana Saldanha published a book that tells the story and talks about the ‘Angel Vianna method’.(3) Angel doesn't like the word ‘technique’ and also doesn't like the word ‘method’, but it was the middle ground she found to refer to a certain ‘modus operandi’ that we use to get into these body states. 

                I was taught at this school, a private school that at that time was almost exclusively attended by a privileged class of white people. I had started with contemporary dance when I was 17, because I had many depressive episodes where I couldn't move. I was into Brazilian music mixed with punk, grunge, mod, a mixture that I like to recall as ‘luscious goth’, because there we were, a bunch of punks sitting on the waterfront, wearing long black pants at the height of summer in Rio de Janeiro, all sweaty. I was in a band and had no relation with dance, except for playing guitar and dancing at alternative music concerts. But I was very paralyzed and melancholic and started to have issues with my posture. An aunt commented that my posture was terrible, and told me to take a dance class or something to make my back less hunched. At that moment the Deborah Colker Movement Centre opened in Glória.(4) I went to take a contemporary dance class for beginners with Aírton Tenório(5) – I thought he was incredible: a contemporary dance person with a well-structured method. I now think that he was teaching a technique similar to what is called release, which is about letting go of your body and using your weight to generate a dynamic, a movement. I loved the class and immersed myself in it. For the first time in my life I enjoyed moving my body and feeling my body, in a way that was different from the pain or paralysis I felt, of the chest closing in, the rock in my stomach. Or that explosive feeling of playing the guitar, screaming into the microphone, losing total control in ecstasy. The teacher noticed that I enjoyed the class and told me that I could be a dancer, but that I needed to take more classes, that I needed to do ballet and make up for ‘lost time’, since women in dance usually start early and I had already lost a lot of time.

 

TB: He saw a potential in you... Was that around the time you went to the Angel Vianna School, after finishing high school? 

 

SC: First, in 2007, I went to ESDI (Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial), the School of Industrial Design(6), which gave me a great basis in visual language and making projects. ESDI is an incredible school, very technical: you learn how to weld, sand, work with photography, drawing, metal, wood, resin, printmaking, typography, modeling, furniture... It is both a graphic design and product design school, you get this double training. But while I was at ESDI I started having a very deep depression that kept me paralyzed in bed for two months. Then I had a chance to get into the Angel Vianna School, because they started offering evening classes. I did my classes from 8am to 5pm at ESDI, and from 7pm to 11pm at Angel. I graduated from the Angel Vianna Technical Course in Contemporary Dance. It saved my life.

            There I got in touch with Angel's method, which basically consists of unlearning how to move. The focus is on what she calls ‘awareness through movement’, which means you move by being aware of your own body. It's about dancing. It's also about denaturalizing everyday movements. The idea behind it, as I understand it, is to deprogramme the body, to de-discipline the body; our habits, the way you get up from your chair... There are many people involved in Angel's School: there is someone who does a reading of your body; a person who looks at your body and sees all your traumas; there is Soraya Jorge who works with Authentic Movement, but has a background in craniosacral therapy and various somatic therapies.(7) Soraya was my body awareness teacher and she is very important to me. Other people who were particularly important to me and who taught there were Maria Alice Poppe(8) and Alexandre Franco.(9)

          The focus of the technical course is not just on deprogramming your body. The idea is to go from an organized, disciplined, colonized body to a reinvented, emancipated body, what some call a ‘body without organs’(10), possibly, a body that comes out of a process of deconstruction. This causes a crisis in all the students. But in the final year, you leave the place with tools to build a new body for yourself. It’s a deconfiguration and a reconfiguration. And in that reconfiguration there is an invention. There is a utopia of freedom there, the possibility to make a choice, to invent your body, to create yourself. Every body dances.

               There are many people and interests gathered at the school. They offer modern performance, theatre, there is the contemporary dance approach, and when I was there, there was a lot of attention for ‘therapy through movement’, with people who work with mental health, especially with schizo-analysis.(11) There is the Pulsar dance company(12), made up of Angel's former students and teachers.

 

TB: Were you dancing with companies at that time and did you also create your own works for the stage? 

 

SC: Yes, I danced semi-professionally. I danced with Esther Weitzman(13); Márcio Cunha(14); Maria Alice Poppe; Alexandre Franco... I also briefly had companies. One company with Renan Martins(15) was a bit of a joke, when we were still teenagers. Then I was part of one that was a little more serious, with Vandré Vitorino(16), Laura Noronha(17) and Camila Fersi.(18) My first solo took place in 2010, in the graduation show of my class in the technical course, called Eu Multidão (I Multitude).

 

TB: How did you start working with video?

