A world of unparalleled imagination
I am a trained dancer. Later, I became a choreographic assistant, assistant director, and choreographer. I have been living in Rosario for a couple of years, and today, I am rethinking about dance.
I used to dance when I was a child. I remember dancing alone in the living room of my house, sometimes in silence, accompanied by an object that acted as a partner or by the music of my mother’s record player. To move my body was to enter a world of unequaled imagination: dancing was a game in which I felt free and fulfilled. To move was to move my dream. When I was five, my mother started asking me to study dance. She danced the contemporary dance; that was her environment. She asked her friends where she could send me to study ballet, and they all said, “No, no, I should study body expression.” So, my training always went hand in hand with corporal expression and contemporary dance.
I have always been interested in choreography, but in Buenos Aires, I became enthusiastic about the idea that you could study it and learn how to choreograph. Today, I would be hesitant to make a statement like that, but I felt that way at the time. I was very young and eager to move when I went to Buenos Aires. I put a lot of emphasis on technical training; I wanted to put my body into it to train. I did that at the Escuela de Danza Contemporánea Arte XXI. There were three years of training. I entered the second year and did the fourth year, ballet, for some people. At that time, I also took classes with many teachers in Buenos Aires, taking advantage of the fact that I was there and had the energy of youth. I also began to be interested in choreography and the theory and history of dance, and I discovered that the only place that offered me that was the IUNA. The road to the IUNA was a search for the foundations of dance.
Getting out of the comfort zone
I can only think about my history by thinking about the context, the modes of production, and the context of Argentina; I can’t separate one thing from the other. There is something that a teacher said to me, which became an axis for understanding the world in which I was starting. When the directors of Arte XXI asked her to choreograph a choreography for the end-of-the-year show, she refused and stopped teaching. A few years later, I asked her why she had left that way, and she told me something that stayed with me: “What happens is that they train them for something that doesn’t exist.” To this day, that phrase remains something I think about constantly. She was referring to the fact that they trained us to a very high level of technical excellence, but the truth is that once you finished, you had nowhere to go. At that time, the only possible company was the Ballet del San Martín, but in the Ballet del San Martín, they mostly came from the workshop’s seedbed or the Colón. Finishing that training was a big break for me because we trained and were prepared at a professional level as teachers and, above all, as dancers, and when you left, you found yourself saying, “Well, but where do I work now?”. I realized that I didn’t have the resources to follow a path other than performance. I felt I didn’t have the tools to face the reality of work. That and realizing that dance is a much broader field than dancing led me to enter the IUNA.
As soon as I entered the IUNA, I heard about the dance company, and that became my first objective. I no longer thought about “I’m going to be a company dancer,” but I understood that that space put me in contact with people, choreographers, and teachers I couldn’t access otherwise. So I auditioned, and I was there for two years, which was very intense because in the morning, we had four hours of the company from Monday to Saturday, and then I studied the subjects of my degree and worked.
The company was like a second bubble – the first had been the dance school – which I made the most of because it is an enormous privilege in Argentina to have a free daily class with excellent teachers and the possibility of being in the choreographic kitchen. Being so close to the choreographers in the creative processes enabled me to understand, in practice, how the performer in some innovative approaches, not to say in many creative processes, has a vital authorial role. The methods were very collaborative, the performers were given a lot, and there was always room for the performer to contribute their authorial quota, their interpretative or creative quota. The way it worked was that of a professional company; even though we didn’t get paid and even though we didn’t dedicate eight hours a day to it, it had everything a professional company should have: an institution that protects the activities in an exclusive hall, super careful and dedicated to dance, with choreographers, with first-rate teachers, with performances, with production assistants, assistant directors, creative assistants. That experience made me experience dance more globally, and, at the same time, I made the theoretical and academic journey at the university. All of that was an enormous learning framework.
In the middle of the company’s second year, in 2012, I got a scholarship to attend the American Dance Festival in the United States. That experience was a turning point for me: I spent two months there, and instead of coming back with more desire to dance, paradoxically, I came back with less. When I arrived here, the contrast was enormous. Having seen other modes of production and creation, another socio-economic reality, made it much more apparent that I didn’t want to dance or be in the kitchen of the works. That experience marked me a lot; it led me to make an effort to get out of the bubble of comfort, and when I finished my second year in the company, I decided not to audition to continue for another year. Because training institutions provide structure and support, you can be in crisis and have good and bad times, but they provide undeniable support. At the same time, that structure was also limited in many ways; it had that double track, and I had to get out of the bubble a bit and face what I wanted to do.
