AIMAR PEREZ GALI
+
​SARAH BROWNE
in conversation
IN MAY 2019, WE INVITED CATALAN CHOREOGRAPHER AND DANCER AIMAR PEREZ GALI TO DUBLIN TO GIVE A WORKSHOP BASED ON HIS PRACTICE. MUCH OF AIMAR'S WORK FOCUSES ON THE IDEA OF EMBODIED INTELLIGENCE, AND HOW THE BODY FUNCTIONS AS AN ARCHIVE OF ITS EXPERIENCES. WHILE IN DUBLIN, AIMAR MET IRISH VISUAL ARTIST SARAH BROWNE, WHO TOOK PART IN THE WORKSHOP. DRAFF ARRANGED AN ARTIST TO ARTIST CONVERSATION BETWEEN SARAH AND AIMAR, BECAUSE WE SAW SIMILARITIES IN THEIR PRACTICES.

THE CONVERSATION WAS ORIGINALLY BROADCAST AS A PODCAST ON DUBLIN DIGITAL RADIO ON 30 SEPTEMBER 2019. YOU CAN LISTEN BACK OR READ THE TRANSCRIPT BELOW.
Sarah: So my name is Sarah Browne and we have been invited here today by DRAFF to have some kind of conversation about our work.

Aimar: My name is Aimar Pérez Galí,and I work in the field of dance normally. I approach dance in different ways somehow. I’m not just a dancer or choreographer, I do a lot of research and writing, and I think we have many things in common.

S: Yeah, I guess my training is in visual art and I guess maybe a bit like you, there’s also these aspects of writing and research and, you know, going into other fields and borrowing things and coming back. So we did this workshop yesterday that was I guess unfolding part of this trilogy of works that you’ve made? What’s the trilogy called again?

A: I call it the Trilogy of the Embodied Discourse.

S: So Sweating the Discourseis the first part?

A: Sweating the Discourse, The Touching Community and épica. I didn’t plan to make a trilogy, it’s just like, now, looking at them retrospectively, I realise that they all share this idea of embodying discourse, a specific discourse that has to do with approaching a certain topic with a critical perspective and with an embodied way of considering how the body is present in that discourse.

S: So I thought maybe a nice way to begin would be to answer back to some of the methods that happened in the workshop.

A: That’s fantastic!

S: So the workshop, there were three parts, which you described as speaking or lecturing for the first hour, and then there was an hour of dancing in the dark to the épica soundtrack and then the final hour was this writing exercise, which seems to be a method that we both use quite a bit in our work, addressing our voice to someone else, even if they’re not present. So I used this hour of writing to actually think about the figure of the teacher and then it turned into quite a straightforward letter to you, so I thought I would read out a little section of that, that might help seed some ideas of the discussion.

A: That would be lovely.
S: Dear Professor, In the dark, I felt conscious of my body of course, I wasn’t so aware of the quotations from Angela Davis, Amanda Baggs and the rest after the first few minutes, but I was conscious that they were there and it made me think about what it means to have this kind of choreographic practice – that in some sense is focused on the body but is also marked so emphatically by disembodied or distant voices. Sometimes these voices are recorded, sometimes they or the person being addressed is even dead. It made me think of ventriloquism, and the artist, whether the artist is a choreographer, a pedagogue, however you might want to describe yourself, is maybe a kind of a medium that conjures these distant voices. Ventriloquism was developed by the Ancient Greeks as a ritual kind of a practice that they call gastromancy, meaning stomach magic. It strikes me that your teaching practice has some ventriloquist tendencies maybe in how you conjure and arrange these distant voices in speech or in written text. Yesterday, you mentioned Spivak’s work on the subaltern, and I thought about how she herself started her academic career as a translator of Derrida, writing the introduction to his work that became a kind of a book in itself. It also made me think of Sarah Ahmed’s description of citation as a reproductive technology that has the capacity to draw attention to the politics of this queer work of citation. What distant or familiar voices and practices we choose to cite and create as a community within our texts, whether those texts are written, spoken, seen or even danced. I wondered too though about this metaphor of speaking and listening as a way of understanding political participation. What about bodily experiences that can’t be translated into language so easily, or people who do not, or choose not, to speak? It seems that there’s lots for us to discuss. More soon, Sarah.

I WONDERED ABOUT THIS METAPHOR OF SPEAKING AND LISTENING AS A WAY OF UNDERSTANDING POLITICAL PARTICIPATION.
​> Sarah

Picture
A: Great! Oh, it’s lovely. Yeah, because I've been writing letters, but I think I haven't…​ like it’s very magic somehow when someone writes you a letter. And yeah, I think, letters have this power - when you are the person addressed, I think many things resonate to you, because you know it’s been written for you. In this last part, this idea of how to legitimate or accept the body speaks and a lot of the time, this cannot be translated into words, or into speaking. And of course there's Amanda Baggs’ video In my Language, which I quote every time in the lecture in Sweating the Discourse… 

S: To describe it a little bit, Amanda Baggs is an autistic woman who doesn’t speak and the video starts off with her interacting with her environment in different ways and kind of singing.

A: And it was actually yesterday, I forgot to mention it, she’s basically doing the same strategy as I claim in Sweating the Discourse - what I’m doing is already something and if you are not able to acknowledge that, then why am I the person who has…

S: Like why do you have to be responsible for translating your language for another, more dominant kind of language?

