Much more than people who dance well
I started dancing like everyone else, intuitively. In my house, my parents listened to a lot of music. My dad is a music lover, and music played all day. My favorite was Carmina Burana. When I heard it, I felt like my body was exploding; I would twist and turn on the floor and run around. There were ceramic tiles, and I would slide and skate from the dining room to the bedroom. That was my first connection with movement. Maybe it was the music that made me dance. My aunt was a dancer at the dance school, and that’s why I ended up going to dance. That was in 1978. In many cities, parents sent girls to ballet at that time, just like they sent boys to play football. I started ballet and studied it for ten years.
Then destiny played a role. My dad used to follow the San Martín dance group, and one day, he overheard that there was an audition at the contemporary dance workshop. I was sixteen years old. He said, “Don’t you want to audition?” I said, “Okay”. My aunt gave me a pink leotard and tutu, and I tied my hair in a bun. Two days later, I went to the audition. They gave me a number; Alejandro Cervera had us do a diagonal and then a ballet barre. My outfit was ridiculous; everyone wore leggings or tights, and I looked like the Pink Panther. Ana María Stekelman was there, and I remember her well. I got selected, and when I returned, I told my parents, “I want to live in Buenos Aires.”
Before that, I didn’t even know that the San Martín existed. In Bahía Blanca, nobody knew about contemporary dance. We were 700 kilometers away, but it felt like another planet. My parents didn’t have the money to support a house for me to move into. It was a problem, but eventually, I traveled. I was emotionally immature and didn’t fully understand what I was experiencing. Living alone in Buenos Aires and being in the San Martín workshop meant much more than just dancing; it was about learning to cook and deal with inevitable loneliness. Places have their ways of interacting and moving, not just in terms of language. I greeted everyone with a kiss, familiar in Bahía, where we were also very chatty. In the San Martín, there was a code that took me years to understand, an idea of concentration and silence that was challenging for me. It was important for a dancer to be different, even without mirrors. It was a school affiliated with the Colón Theater or the Teatro Argentino in La Plata. It wasn’t just a playful space; it was very demanding. Getting in there was about growing up..
Learning dance is much more than moving a leg. I learned this in the ballet in Bahía Blanca at nine. My teachers were women dancers in the old style, very elegant, always made up, they looked like opera singers, like Callas. And they were highly admired. But they were also hardworking women who worked from desire. Many were single mothers or separated, which wasn’t expected then. Seeing these women, who worked from passion in ballet, even though classical ballet has a monarchical structure, shaped my subjectivity. I also remember José Buono, the first dancer in Bahía Blanca who had HIV. It wasn’t talked about, but we knew. I was fourteen years old and knew he was going through an illness in the 80s. Despite that immense pain, he created a group in a hospital to help others going through the same thing. So, ballets are much more than people who dance well; they are spaces for people who are afraid and who desire.
Dance in Bahía Blanca was my genesis, and it showed me a way beyond just doing a demi plié or a battement. It goes beyond things I didn’t like. Those who danced less or not as well weren’t seen. I found myself among those who danced well, fitting the prototype, but I felt that my classmates were invisible, and I didn’t like that. I think the way of teaching has changed. Even though dance has limited time, and you have to choose those who have more potential, you are working with something beyond just a body.
When I moved to Buenos Aires, I came with a strong desire to fall in love with the city. I started studying Art History at the UBA. I remember there was a table where all the political parties were present. From there, I went to the workshop. I was fascinated by percussion, dancing barefoot, and discovering that improvisation was possible. I met Ana Itelman, and it was a tremendous experience. She explained how to think about movement, which was entirely different from what I had learned. They told us, “Every six months, we’ll decide if you can continue; this is a state space, and we must respect it.” I found it difficult to accept this evaluation process.
They treated me well at the San Martín and told me I had potential, but when the audition for the ballet was held, I came in second place, and it felt like a blow. Later, I joined the Ballet del Sur. I was no longer on pointe; my feet were more comprehensive, and I struggled with my balance. I didn’t quite fit in. I started giving classes as something inevitable. I don’t know if the word is resilience or adaptability, but I thought, “If this doesn’t work here, it will work elsewhere.” My passion shifted: “If I didn’t get into the San Martín, I got into the ballet. And if all the ballet performances are classical, and I don’t fit in, then I’ll teach”..
Being happy inside a classroom
If there was a moment when I said, “I want to dedicate myself to artistic practice” – I say “practice” and not “art” because I like the word “practice” as in doing – it was when I started to become a teacher. Also, when I started working in the archive of the Ferrowhite museum workshop, and when I began to do documentary theater around the body and work, dance was a complete guide but was permeated by theatricality.
Teaching allowed me to discover a zone of great pleasure. Pleasure in transmitting, body to body, what I had learned. I started to build something very emotional when staging plays with schoolgirls that weren’t anything impressive. After a lot of analysis and going to therapy, I began to see that this idea of bigness, of grandeur, is very patriarchal, very Hollywood-like, and from a world that has filed us down. And that was because I was thrilled inside a classroom and hadn’t been taught that you could be happy there. I hadn’t been taught that I could be pleased with girls who didn’t dance very well but who became passionate about learning choreography with me while I learned to be a choreographer myself.
Even though I had studied with good composition teachers, creating choreography needed to be added to the map. Dancers are trained to improve, do double and triple turns, and lift their legs higher. When you join the San Martín ballet, your field of desire is more in the realm of an interpreter. It’s true that when you dance, the performer reinterprets and invents their forms. But in my case, the choreographies they gave me or the things I experienced didn’t quite fulfill me.
