Juan Ybarra
is an actor, dancer and choreographer whose work combines
diverse styles including
Decroux mime, Butoh, contact improvisation, and martial arts.
Ybarra has taught at University Centre of Theatre, the National
Institute of Fine Arts Montreal, and La Casa del Teatro (México
City) He has performed with Pocha Nostra in The Indian Queen,
BORDERscape, Jurassic Aztlán, and the Museum of Fetish-ized
Identities.
LS: How does the Culture of War or domination of the “Empire” inform
your work?
JY: First I wanted to thank you for the
opportunity to talk about these things, I think they are
very pertinent questions
because
of the times that we are living in. Culture as I understand
it, culture is a way in which a group of society lives
and closes the
scale of time in their search for meanings. That’s
what we call life. And when war is part of our culture,
when violence is
part of our culture, what we are doing is reproducing and
perpetuating the ideas and the consequences of that. So
my work is totally permeated,
our work is totally permeated by the sense of trying to
reflect and to refract what we consider necessary to put
on the table to
fuel the debate against a culture of war, a culture of
domination, against a culture of expansion and penetration
and all the consequences
that are always behind war.
It’s very interesting being in this Hemispheric encounter
where religiosity and migration are the subject matters
in my group, where religiosity is very present and how
to reflect on the fact
that always through the years war has been always behind
religion and vice versa. So any kind of fundamentalism
that has been traveling
through history up to now has been in one way or another
supported by the violent act of war and we want to keep
talking about that.
We want to get rid of that as a way of being a culture,
because we are just swallowing incredible amounts of images.
We are just
swallowing what media is telling us. So there is another
kind of terror floating around and arriving at our houses.
There is another
kind of terror that is trying to perpetuate these ideas.
So that I truly believe our work is a very important tool
in these days
to raise the flags and to try to ask pertinent questions
in hopes that we will find better answers.
LS: In the face of media regulation/censorship and
propaganda, how do you consider visual art/performance
as a medium for
expression, change, activism?
JY: I think it’s very important that students of visual arts
and performance art can see the potential of images as a way of
delivering ideas. Myself as a performance artist- I use my body
as a tool to deliver images that have several layers of complexity,
at least that’s what I am trying to do. The importance of
images, I find the importance of images when those images are always
contextualized. Now with the globalization, with the global project,
everything goes with everything. So an image in which you can see
these photographs, like we have seen here in the Kimmel building,
if we recontextualize those pictures, they could be part of one
of those Gap or United Colors of Benetton advertisements. It’s
so easy to recontextualize everything.
So I think that images are powerful, as long as
we truly make an effort to contextualize whatever
we do
dealing
with images.
Media
is constantly reappropriating those images and
that is dangerous, that is very dangerous. We live
in a
very dangerous
world that
creates a lot of confusion and gives the sense
that you are living in a society where everything
is okay.
Everything
is
okay, everything
goes, but in fact there is a lot of racism, there
is a lot of segregation. And we know where that
comes
from.
So it’s important and
I think that it is the responsibility of every program
of education, and I will say it, it is the right of every
student to be really
informed about the possibilities of contextualizing the
image. That should be part of every single program, the
image. That all
the students with all their great intentions, that imagery
is a very, very risky material, a double-edged knife. That
would be
something I would remind students when I am working with
them, or myself- about the content of the images.
LS: What tools (of performance, of resistance,
of assimilation, etc.) do you feel are the
most useful in fighting or
responding to the Empire and/or the culture
of War?
JY: My background is theater and I moved into
performance art working with this organization
Pocha Nostra
with Guillermo Gómez
Peña and also working with Roberto Sifuentes- great people,
truly committed, very politicized. And since I think that theater
has lost the possibility of creating a present time event and it
is getting… not all the theater, I’m talking about
the theater that I grew up with in Mexico City, theater in big
cities. There is no chance to reconnect with roots, to create a
collective experience where a shaman is present, where we are really,
really trying to deal with the issues that are upsetting our community.
So theater has become more and more spectacular, part of the mainstream.
Performance art for me has been a place where I have found, again,
the power of the images. Every single image has the context of
that specific moment. And I’m talking about moments, I’m
talking about specific, theoretical time and space situations.
It’s not going to be the same thing to do something here
in New York rather than do something in the south of Texas. The
same images and the same piece is going to recreate different connotations
and different discussions. So I think that is something performance
art has helped me to consider… and has given me the
chance to use performance as a tool.
The way in which we work is also to create
the possibility of interdisciplinality.
I have learned
that also you
can recycle an image. You can recycle
an image in a video, you can recycle an
image in a slide, you can write about that.
You can
have
a more
complex way of explaining
yourself, of explaining your work in many
different ways and that
can create more possibilities to participate
in a social discourse. So you can read
yourself or
your work in
many ways to avoid
just the concept of art. What is art? Not
that because it is art everybody
can understand it, but because it is art
it could be weird or strange. So I think
there
is a responsibility.
I found that
it is interesting
and is my responsibility to be able to
explain my work
in different ways and to try to make all
possible connections within my
community and within other communities.
In that sense I consider myself always
a migrant because I am always trying to
connect with that place and the people
of that community
in that
place.
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