The dependence on independent dance
I didn’t have much empty time because after the summer, a colleague, a friend, called me and told me she was about to start a project with Pablo Rotemberg. She said, “Look, Pablo needs an assistant, and I think you could be one. If you’re interested, let me know, I’ll tell him, I’ll put you in touch, and they’ll talk”. So, it was through her and another colleague and colleague in the IUNA company that I began to work with Pablo. They were almost five years of great intensity, years that were a school in many ways because it wasn’t only the creative assistance, being in rehearsals, talking to Pablo, watching two thousand videos, and chatting with the performers who were authors of the whole work, it was also taking on a production role with him. Thus, we began the creative process of what later became La Wagner. We rehearsed for six months, from Monday to Saturday, four to five hours daily, sometimes on Sundays. So, if my idea was to get out of a containing routine, what I did was instead to immerse myself in a bubble of intensity. Besides, we didn’t get paid for those months; nobody paid us for the process. The premiere was going to be at the Centro Cultural San Martín, which supported in terms of production so that the work could be premiered under certain conditions. Still, I don’t remember the team receiving a cachet. Pablo had won a subsidy from Prodanza, and we received fees, including production, management, dissemination, freight, and costume expenses. So, when that money was collected, we received something, the creative team, that is to say, the performers and myself as an assistant, but there is always a gap between the actual work and what is charged. We gambled that La Wagner was a work that would move; that is to say, we bet that the exploitation part of the production would bear fruit and could economically compensate us for the investment of work done. In those years, something extraordinary was generated in that team; with the four performers with Pablo, we assumed an enormous professional commitment that was a great learning experience.
Working with Pablo was an absolute immersion in the actual field of independent dance in Buenos Aires, and that experience, with all the good, bad, intense, fun, and tremendous things that it can have, allowed me to work with Edgardo Mercado with a different ease, with other projects. It gave me a further understanding of theatre, of what it means for a group, a company, or a creator to have to create, produce, manage, and communicate; all of that was an enormous school.
When we talk about independent dance, we are talking about dance professionals who are not directly linked to dance institutions, who create depending on subsidies, on income that may or may not come from the borderó, and that also depends on some fee or cachet that may come through some festival. The paradox is that independent dance is very dependent on these issues, on obtaining a subsidy from some state body, on being able to perform, and that the proceeds not only cover production costs but also remunerate the artists and the creative teams, and that it can circulate in festivals. For me, independent dance is very dependent on this for its subsistence. The state and the private sector must realize itself and sustain creative processes.
Stopping to keep on creating
After working with Edgardo and premiering my work, Marίa sobre María, I needed to make another kind of break after La Wagner. I needed to distance myself from the reality of independent dance in Buenos Aires and understand how I wanted to continue creating and how and in what way I wanted to continue to be linked to dance. Argentina was going through a devaluation, not only in economic terms of cultural policies but also in social terms, a massive devaluation that directly and indirectly affected dance as an artistic activity. So, I began to ask myself a series of questions: “If I want to create a new work, in what terms do I want to make it? Do I want to continue reproducing this kind of precarious destiny, this destiny of precariousness that exists? That is to say, do I want to perpetuate these modes of production? Do I want to assemble a creative team that works ad-honorem, and then eventually get paid something for the work? Or do I want to do things in another way, in a more professional way, where remuneration for artistic work can be guaranteed?
These questions took me away from the wheel of making. And for some time now, they have placed me in a place of introspection and rethinking about how and from where I want to continue making dance. Speaking creatively, I’m talking about directing projects in collaboration or alone because I last danced several years ago. In this sense, I’ve always felt more comfortable with roles that make, build, and give life to the scenic composition but do not personally occupy the center of the stage. In this period that I call “transition,” once again, I reconnected with academia, approached research, and wanted to project myself in that sense. I want to do something creative, dance-wise, but in other terms, it’s an idealization; it can’t be done. Still, I preferred to try, stop for a while, with all the losses and gains that this might imply, to get out of the wheel, out of that “belonging” to the field of Buenos Aires dance, to see things from another angle.