 

SC: I remember exactly when that was: in 2010, when I received an invitation from Martha Niklaus(19) to participate in an exhibition that took place inside an empty apartment. I had already filmed a few times, things to watch back later, rehearsals, etc., but for this work I really incorporated the camera for the first time. The work was made for the bathroom. I liked this idea of people who were peeing and seeing a video shot on top of the same toilet they were using. It was a video of myself, jumping on top of the toilet, in a loop. The loop was a repetition of the moment I was in the air. I became some kind of flying monster, a crazy butterfly, above the toilet. This was my first study with a camera... and I liked it. It mixed with a kind of punk thing. And it allowed me to feel freer with my body even when I was very depressed. Even my first solo for the stage was a kind of bizarre, out of the ordinary, kind of animal behavioural thing. In the sense of really embodying a different physical state that is not that of everyday life, but also not so far from what we consider abnormal in daily life. So it was more connected to everyday gestures, like walking, sitting, jumping, etc., in a way that is a little detached from the image. It's not about a still image, it's a physical state. 

             Since that time in 2010, I've done a lot of work that involves filming the body. A certain state of enchantment between the body and the camera began to happen more and more. As soon as the camera moved, came close, or was turned on, something in the body would be triggered. A kind of trance, or a state of presence. I associate this state of presence very much with the Authentic Movement practice that I started doing there at the Angel Vianna School with Soraya Jorge. This practice involves a relationship between a person who is the witness and another person who is the mover. The camera has served as a witness in some lonely and paralyzed moments in my life. It has been a witness of anguish, of afflictions of this ‘other’ body, of other states, and today I know that in psychiatry these states are framed as psychoses. I always wanted to go beyond the limitations of my structured body. Maybe because sometimes, in my anguish, my body became unstructured and I felt the need to move it.

                 In addition to this, when you find yourself trapped in a language that traps you, as was the case for me with dancing on stage, or classical dance, or modern dance, there comes a time when you have a feeling of limitation, of suffocation. To me, the very rigid choreographies of the Italian stage gave me this feeling of being trapped at the edge of my skin, in my patterns of behaviour. Even as a spectator I feel stuck in the room without being able to leave. At that point my body wants to go somewhere else, to break free and sprawl out. 

 

TB: You said that when the camera is on, you get into another state of presence, an almost trance-like state. At the same time, if the camera has the role of a witness, there is a possibility to create distance. Watching what has been recorded is perhaps a way of taking yourself out of your body.
 

SC: Yes, and distancing yourself from the body is different from transcending it, from the feeling of going beyond the limits of the body, of getting lost, a feeling that dancing gives us. During this period, the camera perhaps had the function of a witness, as is the case in Authentic Movement(20), and it helped me understand this dysfunctionality of my body, which sometimes paralyzes or speeds itself up too much.

                 At that time, I understood that dancing with the camera was almost like inventing a new body, a body that exists through the image that the camera makes. It’s a kind of dancing with a body that is only embodied that way, in the image, because the camera is there filming all the time, the camera is an extension of our bodies. It’s thinking a more virtual body, a body that’s a little more hybrid. A body in which the camera is an organ, it is part of that body. I only experience life the way I do because of my body. And the camera today is part of this body, it permeates my experience of the world. Even if it is turned off, it is already part of my way of being in the world.

                This body is not the body of a model, pausing for a photograph, it is not a body ‘posing’. It is the body that is witnessed moving with the camera inside of it. It moves through an altered state of body consciousness – which includes this new camera-organ.

                My last two video series, Workation (2019) and Superaquecidas (Overheating, 2022) were a continuation of thinking these bodily movements, which exist there along with the witnessing camera, but in collaboration with bodies other than my own or the ‘camera body’ (if we consider the camera a moving body). In Workation, the camera moves closer or further away: there are four videos, in two it moves closer, in the other two it moves further away. We used a wide range zoom, which goes from a wide view to being very close. The moment the zoom movement of the lens starts is what Andrea Capella(21) –  who worked on both pieces as director of photography – and I called the moment of ‘enchantment’, or the ‘spell’. As the camera lens was getting closer, my head began to drop down. The two things happened simultaneously.

               From the beginning of my research into this body movement, I have been very interested in the ‘pause’. In stopping, being still, what that encompasses. I have always been interested in the relationship between a pause as something inert, something unproductive, and movement as something productive... That is how I felt when I was inert: unproductive, stopped, nullified. André Lepecki(22) talks a lot about the project of modernity as being a project of movement, an arrow-movement that goes and cuts... There is a text of his that talks about the pause as a form of protest, of opposition, of resistance.(23) But I don't think that's where I'm at, I think I'm still inventing another body, a body that is neither productive nor unproductive, you know? It is another state that is tensioned between the two.

         This interests me, the pause as a state. Largely because of personal issues, because during my bouts of depression I had these crises, moments of anguish or paralysis, of not being able to move. With this research I started to try to open this up a little.