What might dance mean for tired, fragile and suffering bodies? Marcelo Evelin and his company Demolition Inc. offer raw, head-on experiences that reveal the dark side of life and break with the certainties of contemporary dance. After a career spanning more than thirty years, the Brazilian choreographer has also focused on the body’s physical decline. Dança Doente (“Sick Dance”) stages a body that is infected by the world and dominated by external forces that are wearing it out to the point of ruin. Marcelo Evelin found his inspiration in Hijikata Tatsumi, the pioneer of butoh, also known as the “dance of darkness”, created in Japan in the 1960s. Approaching dance as the material of a molecular symptomatology, the pathology of a moving body, he rendered it viral, contagious, post-apocalyptic: the omen of certain death, brandished to reaffirm the power of life. Essential viewing!

Interview conducted via Skype on December 7th, 2016.

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Carolina Mendonça: I thought we'd start with a very open question. In general terms, what is this new work? Or how did the idea of Dança Doente (Sick Dance) come about?

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Marcelo Evelin: Dança Doente (Sick Dance) came from sort of a fascination with the universe of Hijikata Tatsumi, the Japanese choreographer who created the Butoh dance form. Since 2008, images of him and his aesthetic propositions have been roaming through my work, but when I started going to Japan in 2011, these images began resonating more strongly with my universe and to a lot of my questions as a choreographer, as an artist…Sick Dance has been developing from there with the two crucial questions that are in the title. The first is the idea of Dance. What is dance today? What can we do with dance? How can we think of dance as the activation of a corporal state which leads to a state of common[CN1] ? Dance as a type of standpoint that is determinant in the political and artistic conjuncture of the world. This is a question that was always strongly brought up by Hijikata, we he tried to formulate a dance that was specific to his standpoint. I think his insistence with the idea of dance brought forward my insistence and my questions, as well as an enormous desire to create a dance piece, questioning, in this piece, exactly what dance has always meant to me.

The other question is the idea of sickness. The “sick” in the title comes from Hijikata's last work, which is this book called “Ailing Dancer”. A book I have never been able to read because there is no translation, but that I can imagine from what I hear. It’s almost a danced autobiography, a book where he resorts to images of childhood, adolescence, of how everything began building up for him; he goes back to all the questions which guided his work during thirty years. From the book I got this idea of an ailment, which is also very present in his works, and started putting it all together, asking myself how we could understand dance as a Symptom. The symptom is exactly that moment where the body alters and shifts its perception of itself. A subjective description of a condition by the body itself. There is a difference between symptom and diagnosis. The diagnosis is what the doctor, through his technique, is able to assess and give a name to. The symptom is a shift, a subtle altering of the perception in your own body, of your own existence, and can only be described by the patient.

So, Sick Dance is a piece that's being built around these questions.

C: Listening to you, it seems like the relationship you establish with Hijikata's universe, and with the dance itself, has less to do with the form and more so with an investigation of what dance is as language.

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M: One of Hijikata's propositions that interests me the most, which was one of the first questions to come up in this process, is the idea of separating the body from language. This still is incisive in the piece, almost an impossible question to face, and this side of it also interests me. What I feel Hijikata has done is exactly not considering dance as a form, but mainly as a process of transformation of a corporal, psychic, emotional, mental state… This constant process of transformation is one element I consider very important in dance. I see dance as a process of dissolution of rigidness, as something more fluid that somehow determines the bodies continuously, along with the friction of these bodies with other bodies, with the world, with the questions that permeate all of this. Lately, I think of language as something outside of itself, as the dismantling of language. Again, as transformation, precisely to take itself elsewhere.

C: We are talking about these issues that are your starting points, and I wanted to understand how they transfer to the rehearsal room. Take us through your creative process.

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M: My process is always very intuitive and looks like a chase. It's always the process of pursuing what has not yet vanished, what remains, insists, comes back. I have a process of seeking something that is unclear, that changes  when I approach it. In this piece, it's almost as if we're chasing the idea of a spectrum, a ghost. The play has something of phantasmagoria to it, which to me is key to its intentions, the laws and rules that permeate and structure it. So this process is the pursuit of something that doesn’t exist, or exists no longer, or maybe never existed at all.

In the case of this creation, I had a longer process than I normally have before starting rehearsals. I spent two years on the verge of starting, constantly preparing, and things kept changing all the time. All the ideas I had for the process, of starting with one question, one image, all of those keep dissolving, keep transforming, or I lost them. To me, the research I did now in Japan was very much a process of not gathering more material, elements and ideas about Hijikata, but instead killing the ideas I already had. A whole investigation based on losing all the references I previously had or making banal the more didactic ones that could help me build a piece. Relativize, abandon, lose all of it. Therefore, the most important thing I have now is: how to position myself in a place where I can let myself be traversed by an uncoded language. How does my body, my dance, position itself towards something that traverses, that intercepts, that makes use of this body. As if we were one of those airport windsocks, placed there to tell where the wind is coming from and where it is going.

C: Yes, with this idea of a ghost, an apparition, it seems like this dance is less an action than a way of listening.

M: A perception...

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C: Or another understanding of dance...

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M: It is hard to tell, because it seems pretentious for me to say that it is another kind of dance, it seems like we’re inventing something that doesn’t already exist. But I feel that, yes, it has a lot more to do with amplifying a perception, activating a kind of absolute corporeal consciousness, happening in time and space, so to me, it is dance. I have demanded a high rigor of dancing in regards to the perception one has of oneself, with the permissiveness of this corporeal state. More than the construction of a body, of a corporeal language of movements and gestures, I think of it as altering and amplifying consciousness.

