MARÍA PEREDO GUZMÁN
FRAGMENST
OF WRITINGS
Hands and Bodies
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[Page 1 ] `Les feuilles mortes´ (Dead Leaves), a pas de deux between two hands is a fragment of the contemporary dance piece `Kiss and Cry´, created in Belgium in 2012 by the collective NANODANCE. It is performed on a staged film set where the dancers interpret diverse `hand choreographies´ filmed and projected on a screen. “The challenge was to make something big with everything small: how to dance only with the hands, how to realize a film on the top of the kitchen table, how to use words only to evoke.” (Gunzig, 2012, p. 7) says one of the creators.
I choose this song because it allowed me to analyze the hands in other functions besides their pedestrian use and exemplify different presentations and representations of body in contemporary art. Despite the interdependence between movements with the song (constituted by music and lyrics), scenic objects and lights, on order to conquer the objective of this essay, I focus only on the hands and the question : can they be replaced by real bodies?
The methods I used were bibliographic and documentary revision, Labanotation, charts, copying the movements myself to understand their mechanics, and the virtual application PM2GO.
Conclussions: ​Can One and Other be replaced by “real” bodies?
[Page 7] Yes, they can, if the producers have enough budget to find theatrical mechanisms to make objects and people fly and slide. If people want to do the choreography, they can, the movements would need to be adapted for the entire bodily structure as well as to the laws of gravity and impulse. Then One and Other would be : man and woman or two men or two women. If naked, the delicate elements of the dance such as caresses would become narrowing pornography in some sections.
Nevertheless, the medium is the meaning (Yes, we will never get tired of quoting Mr Marshall McLuhan.). If regardless to these considerations, two virtuous dancers recreated the dance, the constitutive elements of the piece would be destroyed precisely because in the play of changing dimension and registers, bodies transform at the ¨turn of a hand¨, or ¨slight of wrist¨. Thus: No, the hands can not be replaced. The impossible but visible movements and the transferred presences, give to the “replaced” body much more freedom and poetic possibilities than the concrete one.
Throughout the presence of these bodies and their simultaneous absence, there is a position: we do not need clothes, face, sexual differentiation, or even gravity to dance. At the end, love is not about kiss or cry, but about being touched.
Where the thing is...
[Page 1 ] Transmission is explained in a normal dictionary as “the act or the process by which something is spread or passed from one person or thing to another.” If we see transmission of dance as an experiential passing on of knowledge of a specific kind, embodied and embedded in a culture, our work as researchers will bring into consideration questions about perceiving this process, analyzing it and writing about it.
If dance is something transmitted, where is it, the thing? Taking the analytic propositions of Laban, we can recognize in dance elements such as shape, effort flow, and the prerequisite of body. Do we have a body? Are we in a body? For Marcel Mauss (in 1935), the man´s body is his most natural technical object, and at the same time a man is his body. An object between objects.
[Page 3] And I say: Body is not an object. We are a body. We are somebody. Then other questions arise: If I am a body, am I also a mind in a body? Am I a soul with voice in a hardware called my body? Is my body mine? Using these questions as a tool, I wrote the following paragraphs:
1. I fill in my lungs with air, and while I breath out I flex my knee joints, I look at the space rotating my neck until I see my parallel feet. My back, is in consequence curved. My head is heavy, and my hair is light. Slowly I flex more my knees permitting my hips to go lower, I touch the floor, caressing it with my 10 fingers, I rotate my wrists flexing also my elbows sending my weight forward on my forearms while my knees slide on the ground. Slowly my whole body arrives into a crouching position on the floor. All this in 5 seconds.
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WARRIOR BODY/OPEN HEART
Warrior Body/Open Heart is a dance piece co-created through Participatory Action Research in Cheongsong, a rural town in southeast South Korea. This research was done through the framework of a program held by state multicultural centers where immigrant women from different countries, married to Korean farmers, go through a progression of enculturation, transculturation and multiculturalism. The present research analyses the multiple processes experienced by the community of participants during the creation and performance of the dance. The acronym WBOH refers to the dance, the practice of it, or to the group of participants when dancing or practicing.
KEY WORDS: * Dance creation * Multiculturalism * Immigrant wives * PAR * Community
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ABSTRACT
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[PAG 5, from the Ch1) A researcher´s time is traditionally taken up by hours upon hours inside a room, concerned with searching out the most minute details of their subject matter, such as uncovering ‘the exact step’, ‘that gesture’, discovering variations, asking unusual questions like “how do you feel when you do this movement? Where does your imagination take you when you hold your hand like this?” and so on. While this is not so different from an artist’s creative process, which itself is nothing less than pure investigation based on trial, failure and repetition; the research here is an hybrid combination of both. The dance WBOH and the lives of the participants (including myself) were constitutive parts of this field.
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Clic HERE to read fragments of "Warrior Body/Open Heart, a dance by Cheongsong's wives" published in the Magazine "CONTACT QUARTERLY" Vol. 43 no. 2 Summer/Fall 2018
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