Throughout my dancing career, from the beginning in Bahía Blanca, issues of identity and gender were always on the table. We must rethink the spaces that excite us and re-enchant the ballets. If you dance Giselle from Swan Lake, what other ending can the work have? If a boy, a girl, or a non-binary child comes, ask them what different end Giselle can have. Does she have to go mad to fall in love?
We all have our playlists; we repeat things or words. One of the things I repeat is that I belong to the post-dictatorship generation. We didn’t start from scratch but had to reconnect a link and hook it back in. Administration within institutions was inevitable. In Bahía Blanca, we had to start the contemporary dance program without a curriculum or trained teachers. That forced me to manage; I started requesting programs from the San Martín, the Colón, and others from abroad. There was hardly any narrative in 1991; it was only around 1995 in Europe that dancewriting started gaining more strength. So, we had to write a program, and since I couldn’t teach alone, we had to assemble a group of dancer-teachers. We met at my house with friends or colleagues from the San Martín. They came to give workshops for ballet teachers starting to delve into the contemporary language.
I learned that if something doesn’t exist, you have to create it. If there was no dance piece, we had to make one. If there was no program, we had to invent it. Federico León says that the “polirubro” (multifaceted) concept is a creation of the 90s, that inside a convenience store, there was a washing machine, and they also sold undergarments. Management is intertwined with a place’s political and social context and history, especially in Latin America. So, I am a manager because it falls within the realm of “doing.”
Let the wheel turn in a different way
I have thirty years of teaching experience. During the pandemic, I created a WhatsApp group for many chains. It was necessary to dance and say, “We are here; dance exists beyond being confined.” The artistic field is within culture. It’s a place in the world where you fight battles. It’s a place of tension. Something ethical is at stake here. I have received so much from colleagues, teachers, and mentors. It feels like I can’t keep it all to myself.. Working with archives is about passing on a narrative from mouth to mouth. There’s a saying that you cease to exist when no one mentions your name. So, we build networks and chains to achieve things that have taken years, the struggles of many people who have invested their heart and soul. I have a stake in the new generations, in people eager to create something related to art. How can I ensure that this passion they have is carried forward? It’s a matter of desire; management comes from there. It’s not neat, orderly, or highly conscious management.
Institutions tend to absorb things late because they come into existence later. The curriculum for dance in Bahía Blanca has evolved. When Paula Rodríguez and I designed the program, there were subjects like Dance History. In teacher training programs, there were different content areas. Over time, new ways of thinking entered the field. For example, hip-hop was introduced into a dance school five years after being seen in a public square. An institution adopts something after it has gained momentum. I was part of the school of dance’s management team for twenty years, and I saw that institutions risk losing relevance and not being part of transformation. You are training young dancers with incredible potential, but when they leave, they lack the proper perspective to face the world because you’ve shown them a different world. Institutions cannot do everything, and today’s young artists have independent groups outside them. Institutions must reconsider how they approach things.
Mediaciones vivas is a space that emerged from the need to think about different management frameworks. Management isn’t just about dreaming and executing something; it’s a realm of complex knowledge involving political and contextual perspectives. I began to notice discussions about cultural rights, and we started questioning what “territory” means. I often mention Mario Bellatin. He had the Escuela Dinámica de Escritores (Dynamic Writers School) in Mexico. When asked whom he invited, he would say, “I don’t invite the person with a great curriculum or who did brilliant work twenty years ago; I bring in someone who is currently transforming something, boiling with something.”
Let’s consider curations: Who evaluates? Why don’t they evaluate the territory differently? Out of five hundred applicants, four hundred are rejected. There’s one person with twenty awards and likely more to come. That person is being chosen and encouraged; they know how to present and write. But what am I rewarding? What am I supporting? The cultural budget centers around Buenos Aires and the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires (CABA). Instead of just saying the word ‘federal’ to sound good, let’s think of natural ways to change the system. I coordinate the Organismos Artísticos del Sur (Artistic Organizations of the South) and am involved with Mediaciones vivas. I’m witnessing how a discussion on cultural rights is taking shape, what constitutes a cultural right. Those in artistic positions, in political or government roles, must have the humility to connect with people outside our circles, perhaps in a neighborhood or a remote location. Research is an unstable process, and something new may emerge from it.
Living another dance
There are as many ways to do dance and art as people worldwide. I like Rimini Protokoll, a German group that talks about the “experts of the everyday”: someone who harvests, a seamstress, someone who sews well. We need to rethink, as in the early 20th century, what art is, who defines what art is, who is an artist, and who points that out. Inés Sanguinetti had the project “Creating is Worthwhile,” and she said that contemporary dance was like a David falling to the ground, referring to the sculpture of David. She felt that to revitalize it, we needed to make a dance soup, mixing dances. Institutions need to host more parties beyond rethinking everything they think. I see the efforts of colleagues, teachers, and students to reinvent institutions. Not everything is done repetitively, but we need to break more bubbles and make contact. Like in collage, bring together once separate things.
We also need to start seeing dances where we don’t see them. When there’s a march to demand something, like the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, that is a dance. The parade is also a dance. Someone might say, “A dancer won’t teach you how to march.” But if a dancer participates in protests or a community kitchen while cooking, they might discover a dance. A classical dancer has to train all day, but to dance Swan Lake better; they must see dances where they haven’t seen them yet. Even if they work twenty thousand hours in ballet, we must make them experience another dance. Inside the school, it could happen that when they see the janitor, the caretaker, or the assistant cleaning with their broom, they discover a dance there. And we need to stop and look at it. Teachers must show a ballet student that the janitor is sweeping and keeping the place clean. Look at them and greet them. Start saying, “The beautiful demi plié you perform on stage, that thing you do to offer something to others, a pleasure… he’s doing the same, from a different place”. We need to stop separating dance and art from life.