Hybridizations | SARAH FERREIRA

Body: 

português

dança em foco

This essay refers to the videodance shows held within the programming Festival Multipla in the city Florianopolis, Santa Catarina, Brazil.The series entitled "Videodance Brazil" brought a compilation of Brazilian videodances, a retrospective of 10 years of the biggest festival of the country Videodance: Dança em Foco.Since 2003, this festival is structured in three main goals: fruition, production and training, conducting international invitations to national MIV (International Exhibition of Videodance) and also by promoting dialogues, workshops, exclusive and unreleased publications on the subject. Since 2007 I follow the history of this festival and I was able to attend workshops and to meet people who produce and teach this art form - Billy Cowie and Liz Aggiss, Douglas Rosenberg, Andrea Bardawil and Alexandre Veras, Felipe Ribeiro, Luciana Ponso PaulCaldas - and also artists, partners of the course, I found this videodanceway and that always made me think about opportunities for training and production of this language. It was this desire that drove me to create, in that same year, the research internet channel VIDEODANÇA +, which focuses in its structure on over three thousand videodances divided into different sites for storing videos, texts, artists websites, and is constantly updated with information about this language that are available on the internet.

The partnership between these two Festivals, Dança em Foco and Multipla Dança brings me joy to see links narrowing between them and the need to continue to cross act of doing, producing and to think and live dance and videodance across the economic, the political, the social, and why not also say, the ethical and aesthetic. The videodances I saw reminded me of many people and ideas, made me re-think wills and consider that there is much to be done. For dance. For Videodance.

The text that gets to me like a trigger in my writing, resembles the ideas of Spinoza, by Paloma Bianchi, who sews in her structure, images and graphic descriptions of various states, where the eyes of a spectator meet between camera and the body. It brings a very interesting metaphor: place where the meeting fails (or there is not a meeting), of both languages, dance and video, performing as separate movements. The perfect mix between dance and video would happen, in the place where the viewer does not distinguish more these two languages, this would be, the almost possible place, where we would find videodance. Following in this direction, thinking of how this metaphor creates a space that demonstrates the awareness and affections of a possible spectator in a work of any videodance, in an extensive way, shows that there is room for the viewer to meet the work in a personal and unique way.

But when I try to think beyond the personal perception of the viewer, without deleting it, when we want to treat videodance as a language, as a conjunction, perhaps this metaphor dual, in the process, ends going against the building of this language, making it sin for the lack or the excess of one of them. To do so, we should consider Canclini, in his term hybridization, which brings the conceived idea of the cultural processes where structures that existed separately should be combined to generate new structures, objects and practices, without setting on the positive or negative character, but as a process that can have different derivations, generating very fruitful mergers, openings horizons for members of a culture, very often, contradictions, conflicts and confrontations.
I think the notion of hybridization broadens the possibilities of relationship between the body and the camera, as it seems to consider the whole process, and the exclusivity of each and every meeting. We may, thereby, visualize videodance as a new political form making art, a work of contemporary art, which considers and offers the potential for both the artist to experience the process, the path, the error, as well as the freedom of the viewer to complete the work as a survival and continued movement.