What makes you move

[N]ot what moves, but what makes you move
Pina Bausch

The work O Chão nas Cidades- Performance e População de Rua (The Ground of the Cities- Performance and Street Population) aims at combining empirical experimentation with ethnographic reflection on the experience of social space. I am proposing to create a performance on city sidewalks, concretely intervening --with my body on the ground-- in a space marked by social exclusion for thousands of street dwellers, simultaneously situating myself as both performer and researcher.

In creating performance projects, I have always tried to foreground a quality, inherent in the actor's physical presence: the pleasure in risk-taking and the hyper-circulation and exaltation that result from this adrenaline rush. To be performing in the streets is to be at play and at risk, which requires my body to connect with the here and now of the experience and to be open to a complete and menacing emptiness.  For me, play, presence and emptiness have been totally tied to a conceptual immersion in the language of performance and the ethnographic approach of street performances.

But my body is not only pierced by culture, it also is culture, changing identity, organic matter, social representation, subjective and public domains; to experience the dimension of risk is also to engage in a dialogue with the multiple risks in the world and for my body in the world. The city’s body is a body filled with exaltation and adrenaline. Risk is a condition that is imposing itself more and more on the modern world. The mere participation of the individual in contemporary society invites displays of shock. When I lie down on the ground of the cities, I articulate the desire to experience the risk of being exposed and the wish for political transformation: to call attention to the fragility of social bonds and the delicate balance of human coexistence.

I move because I want to be in the in-between --the inevitable space of performance-- but I also move because I wish to create new perceptions and affective relationships in a world that is pierced more and more by the shock of changes too rapid to be integrated into our perception and that deny our active participation.

 

-- Andréa Maciel Garcia