Holding the hands at the tip of my words

At the invitation of Dinis Machado and Ballet Contemporâneo do Norte, I was commissioned to choreograph a solo for the Barco Dance Collection. Right now, my interests have developed in what I call indexing and focusing practices, in particular, in the way the performer develops physical and nonfictional states in interpelative relationships with an audience. Thus, the performer operates in a common and non-autonomous space with the audience in order to orchestrate a choreography of relationships with imaginary objects and spaces, spectators and abstractions.

Dinis Machado, through visual and verbal processing of performative events, will be driven by compulsory gestures through endless simulations of fictional spaces and different temporalities. All his words and gestures will reveal out a world that does not exist but is indexed and grasped through his body. The public reside in the threshold between participation and contemplation, which questions the involved politics of how this performative space mode is built in coalescence with the public.

Choreography Jorge Gonçalves

Performance Dinis Machado

Light Design Diogo Mendes

Photography Miguel Refresco

Video Sofia Arriscado

Production Ballet Contemporâneo do Norte e BARCO Dance Collection

Production Manager Inês Nogueira

Artistic Residency Pólo I Caixa das Artes, Santa Maria da Feira

Première 4 February 2017, Cineteatro António Lamoso, Santa Maria da Feira (PT)

#1 Nominating things and actions in the room with deictic words until a fictional diagram is stablished. Each gesture gives time to people to see with the gesture and to where it points in or out.

How do I give attention to myself and to where I point, at the same time?

#2 From the previous fictional diagram, a narrative emerges and is whispered or said out. There is an urgency to actualize it in the space, there is a memory to be remembered out loud, there is an affection to be felt in the voice that comes with the narrative.

Every gesture that holds a deictic word has an address in the audience and at the actual space and time that we all share with you. Other gestures that hold non-deict words are dissociated from the meaning produced by the narrative, they are callers of attention that are in-between the formal, informal, geometrical, disruptive that invite to your frenetic and daily dynamics of your personal gesturing of the world in your hands.

#3 Extending the narrative to the audience where the fiction meets the reality of the situation. Restrain yourself to the only use of deictic words.

Practice the tension of the limits of your gesture in the space and time through the arms and sight.

Be aware of the attention that you invite to be seen through each gesture.

Change relations of things, persons, spaces and time by an action of transformation.

Deliver yourself in-between two spaces, you and yourself, you and the otherness

Be aware of the frame that you are trapped in and work within it  before changing, the practice is always relational to a perspective.

Time to time, allow yourself to a spiral or a turning vortex of gestures and deictic words.

#4 Different movement practices define micro or macro deictic spaces.

Each ending of each movement or gesture is a deviation. Each arrival is changed continuously to the side and by a degree of velocity, scale and frame. There is an arrhythmia implicitly due to the awareness of the practice. Every time you feel the situation is being installed change space by the means of a deictic spatial word. Every new space is different from the previous by our own measure of what it means change to you.

#5 Leave the space empty by saying out loud a spatial deictic word