1. introduction  
   

Paz Rojo is interested in the figure of ‘we’. Searching a different expression, relational grammar of plurality for ‘we’. But, she got used to how she was working, methodologies that felt ‘safe’ and even got bored with it.

So she was letting go of that and meeting a text of Agambden on ‘The Whatever’: question of abnormality.

 Reference: film ‘Gerry’ by Gus Van Sant

“what if we stop being artists”, Paz Rojo

 To keep on doing what we do, without identifying ourselves to what ‘artists’ mean today: ways of production, market, visibility, recognition,...

 SEVENTIES IDENTITY

 70ies: dancers & artists play with the concept of equality, fighting for democratization of how one wanted to live, for their subjectivity and the recognition of their identity as a group and individual. Emancipation and asking for visibility and acknowledgement. But because of that different labels and groups emerged.

 A body (of a dancer) could be the body of everyone. They were exploring the body in their quotedianity, setting up social events and happenings. But the collective itself was always a group of ‘outlaws’ trying to protect their individualism. So they needed to apply the idea of acknowledgement.

 And in the end they were just fighting for their own label in the market.

WE the feminists (for example) à the idea of identity, identity of a group.

 Then there was also the practice of ‘contact improvisation’. In doing that, no major protocols, no specific model or style was at hand, but focussed on the experience of weight and gravity by supporting eachother with fixed coördinates. But then the encounter with the other was still placed in a dispositive. Still creating a coprotagonist relationship.

CRISIS

 All the systems of beliefs are falling over à wellfare state gave us the belief we existed, but because of the fall of that (crisis), qualities are changing and there’s even a loss of human qualities. But still there seems to be the idea that the works needs dancers and artists. “But I might not be nessesary”. We were even never needed. There is a lot of potential in that.

 MOURNING

The state = father. The father is providing all the parameters to exist and makes me exist.

But now the father dies. And I realize it was not me who was thinking, but the father...

The mourning for the father is an existential mourning.

The illness of adolesence: to be in the realm of acknowledgement.

But now there’s a realisation of that and reaction to it...

 “The father (state, enemy) is not so recognisable anymore, it’s all around,...”, Veri

“There is no outside”, Simon

 So the ‘enemy’ is us...

And we are ‘whatever’.

“‘We’ is not a topic, it’s something to experience.”, Paz

So the question of experience comes back... If we are not nessesary, we might not exist!

We fear that to be excluded from any kind of work means not to exist...

 What does it mean to work? When do we feel we are working? Where does that happen?

The job today is to exist. This causes a stress: our nervous system is plagued by a state of adolescence and/or a state of chronic fatigue.

We should learn to deal with the idea of ‘loneliness’: in order to be together, we should learn how to be more lonely. What does that mean?

It means not searching or claiming a solution, but weighing: dismanteling the systems of belief, labels, truths. To make a nihilistic travel.

NOTHING & NOTHINGNESS

“To be noone, not to be what we can, what we could, but what we are, whatever we are.”

I weight to I am. To touch and be touched by things.

A way of dealing with the now is to test yourself with the environment, take messure... To get in touch with what is putting you into a little crisis. What’s the wheight on you?

 FILM ‘GERRY’, Gus Van Sant

In this film two guys are walking, soon you see that they don’t know where they’re going and everything and everyone is ‘Gerry’ or is ‘Gerrying’. There’s time and the whole film is an ‘experience’, a travel for the sake of a travel.

 STOP BEING A DANCER

Text by Martin Sparenberg

Dancer is what one does, not what one is.

2. practice 

BODYING 

weighing and moving the different planes of the body.

Moving the sensation, being in a liminal state.

A kind of active meditation

between forcing and losing