Hommage in fragments of dance
There is always an hidden reader behind every written
word, an overseer behind every articulated vision, an operator behind
each operation, somebody who maybe will never see anything, somebody who
maybe will never read anything. This does not matter, a seed grows also
if fallen from distracted hands.
Pour voir et sentir l’Amérique, il faut au moins
un instant avoir senti dans la jungle d’un downtown, dans le Painted
Desert ou dans le courbe d’un freeway, que l’ Europe avait
disparu. Il faut au moins un instant s’être demandé :
« comment peut-on être Européen ? ».
Jean Baudrillard, Amérique, Paris, Grasset 1986.
This continent, America, contains me as a container, holds me within,
keeps me with… I understand that sometimes people just in order
to fill their emptiness, not to see it, get drunk on their insane actions
whatever they may be. Sometimes humanity wander just for the sake of doing
it and contents are an obscene luxury (kitschy sentimental fetishes) but
here an obscene luxury is not a scandal, not at all. After years of desire
I hold my camera again, I look at Olga dancing within the ruins of this
magnificent metropolis, I let the visions of my mind become pixels
on the monitors of others. I understand that here where everybody thinks
for him/her self without any shame, maybe there is a place for my displacement
also.
I grasp Olga’s dance, its patterns, its traces and she understands
my eyes, their nostalgic gaze. We are both more like strangers than the
others because where we come from, Europe, nobody wants to leave anymore,
people escape just out of boredom or breathless compulsion. What is our
spectacle of religiosity in an hemisphere that is not our own? In a city
where the mystical, the kitsch and the trash mix together? Praying to
NY, praying in NY, praying that New York could be different from
what it is or maybe that could make us different from what we are or at
least leave us let us intact in what we were.
The American dream. We buy at the Sunday flea market at Avenue
A and 12th street a dirty black wig for 2 dollars and a pink dress for
15. Sometimes recognizing comes before knowing. Who knows why we understand
that in this make up there is a truth. Clichés always work, this
is the first rule that you learn in both theatre and cinema. A woman who
runs after a train, car, truck creates an emotional, a moving image. If
we think about a man doing the same we sort out with a completely different
effect, the notion of progress instead of the notion longing…a combination
of significations that are somehow less significant. They say that during
the shooting of Rome open city Roberto Rosselini shouted at the actress
Anna Magnani (after the famously glorious scene when she is killed running
after the car full of Nazis) in his typically untranslatable roman accent:
Annarè è buona la prima! Annie, the first take was
the best one!
In New York where nobody looks at you, everyone makes up his/her
own show, exposing his/her own delirium his/her own uncontrolled fantasies.
Il n’y a pas ici de deuxième degré de l’écriture.
In
this city is possible to live by pseudonyms: I am an artist, I am a
poet, I am a philosopher, … a super funny diversion, irresistible,
that fills us with enthusiasm and joy, a game that we cannot play anywhere
else in the world. A woman here can allow herself to be alone without
feeling lonely, she can dance in the rush of others, rest under the roots
of a tree while the frenetic city ignores her. Olga and I chose to dance
in the places of our tedium, of our lost time. We dance on it, we
dance in it. The streets, the train, the garbage, the monuments. We know
that somewhere else this dance could be luxurious, superfluous,
delicious. Here is salvation, it is a compulsive need. Our resistance
is not at all conceptual, it is a cry for kindness, fragility and beauty
in a world that does not seem to need these things.
America and
Europe don’t communicate anymore, they are only capable of despising
or exalting each other in order to survive, to keep moving forward in
each of their own deliria. This is the language of our images. The contradictions
that an European experiments in the US can be understood only by another
European (taxes, taxes, taxes, where is all this money going buying anything
from a cucumber to a computer when good education is mainly private, hospitals
the most expensive in the world, social welfare almost non-existent? The
question is purely rhetorical, we all know… ) as well as this sense
of freedom and energy unimaginable in any other place. Freedom here
is not a political or economical concept but a physical perception, young,
raw, unfettered space. It is the brutality (human and urban) of this place
to inhabit its own richness, that allows the unaccomplished to get accomplished
and that enables an idea the most insignificant and banal to find eventually
its own praxis. In Paris, Rome and Barcelona where everything has already
been done better and before by someone else, where everybody lives in
the universe of what has been already thought and said, creation is a
game for the virtuosi of the citation. Everything in New York is new because
the one who creates it does not know that it is not new. It is for this
lack of historical consciousness that us, the Europeans are longing for,
it is to escape from the middle class curse, that we hide in this new
place, we find ourselves caught in the founding fathers’ syndrome,
we start hoping in the new world again.
In Paris these days the seasonal worker of the spectacle block the
streets and refuse to perform on the most important stage of all, Avignon,
in order to safeguard their welfare of unemployment benefits, in New York
an anonymous poster of a sad Marilyn, saturated and absent, welcomes me
in the city of the infinite possibilities, announcing:
I am not going to be famous
I won’t get to be a rock star
I am going to be stuck on a payrole
Doing work that does not interest me
For a very long time.
In New York I have an hard time explaining what is an….intermittent
du spectacle (presuming that someone who is working during a theatre
season is by nature intermittent). In Paris one is stroke by the web of
the Metro, so capillary and luxurious, it is an experience similar to
reading the index of a book, to perceive by the title its content, to
anticipate the taste of the text. The metro stations: Odeon, Cencier
Daubenton, Pont Marie, Bastille…signs that distill in the depth
of a tunnel the atmosphere of an active place, the liberated energy of
the surface in the space under earth. The metro, alias the index of Paris,
its map extended to the extendible, a geographical map without any reduction
of scale.
In NY the subway is a public transit.
Here nobody is alone because everybody is alone like the yellow cabs
that all move together in acritical mass in the illusion of being the
only ones to travel towards that destination. You find out after a few
days that is maybe more convenient to generally eat out than to go shopping
for good food in supermarkets. Then you choose your own place, you
go there as if it is your private cafeteria, daily you meet more or less
the same people, you cheer on the waitresses and you think that maybe
one day you will also be a waitress in the same place (if the waitress
receives as a pay only the money coming from your tips who takes the rest?
Corporations, investors, owners…? ). The restaurants are the veritable
dining rooms of the city, the kitchens and the refrigerators of the houses
are instead the most desolate spectacle of all, deserted or overfilled
with any kind of goods as they may be.
Ilaria Distante, born in Italy in 1972, worked as
an actor with Italian theatre companies centro di ricerca e sperimentazione
teatrale di pontedera, Comapgnia Pippo Delbono and as artistic collaborator
for German independent film production company Confine Film. She graduated
from the University of Pisa, Italy, in cinema studies and she is currently
involved in videodance and photography projects.
