Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Exergie - Butter Dance

In the work of Melati Suryodarmo (Surakarta, Indonesia, 1969), the physical body is the mirror of what takes place within inner universes, the plane where ideas, feelings, concerns and abilities are revealed – such as walking on a line and keeping balance. “As long as we are conscious of our individual physical existence, the body can be a parameter of the mind. I believe that the body contains all physiological paths that influence our future and present lives”, says the Indonesian artist, who integrates the Independent Performance Group, a performance group founded by Serbian artist Marina Abramovic. “Exergie – Butter Dance” is the reflection of her belief in the body-mirror. In the piece, Melati walks in high heels on pieces of butter; she is on the verge of slipping and falling. The act demands absolute concentration, the ability to overcome one’s limitations and quick reactions to challenges that change at every second.

“The concept for ‘Exergie’ has reached my deepest psychological dimension, and it fits, therefore, any situation I might be living. Each time I do it, I face new experiences. My work is based on a main concept that is solid and that can grow and progress alongside my life”, says the performer. A student of Marina Abramovic from 1994 to 2002, she has experimented the radical method of her teacher, who usually takes her pupils to the limits of bodily and emotional capacity through exercises, fasting or meditation. “Besides teaching me discipline and professionalism, Marina has supported me in the search for the understanding and awareness of my cultural roots and my individual being, specially through physical and mental methods that she has shared with me”, says the artist.

Suryodarmo holds a degree in International Relations, and her work features elements of Noh theatre, Butoh and Oriental dances to talk about identity, energy, politics and relationships between the body and the environment surrounding it. Her work after “Exergie” includes “Lullaby for the Ancestors” (2001), in which, in a long lilac dress, she commands a white horse, and “The Promise”(2002), when, clad in red, Suryodarmo holds an animal’s liver, an organ usually associated, in her country, with hiding problems. “I will never choose a subject that is unreal or that is not connected to my life. I can only speak of themes that interest me and that I am sure I know. Even when I speak of politics, the aim is not to represent a general opinion, but my personal view of it.”

Now, the artist ponders on silence, the theme of her next project. “If I want the world to change, I have to start with myself. The most important part of individual attitude before a political situation is to trust the mind and respect others the same way you respect yourself.”

Conception: Melati Suryodarmo.

ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL, "15º Festival Internacional de Arte Eletrônica Videobrasil": de 06 a 25 de setembro de 2005, p. 152 a 153, São Paulo, SP, 2005.

Performances

Centered on the body, the performance, as ephemeral and unpredictable as it is, is not a form of entertainment, but an artistic genre that involves confrontation and risk. Political by necessity, it subverts the relationship between the work and the public, who is not invited to suspend disbelief before a fiction, but to pay witness to an occurrence. Transiting amongst disciplines every bit as much as it evades them, the performance becomes the expression of an art form in which the boundaries between genres cease to make sense. Perhaps that is why it is singled out as the contemporary artistic manifestation par excellence.

It was the observation of this phenomenon, especially in the evident manner in which it reverberates through electronic art – now increasingly more politicized and linked to the presence of the artist –, that motivated the gathering of such an expressive group of performers at this Festival. Brazilian, North American, Asian, African, they represent various takes on a genre of infinite hybridism, intent on dissolving the limits between artistic expressions one moment, and pointing to social issues and sharing universal scars the next.

One of the most striking of these approaches, the performance openly constituted as a political gesture, is rep- resented, among others, by the Cuban-born New Yorker, Coco Fusco. She commands an urban intervention which stages a ritual of subjection common in North American military prisons, though seen here as a kind of compulsory performance in which the body is violently used against man himself. The observation of the way situations reflex themselves in the media and in the society is also the source of the recordings brought together in “Futebol”, a work by Frente 3 de Fevereiro that echoes an act of racism; and the distressing sensa- tion of imminent tragedy the feitoamãos/F.A.Q. group takes as its subject matter.

No less political in their essence, the works of Kenyan artist Ingrid Mwangi and the Indonesian Melati Suryodarmo are the fruit of a performance conception in which the body is the field of projection for disturb- ances born within the sphere of strictly personal experience. Mwangi, who created “My Possession” for the

Festival, uses voice and movement to speak of an existence in displacement. In “Exergie – Butter Dance”, Melati, who studied performance with Marina Abramovic, draws upon the imminence of the accident – and not uncommonly, the accident itself – to produce a concentrated level of intensity without the use of any narrative structure whatsoever.

In different ways, Marco Paulo Rolla and Detanico Lain represent the performance that is born of the fine arts. Rather than abandoning the white cube, the paradigm for the contemporary exposition space, Marco Paulo appropriates its formal rigor in performances that speak of the disconcerting bursting through of chance into a world of placidity and balance. Artists Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain environmentalise their pixel landscapes and enter the scene themselves to manipulate them live so as to accentuate their character of digital representation – and, ultimately, understand how the representation constructs images of the world.

Plastic, music and video are the founding elements of a performance genre that is particularly vigorous in Brazil. The previously unseen works of the Chelpa Ferro group and the artist Eder Santos to be shown at the Festival are some good examples. In Chelpa Ferro, Barrão, Luiz Zerbini and Sergio Mekler broaden their spectrum of action by producing music and noisy objects, which they position on the stage as parts of an installation. “Engrenagem”, which reunites Eder Santos with musicians Stephen Vitiello and Paulo Santos and with performer Ana Gastelois, is a re-reading that validates the artist’s talent in the use of video to multiply the visual effects of performing acts of dance, music, drama and poetry.

Both Eder Santos and Chelpa Ferro have passed through the Festival before, as the presence of their work in the Antologia Videobrasil de Performances attests. Eder created an historic series of performatic works for the Videobrasil Festival, while Zerbini, Barrão and Mekler featured under the name Chelpa Ferro for the first time at the 12th Festival, in 1998. It is therefore symbolic that their new work has been chosen to close the 15th Videobrasil. Within the ample panorama of this most contemporary of genres, they represent a line in performance that was the pioneer on the Brazilian scene and which the Festival is proud to have nurtured since its inception.

ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL. "15º Festival Internacional de Arte Eletrônica Videobrasil - 'Performance.'": de 6 a 25 de setembro de 2005, p.98-99, São Paulo-SP, 2005.