Another community: when dissident bodies and temporalities dance
Another Community is a work by performer, choreographer, and director Iván Haidar. It connects dance with dissidence to question ideas of time and language through non-binary body language.
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The naked bodies enter the stage with a slow, choreographic march. They walk in front of a white screen that projects the same procession. Another Community is a work by performer, choreographer, and director Iván Haidar . The performers construct a story without words or music; they narrate everything with their bodies and movements. They tell it twice on the screen, creating spectral images of great beauty but also inviting the audience to complete the work with their own eyes.
How to say without explaining
“In today's context, it's not just about the technical nature of the device and the beauty of a live audiovisual proposal. It's also about what happens to those bodies , what happens with temporality , what happens with those images that suggest things,” Iván explains to Presentes. Anyone who has never seen dance or performance pieces is not excluded from appreciating what happens here, because, as its director says, the proposal invites us all to question ourselves based on what the scenes evoke.
A wordless performance doesn't mean it's silent. Just as bodies are mediated by visual technology to inhabit the space, voices had to find their place in this way. "The sound device, respecting this logic, is also a body. The performers' voices also appear mediated by technology to create this looped multiplicity of sounds." And regarding the lack of music or text, the director attributes this to this search for "the ability to speak without explaining, therefore to suggest one meaning among other possible ones." They are sounds, guttural noises, pierced by the sound box that allows them to be mixed to tell us, this, that, many stories.
Invitation to other temporalities
“ It's an invitation to another time, one I feel we're not giving ourselves, or giving ourselves less and less, to a time that is disappearing: that of contemplation ,” he explains. In a time of bombardment of stimuli—cell phones, TV, the Internet, social media, the streets, lack of money, violence, wars, abuse, presidents— the work opens a window to another perspective, “to wasting time, which is gaining time .” In a time of accelerationism, there is a disobedience in proposing non-productivity, “which is the most necessary thing in the world.” This challenge is taken up by performers and audiences, for a time of contemplation and proposals that generates many questions, readings, and insights of their own.
There are other bodies that can dance
How are dance and bodily expression linked to sexual dissidence? “To talk about sexual dissidence in relation to dance or bodily expression, we have to bring the debate closer to when we began to see the possibility of other bodies in contemporary dance,” she responds. Up until that point, everything had been binary and biological: men (with penises) and women (with vulvas) with exceptional physical abilities. Only at the beginning of the last century did a period, “obviously led by women,” begin to propose: there are other bodies that can dance. Suddenly, the unchosen, the non-“virtuosos,” were on stage. And it allowed us to begin to understand virtuosity from other perspectives, for example, from emotion.
“I think dance is very activist in that sense,” says Iván. “Because it has been proposing, at all times and different moments in history, things that are invisible. Dance is perhaps one of the most neglected disciplines of all,” he explains. This is no small fact brought up by the director and performer. And he adds: “The largest percentage of members of the dance community are women; there you have one of the first minorities. The men who enter dance are generally gay. There you have another minority.” Listening to Haidar, one can better understand this relegation of voices that seek new questions, other nuances, different narratives in the face of institutionalized hegemonies.
Another Community invokes ten bodies on stage that multiply on the screen. Are they men or women? Haidar's proposal, along with the group of performers, transcends this binary. Even with exposed genitalia, it doesn't seem likely to assign an identity to the person performing. This small/immense queer revolution welcomes those who can break free from this prejudice and immerse themselves in the much broader range of interpretations and appreciations offered.
“Dance is something ancestral, popular, and primitive. It's an exercise the body uses to connect with others, to be in community, and to connect with others, as it has always been. Today, we come together to dance to be together, and we do so through movement,” she says. She cites as a reference dances that briefly dissipate differences, such as carnival, which briefly transcends social and political differences. Dance is the political exercise of dissent in the ballroom scene. We move to demand, to make demands, to make visible, to dance “as something social. It's a great artistic and activist discipline .”
Another scene, another community
There are no certainties or precepts in this performance, but rather an invitation to experience what happens in one's own body while watching others. The bodies on stage and their avatars on screen become the hidden words, and each person in the audience decodes that language with their own resources. Haidar has been exploring this device of dance, performance, and doubled image since 2017, beginning in parts with her solo performance, Otra Línea, and then in 2019 with the first version of Otra Comunidad.
After various presentations, after a pandemic and a year of isolation, after a period of "parking," the play returns to the stage. The premise of an "other" community—not better or worse, new or old, but one constructed between the stage and the audience—allows for a sensorial and reflective journey filled with talent, precision, and, above all, a love for collective action, always necessary in times of individualism and chaos.
Otra Comunidad can be seen on Thursdays at El Galpón de Guevara at 9 p.m. Tickets can be purchased at Alternativa Teatral.
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