Once and now | ANDERSON DO CARMO

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To undertake a curatorial project it is not only to assume responsibility for selecting a program; it is assuming responsibility for an understanding of dance, body, movement and also to be responsible for everything that simply doesn't fit inside this understanding.

It is the responsibility to undertake a kinetic journey in search for an answer - most likely one that is long lost - to the question: where does movement come from? What brings movement to existence? An answer that presents itself as possible is succinct but not limited: desire. What makes movement exist is the desire for movement. Paradox: Is will/desire/wanting by itself not a call to movement? Would movement be, then, its own cause and consequence? "To move" would actually be a defective verb that can only be conjugated on present tense? Here we arrive at a crossroad that will make us spend quite a lot of time thinking about movement.

If we assume that "the desire to move" is already to move, regardless how imperceptible would the movement be, it would always be there to give body to bodies; perhaps fossilized, but not inert. Symptomatically, to think on an absence of movement would be evidence of the inevitability of not having it - the movement - as reference. Bringing Didi-Huberman to this conversation, we would talk about fossil movements, stratified time that as potency would make itself present on movements. Even on a dance with no movements this would be latent on the stopping as a "block of prehistory that subtly comes to present, a "vital remaining" that suddenly comes to life. [...] fossil that puts itself to dance and even scream.".

Are movement and dance inseparable? Yes. But certainly not synonyms: as potency of obviousness the (not)movement does not get tired of making the dance be and comes back to be dance; but knowing that on this odyssey there will be no promise of arrival or staying on a long forgotten home, there would only be left to group, to dispose, to articulate clues in function of this "want-move" so it can be drawn maps that will never be followed. Writing, here and now, to make curation seems to be collecting clues for a "awareness of desire to move". Always clues, never verified data: remember then, that this answer is very likely to be lost, and probably it is for the best. Thus, the movement that makes Multipla Dança 2014 is to connect to "make" sense.

The first clue, evident on a quick look at the programm, is the brave and massive prevalence of solos: five of them next to two group choreographies. A collection of "I" - on plural - radically experimented on the mobility sphere, making their desires of move - and our supposed knowing of this desire to move - true war machines, revolutions that happen on microscopic scale and thus authentic and possible. A dance solo presents a complexity almost non-reproducible on another structure: it dislocates the role of the action on the subject so as to take place. On the opening text of the program of the event one could discern the word that is a mixture of enclosure and escape that insists on holding hands to each and every artist: narcissism. When the mythological Narcissus tilts on the edge of the river, sees the object of his fascination and drowns, it is very likely that what killed him wasn't seeing himself, but his capacity of producing image on the reflective surface of the river.

Giorgio Agambem speaks on his "Estâncias" about Narcissus' Ghost: to come out of oneself and remain from this self into other that is what makes one perish. It is wise to remember that the myth tells us that they found a flower while looking for Narcissus: such indisputable and perishable beauty and possible only on the openings and crossings of subject's role in favor of happening's role.

If the subjects, the "I" (plural) evidence themselves here on the bodies and each body is a biography, how can we make such crossings possible? And for what? On the presupposition that the body is not the medium, nor an instrument, nor even the relationship field with the world around, but is on itself, on its own materiality, a relationship with the world, would these biographies be narratives with our relationship with the world? The meaningful "multiple" on the name of the event may be the second clue for our map: the multiplicity as potency of being and doing (act). If multiplicity is the presupposition and potency the objective, the making of a common point would be our occupation.

And then, again, we stumble with a lot, so much to do: how can we construct the common on a environment - contemporaneity on dance - where "from now" is what we are looking for? How can we apprehend singularities as powerful as well as enigmatic? A vertigo of questions, but on some instance seems a viable start to maintain these amount of doubts about this "from now". The "from now" is only recent? On one of his last publications on Brazil, Didi-Huberman visits the universe of visual arts' historian Aby Warburg (1866-1929) and reveals the surgical procedure of permanence of a whole pagan imagery present on Renaissance paintings that narrates Christian activities. The images survive, fossils are in constant movement, and this search for this "from now" is the same one that is inherent on dance for so long: would each dance dug the "from now" from their time? Wouldn't be time to think beyond the "from now" what "from once" remains?

On permanent battle between freedom and restriction, dance presents itself on this seventh year of "Múltipla" as desire of not ending, desire of not infinite, desire to continue, desire, desire, desire... Evocating once more Warburg, it is possible to think that his greatest work would be "Atlas Mnemosyne", a big compendium-memoir where an infinity of images are juxtaposed connected by permanence, survival, presence "from once" and not "from now". Its own presence on such work is a simple trace that agglutinates what others did, its presence is a disappearing. Also like this, the Narcissus that perishes in front of his own image and in another remains, has its presence potentiated while he disappears as an individual and as vestige can be seen. If the "I" is the enclosure and escaping on the adventure that is to understand subjectivities and if the "from now" is enclosure and escaping on the labyrinth that is dance's contemporaneity, the compass and third clue for this journey is to hold on the question: how can I engage on the making of now?