Praying
New York / Rezándole a Nueva York
Praying to the most inhuman city of
all, praying to it to find a place in the chaos of its streets and in
the loneliness of its people. The roughness of the displacement made that
two displaced women, an Italian attached to her camera and an Andorran
dancer, meet to find a space where to feel comfortable; to find their
own space.
Our work is a prayer to any God available,
because we don’t have one; an appeal to any dogma suitable with
our exigencies; a prayer for the ones that still have time to listen.
“Praying NY” was, since
the very first moment, before all, a need. It has born from the hunger
of finding and of the dislocation, from the solitude and the isolation.
Created and developed in collaboration with Ilaria Distante, the result
of our common work is more than a simple project with a message and with
academic objectives. Nor does it pursue a pure aesthetic objective. It
would be too easy to reduce it to that. “Praying NY” is, for
both of the authors, much more than that. It is the engine and the life
boat in the agitated sea of the city where everything is possible.
We started working by intuition, to be able to feel part
of something, not excluded of a reality that existed out of ourselves.
That is why, this project thought and prepared for the initiatives of
the “IV Encuentro of the Americas”, is, at the same time,
the result of our personal experience at the moment of confrontation in
a city as big as New York.
The story begins in the beginning,
when two Europeans, an Andorran and an Italian, land in New York with
their own dreams and their different wishes, and with a huge hunger to
reach all the insights that, in principle, a cultural capital as this
offers. But the charm of the expectations quickly dissolves when we realized
that this city, in spite of gathering all the nationalities of the world,
and being the scene of the “living together” and the “cross-breeding”,
was simply, all the contrary.
Generally, the topics never survive,
and most of them are denied with the past of time and the empiric experience,
but, maybe the encouraging prejudices that this city carried with it made
that disenchantment only bigger. We would not have had the same sensation
if we had arrived in another city, where by definition, you are only a
foreigner immigrant who is supposed to adapt to the “modus vivendi”
of the new place. New York, because it does not have such a prototypical
style of living, was waiting for us, presumably, with the open arms. But
by assuming that deceit a priori, we thought
We do not deny, we cannot, that in
New York brings together, by accident or by diverse purposes, people from
everywhere and from diverse cultures, with different cosmogonies and world
appreciations. But this reality does not implicitly imply that those different
philosophies of living come together to generate a new kind of relationship.
Here, more than anywhere else, the demarcation of race, culture and religion
is immensely exaggerated. The communities, as ghettos, they exclude themselves
from tracing unbreakable boundaries. And the people that compose those
communities behave the same way. They are inaccessible islands in a sea
infested with archipelagos. The fact that they are obliged to share a
subway compartment, does not mean that the Jewish and the Afro American,
that the Irish and the Puertorrican live together interacting with each
other.
They are simply forced to share a
common space, but the interaction and the interrelation are minimal. Each
one belongs to his defined group or to his religion, and they are not
looking to create new links with the other adjoining kinships. That is
why neighborhoods as Little Odessa, China Town or Harlem exist. Closed
and exclusive ghettos perfectly demarcated and framed in a context impossible
to tone down.
The conflict with the aggressive city,
lacked of context, has provoked in us a defensive reaction. Above everything,
we wanted to find our place, but although we were desperately looking
for it, we could not reach our goal. The huge cultural difference that
separates the Old Europe and the New Continent, the diversity of possibilities
which we could identify, and the dispersion of those possibilities induced
us to a panic feeling. We where out of milieu, absolutely out, without
knowing if we could ever be inside.
Because of this feeling, the sensation
of being out of the game, we decided to throw the dice and play until
the last card. The proposal was clear; the search for the Holly Grial,
that in this case, was our place. With this intention, looking for a “where”, a philosophy or
a religion that made us feel part of something, we have decided to undertake
this project. The “Performances of Religiosities” Encounter,
offered us the perfect framework to start our quest.
And from this disconcerting sensation, our character,
I myself, was born.
We premeditatedly wanted to exaggerate the features that
could imply a bigger contrast with the surrounding reality. It was difficult
to find the proper model, because it is complicated to be a stranger in
a city peopled by them. Any costume was radical enough to mark distances
with the reality, because the reality here, has innumerable faces, all
of them different and unusual. In the end, we have decided that the best
way to create a real contrast was to confront the poetry to the rawness. We created this lost character that
moves through the ins and outs of the city looking for her people, for
her space, and of course, for her life’s philosophy, for her religion.
To really be able to live this experience
as we planned and not simulate what we wanted to be an empiric experiment,
I had to create a story to whisper to myself when I was in the middle
of the action. I felt, since the beginning, not only out of space, but
also displaced in time. Being part of a period where the beauty reined
in above all else. And the story of Cinderella came to my mind. Yes, I
was like Cinderella out of her tale. For some incomprehensible reasons
my fairy godmother, after providing me with my nice outfit, my jewels
and my aristocratic style, has wronged destiny. And instead of transporting
me to the Royal Castle where my prince was waiting for me, she transferred
me to the contemporary New York where nobody was waiting my arrival.
This will be my displacement and our point of departure for the work:
Out of space and time.
And it worked, as do all things embarked
upon with passion. We looked for the most unusual places to locate our
character, but also the most common ones. And in the typical spots, we
displaced the actions to better create the contrast we wanted to provoke.
And in the game of the creation, we had discovered that the three of us,
the two authors and the invented character, were only another displaced
people in a sea of exiles. We could look forever for our place,
but what we were going to find would only be, as us, searchers of their
place.
That might be the reason why nobody
reacted to our actions. Nobody seemed to be impressed that I was dancing
in the middle of the Washington Square Park fountain or that I stopped
the traffic because I wanted to lay down in the pedestrian crossing. Because
each one of the spectators that were attending our performance will be
able to do the same things in order to find their place. I imagine that
it was not scandalous enough, not too exaggerated if the goal of the game
was finding themselves. Feeling alone in my costume, I felt at the same
time the complicity of those which in their moment have looked for their
place or those who were tired of looking for the answer.
But we have found it. It is impossible
to feel alone in a society full of lonely souls and displaced fellows.
At the end, they, also us, we form part of a group: the ones that do not
find their space and could not fit in any existing conventional classification.
That is why Ilaria and I have found each other, to recreate our space
in exile, forming our own small community, with our rituals, habits and
aesthetic conceptions.
The most surprising and unexpected
of all was that, looking to create a contrast between the fragile beauty
of the character and the sour streets of the city, beauty ruled above
everything. In spite of dismissing it, the ugliness strengthens it diving
power and light to the loveliness. Although the stage was a bunch of trash
dropped in the ground. The character and her leitmotiv did not get infected
with the environment; on the contrary, they were elevated with it.
And there are thousands of possibilities
and the spaces to explore never end. That is why we want to continue,
for the will of continuing to investigate and for the desire of evolving
the project adding movement to the photographic frame. Movements full
of significance. We desire that this project would be the seed of a posterior
Video Dance that evolves the same idea of displacement. There is only
an eagerness to continue working on it, and I think we have to take advantage
of this very particular situation we are actually living. It is unique
and unrepeatable.
Olga Sasplugas, born in Andorra, had graduated
in Contemporary Dance in the Institut del Teatre de Barcelona and in Humanities
studies in Pompeu Fabra University of the same city. She danced 3 years
with It Dansa, were she worked with choreographers as Wim Vandekeybus,
Nacho Duato, Jiri Kylián and Rui Horta. Her choreographic
restlessness has taken her to create “Mâi Pen Rai”,
a Video Dance with the same name, “Enredant-me” and “Fly”.
