MA SODA Publication 2018-2020
Pages 10-14 by Jorge De Hoyos (writing) in collaboration with A.U.Pinto (painting)
Alessandro and I met at a Berlin sex club where we immediately entered into a committed boyfriend relationship from the moment we made each other orgasm until around 8am the next morning—one of the most erotic nights I’ve ever had. After this 11-hour, polyamorous partnership, we didn’t see each other until riding on the S-Bahn a year later. We didn’t become regular friends until even months after that. Now, having grown very close, Alessandro mentioned how a deep, inner-guidance insisted that he must get to know me that night. I remember our attraction…not just sexual but some-cosmic-thing else that leaves a distinct impression, the feeling of which is specifically easy for me to recall. It feels like the bitter taste of semen and carbonated beer being washed away and swallowed by a soothing, ravenous tongue. It feels like recognizing.
As my visual arts collaborator, I asked him to contribute an image that reflects and gives insight into my ongoing research on presence: how can I be more deeply grounded in my body so as to improvise dance performance at my fullest capacities—to not overthink so as to allow my intuition to lead the dancing? The work demands releasing control of rational decision-making procedures so as to allow whatever is inside of me or wanting to come through me to gain physical expression into legible form.
I was explaining, “In general, but also specifically for the final presentation, I want to be dancing so open and full of vitality so that my spirit can be free and I can embody and satisfy all the passions and desires. You know, like Billy Elliot who later becomes the beautiful Swan...” With a knowing look he said, “I have something that is you. I will send.”
There is an inherent violence in expanding beyond borders, in entering territories defined in relationship to oneself as “other”. This process entails confrontation, a struggle for dominion. In the context of becoming more grounded as a dancer to perform at an expanded capacity, this struggle takes place in the realm of the self and is largely a matter of recognition. Recognition is here understood by the fact that borders demarcating a sense of oneself as separate from an “other” are always changing, and that through a continuous tug-of-war, processes of incorporation and growth occur as one side eventually cannibalizes the other. The “other” becomes the self, and vice versa. Recognition, therefore, is a repeated process of incorporation. It means to expand one’s definitions of what constitutes one’s self to include otherness. The violence inherent in this process emerges from the precondition of ongoing struggle, and the violence intensifies and gains sharp teeth when this process is resisted.
I initially resisted Alessandro’s painting—a screaming figure masturbating as a demonic shadow looks on. I feared to recognize it as the accurate and insightful reflection of my research that I now consider it to be. Upon first encounter, my stomach clenched as if trying to stabilize an internal breach, as if clenching could prevent something personal and valued from cracking. Yes, the image could relate to the human-to-swan transformation story with which I was initially identifying, but it was the nightmarish, “other” black swan version that had manifested like an intruder. I felt momentarily seized in suspension between my resistance and an impending sense of destabilization. The violence in this uncanny confrontation felt like the instinct to defend myself or seek refuge. Have I been understanding myself and my research in an entirely wrong way, foolish and even immoral? Have I naively opened myself up too much, leaving me susceptible to a demonic takeover or an eternal hell of serving relentlessly throbbing passions? At stake was a sense of personal power…am I now lost?
Of all the fears I experience while dance improvising in front of others, getting lost is the strongest and the most recurring. It happens when I worry: Am I really present? Will I look ridiculous if I follow that feeling? Am I being interesting enough? Such thoughts create a mind-body split, and in this gap between intuitive impulse and physical action, time goes missing. I become confused and fearful and lose orientation leaving me vulnerable to the rampage of internal voices. What results is that my spirit, for fear of demise, seems to evacuate my body while my physical remains proceed to operate along habitually programmed movement pathways, like a machine on autopilot—unresponsive. Dancing like this feels from the inside like a waking rigor mortis. A body somehow survives but at the cost of the quality of life.
Grounding my energy has become my main area of inquiry and practice to keep re-finding myself in my body and in the process to revitalize it. Breathing deeply, for example, is one of the everyday tools I use to dissolve stiffness—stiffness as in freezing into pre-defined patterns, as in becoming slave to the tyrannical penis passions depicted in the painting, as in not moving freely. Breathing, a main way of grounding, helps me dissolve internalized obstructions so as to cultivate my intuition.
Confronting Alessandro’s painting, I breathe deeply to dissolve my resistance to recognizing how something so true and revealing about me--my desires, dreams and questions--stands naked, reflected and immaculately transparent to my perception.
As the spiritual teacher Caroline Myss explains: “Every time you learn something that is more accurate, more authentic, or true than what you were just believing, you crack open a little bit. In that moment of cracking open, you become very vulnerable because you know that the world you were just living in is gone. It evaporates in front of your eye. Just like that” (Myss 2019).