C: You spoke a lot about the idea of ailment as transformation, and I feel like the piece also has the idea of Death as one of its apparitions...

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M: I feel the state of sickness in this piece has to do with this complete destabilizing of the body and all the processes that keep the body alive. Death is almost the flip side of an enormous potency for life. It is the other side but also it's life's siamese twin sister. Intuitively, I feel that the potency for life is very close to an absolute state of death. What fascinates me in death is this idea of utterness[CN2] , death is death, something we know is going to happen and is absolutely determinant in our life. The question would be: how can we exist in life with decisiveness, with the magnitude that we're going to exist in death?

I usually think that dead people live inside of us, and Hijikata's dance was wholly permeated by this, as he said he spent his entire life dancing with his dead sister inside his body. So he spent his life feeding a dead sister, a dead body, and I think it gave enormous potency to his life. This whole idea of haunting, of ghosts, the Japanese conception of it is that it comes through a kind of sensation, a vibration in the air, that they call kehai. The idea of spectre is very important to me in this process, but not in the western comprehension, of a ghost that is related to a personality. Kehai establishes itself in space and comes as a situation that occurred, a tremor in the air. Didi-Huberman speaks a lot of the unfolding of images and the apparitions that are created as these images unfold. I don't know exactly how to go into that, but I am rather curious, almost as a technical element of this research, to unfold Hijikata's images, not in the sense of making them visible, but to create space for the spectre in those images that ravage me somehow.

C: I thought about the relation to the Kinjiki (Forbidden Colors), in that there’s no attempt of necessarily remaking or reassembling his performance, but instead almost letting him disappear.

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M:  Yes, it's much more the spectre of the Kinjiki than a reconstruction or homage. It's more about what remains, what haunts me when I see Ohno Yoshito in the kitchen of his home making a gesture from a dance he performed 57 years ago. I like to think of Dança Doente as a parenthesis between the Kinjiki (Forbidden Colors - 1959) and Yameru Maihime (Ailing Dancer - 1984), Hijikata's first and last works. The Kinjiki as an initial mark, a near provocation, Hijikata's drawing attention to his dance; and Yameru Maihime, a book no one is able to translate, with its bifurcated writing, ambiguous, destabilizing the construction of sense, creating a much more sensorial reading.

C: The work is very strongly related to Japan. I wonder what thoughts you have regarding Brazil.

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M: My last research trip to Japan consisted of killing all the references, unmaking all the clues I had. Setsuko Yamada, a Japanese choreographer, was very emphatic when she told me that “your research is not necessarily Hijikata. You have to find your Hijikata elsewhere. What Hijikata perceived as Dance, as a concept, is not directly linked to Japan, to kimonos, to Tohoku.” She directly said, “Your Butoh, your dance, is in Brazil”. More and more, I began recognizing, during the process of the residencies, the presence of Candomble and the Macumba traversing the process. I am trying to open my perception specifically towards the processes involving the ideas of Incorporation, of Traversing, of Mediumship, of other forces and other worlds coming through bodies and celebrating with dance, like in Candomble. The idea of a Ritual is also present in Hijikata's work, but in a non-solemn manner, it is completely mundane and irreverent. I am finding those approaches, but it's hard to tell how much we're going to go into that. It's something that is permeating the process right now, like crossing distinct references from the same world.

C: From the start, we experimented with a spatial conception that directly informs the audience of the material being produced in rehearsals. What is this space and how have you been working on it?

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M: This space is not yet defined, it's still a proposition to be tested. I feel that, although it came up strongly in the two residencies, it still is an open idea that we have to test. But the idea came from thinking about how this dance could have a stripe covering it. A stripe as in some kind of censoring, but also a bandage, a band-aid in space, something that creates impossibilities or that covers up in order to protect.

I have been working for quite a while with the idea of masks, which are a constant in my work and that I feel coming around again. I am following a flow that dates back to 2006 with Bull Dancing, which is about masking. Masking to nullify one's identity but also to de-hierarchize the body, shift the focus from/about the body, almost as to rotten the gaze of those watching. And I keep thinking about how this can happen without faces.

C: The stripe is also a very clear gesture towards the audience. How have you conceived the relationship with the viewer?

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M: I'm always very concerned with the viewer and I can reach them in a more indirect, porous, less intellectual way. Closer to an experience. Since Suddenly Everywhere Is Black With People I have radically thought about the audience, taking them away from the situation of just sitting still and looking forward. Creating a space where they don’t need necessarily to participate, but experience something horizontally, as a happening that speaks to them directly. Now, I want to go back to the frontality, to a traditional stage with people sitting in the audience, with the lights out. This has been a challenge, making what happens on a traditional stage also be an experience.

C: Ever since I came in contact with your processes, the understanding of Affection has became very strong to me, not only as a work-tool, but also as a position. I wanted you to talk a little about that.

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M: I think affection is an important word and a guide to my processes. But I feel that affection resides much more in a checkmate move than on a given thing. Exactly because of the need to create something, we go back to those people whose affection assures us they'll be together, despite all the turbulence that can happen during the process. Another word that is connected to sickness and symptom is contagion, and contamination is present in this process. I think of dance as Contamination. I think dance has this property that leaves a mark, that when it's strong, we can't forget it. Dance seems to be of this nature where something we saw 30 years ago still affects us. To me, having seen Pina Bausch dancing in 1980 in Rio de Janeiro is something that is still alive in me like a disease I caught, a virus I never shook off. So I feel dance has this power because it happens to the body, because it is physiological, hormonal. What we generate while dancing, and the way the viewer sees dance, has this characteristic of contagion. Being able to experience the contagion, to expose ourselves to the viruses out in the world, is an element in the creation of this piece and something that very much interests me.

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