--
Billy Elliot. Directed by Stephen Daldry. Universal City, CA: Universal Studios, 2001
Myss, Caroline. (2019). Understanding Your Own Power – Enchantment 2018. [YouTube Lecture] Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeY_SmJafSQ&t=203s [Accessed 14 Sep. 2019]
Ubirajara, Alessandro. Risk on potato bag #2. 2015, Berlin.
As my visual arts collaborator, I asked him to contribute an image that reflects and gives insight into my ongoing research on presence: how can I be more deeply grounded in my body so as to improvise dance performance at my fullest capacities—to not overthink so as to allow my intuition to lead the dancing? The work demands releasing control of rational decision-making procedures so as to allow whatever is inside of me or wanting to come through me to gain physical expression into legible form.
I was explaining, “In general, but also specifically for the final presentation, I want to be dancing so open and full of vitality so that my spirit can be free and I can embody and satisfy all the passions and desires. You know, like Billy Elliot who later becomes the beautiful Swan...” With a knowing look he said, “I have something that is you. I will send.”
There is an inherent violence in expanding beyond borders, in entering territories defined in relationship to oneself as “other”. This process entails confrontation, a struggle for dominion. In the context of becoming more grounded as a dancer to perform at an expanded capacity, this struggle takes place in the realm of the self and is largely a matter of recognition. Recognition is here understood by the fact that borders demarcating a sense of oneself as separate from an “other” are always changing, and that through a continuous tug-of-war, processes of incorporation and growth occur as one side eventually cannibalizes the other. The “other” becomes the self, and vice versa. Recognition, therefore, is a repeated process of incorporation. It means to expand one’s definitions of what constitutes one’s self to include otherness. The violence inherent in this process emerges from the precondition of ongoing struggle, and the violence intensifies and gains sharp teeth when this process is resisted.
I initially resisted Alessandro’s painting—a screaming figure masturbating as a demonic shadow looks on. I feared to recognize it as the accurate and insightful reflection of my research that I now consider it to be. Upon first encounter, my stomach clenched as if trying to stabilize an internal breach, as if clenching could prevent something personal and valued from cracking. Yes, the image could relate to the human-to-swan transformation story with which I was initially identifying, but it was the nightmarish, “other” black swan version that had manifested like an intruder. I felt momentarily seized in suspension between my resistance and an impending sense of destabilization. The violence in this uncanny confrontation felt like the instinct to defend myself or seek refuge. Have I been understanding myself and my research in an entirely wrong way, foolish and even immoral? Have I naively opened myself up too much, leaving me susceptible to a demonic takeover or an eternal hell of serving relentlessly throbbing passions? At stake was a sense of personal power…am I now lost?
Of all the fears I experience while dance improvising in front of others, getting lost is the strongest and the most recurring. It happens when I worry: Am I really present? Will I look ridiculous if I follow that feeling? Am I being interesting enough? Such thoughts create a mind-body split, and in this gap between intuitive impulse and physical action, time goes missing. I become confused and fearful and lose orientation leaving me vulnerable to the rampage of internal voices. What results is that my spirit, for fear of demise, seems to evacuate my body while my physical remains proceed to operate along habitually programmed movement pathways, like a machine on autopilot—unresponsive. Dancing like this feels from the inside like a waking rigor mortis. A body somehow survives but at the cost of the quality of life.
Grounding my energy has become my main area of inquiry and practice to keep re-finding myself in my body and in the process to revitalize it. Breathing deeply, for example, is one of the everyday tools I use to dissolve stiffness—stiffness as in freezing into pre-defined patterns, as in becoming slave to the tyrannical penis passions depicted in the painting, as in not moving freely. Breathing, a main way of grounding, helps me dissolve internalized obstructions so as to cultivate my intuition.
Confronting Alessandro’s painting, I breathe deeply to dissolve my resistance to recognizing how something so true and revealing about me--my desires, dreams and questions--stands naked, reflected and immaculately transparent to my perception.
As the spiritual teacher Caroline Myss explains: “Every time you learn something that is more accurate, more authentic, or true than what you were just believing, you crack open a little bit. In that moment of cracking open, you become very vulnerable because you know that the world you were just living in is gone. It evaporates in front of your eye. Just like that” (Myss 2019).
--
Billy Elliot. Directed by Stephen Daldry. Universal City, CA: Universal Studios, 2001
Myss, Caroline. (2019). Understanding Your Own Power – Enchantment 2018. [YouTube Lecture] Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeY_SmJafSQ&t=203s [Accessed 14 Sep. 2019]
Ubirajara, Alessandro. Risk on potato bag #2. 2015, Berlin.