A: Exactly, and also, why do I get the label of being, how do you say, with em… ah… a disability? Like why am I the disabled one when I can speak your language but also I have the sensitivity of speaking embodied language, or however you want to call it. And yet I am the disabled one and you are the 'able', when the able one can only speak one language. And to me, when I saw that video, I was totally like, ‘woah, ok, fuck, this is what happens with dance’.

​S: Yeah, it’s amazing.

I’m a dancer and I can speak your language if you want me to, but do not speak for me.
​> aimar

S: No, I didn’t. I came across the video when… a couple of years ago, I went back to college to do a Master's that arose from a residency I was doing in a university, an artist residency in the School of Social Science and Law in UCD, in Dublin, and that somehow changed into me doing a Master's programme that was, like, purely academic for want of a better description, like not in an art school, not an experience I’d had before, even though I read lots of the critical theory material that you would have read also, and the Masters thesis that I wrote, it was in gender studies and it was about reading autistic women’s life narratives in different ways and thinking about different kinds of knowledge and how it’s listened to or experienced… and how it interacts with, I guess how medical understandings of disorder and the body interact with what that means for people’s self-understanding. So it was through that research and it was also through reading Erin Manning, who’s a philosopher but also writes a lot about dance, I found this video about Amanda Baggs. So I guess it had initially been distributed a lot in disability activist communities, it’s made for YouTube, it’s not made for cinema distribution, so I think that was where I found it first. And then this screening programme series that I curated, that was about gastromancy, was thinking about ventriloquism as a kind of a method of how artists speak through other artists. 

I was thinking about ventriloquism as a kind of a method of how artists speak through other artists.
​> SARAH

S: And also in cinema in particular, how it works when there’s a soundtrack and an image and what that kind of magical experience does, or what’s it like when there’s a text that’s very, very present in a piece of work, whether it’s cinema or performance, and what that does when you’re conscious of your body but listening to this set of directions or somebody else talking about their experience, so that’s where it kind of entered again. I still think about it a lot. And it’s just a piece of work I really like to share with people.

A: I used to say it’s my favourite video on YouTube.

S: Yes, easily!
STILL FROM IN MY LANGUAGE - AMANDA BAGGS
​A: I was thinking now, because you are mentioning
this idea of the soundtrack and the image and what happens when you put these two things together, and I thought it’s actually also the strategy I used for The Touching Community, where it’s a one hour and a half soundtrack, like a movie, and it’s treated or composed somehow like a soundtrack and then you have a practice that apparently might have nothing to do [with it], but you find the relations, probably the same as a movie or as a video. For instance your Report to an Academy… there are moments that you pretend the octopus is speaking, but… 
S: Yeah, I guess it’s interesting what happens in the brain when people are looking at something and listening to something, because sound will make sense of any experience in a way, it really leads people, particularly if it’s a human voice that is speaking in a direction. Because The Touching Communitywas also linked to this Derek Jarman reference where there’s a blue screen but the soundtrack is the movie or the film or the experience that people have, so Report to an Academy, this piece that you mentioned, was made in that way, or was this script that was adapted from the Kafka short story, and it really deals with this problem of speech and the body and what is an effective way to complain or to protest or to make some kind of change. The context of the commission was, it was commissioned for a project called The Complaining Body, so it was thinking about those questions, particularly in the academy, where I have experience of working as a lecturer… so it was thinking about all of these questions, where speech is a kind of a complaint, particularly when the language around education is becoming so neoliberal and nonsensical, like extremely abstract, not at all talking about the body but talking about the educational landscape, doing more with less, but at the same time people that work in academies and students are mostly getting sicker and more mentally and physically unwell, all the time. So it was thinking about my place in that to a certain extent, but also, what is happening with the academy as a workplace at the moment, so the film is structured as a direct address from this octopus, and the octopus is a lecturer that has decided that actually the only logical thing to do is to completely change her shape, that her own individual tongue is not working, so she needs to train her whole body as a tongue and become an octopus. So the film kind of talks about her reasons for doing that and how this compromise has come to be, and that’s where it ends up. ​​
STILL FROM REPORT TO AN ACADEMY BY SARAH BROWNE
A: And is that because… do you teach?

​S: I don’t now… I was at the time. And I have taught for a long time… for a decade or so.

A: And is that something you were experiencing as a teacher or as a lecturer?

S: It was something I was experiencing directly, so when you talk about the necessity of speaking from your own perspective, I felt that I could speak as a lecturer but at the same time the work kind of abstracts that to a certain extent so it’s not in any way only about my workplace at the time, there’s a lot of references to other institutional politics and everything that’s in it is real to a certain extent, but it’s not only mine. So there’s an access point that comes from my experience, but then it’s also trying to, you know, connect with these other experiences that people were having at the time and are still having. But when you were talking about, yesterday as part of the workshop there was this discussion about knowledge transfer, I guess, and you described the problem of dance. I didn’t exactly have a problem with visual art, but I think there are those moments in a practice where, particularly if you’re a teacher, you’re very conscious that you’re responsible for transferring knowledge in a certain way, and that becomes an ethical question of how you do that, and how do you place yourself within an institution, or within a broader art world that you may or may not feel is a useful or a good thing to be distributing to other people, other students.
A: Yeah, like, because I think…​ like traditionally in dance what you would transfer is the technique of dancing, and it came now to a point that people are transferring styles. Yeah, there is of course a sense of responsibility when you’re teaching and to me it’s very clear that it has to be something that is exciting me, and I’m not sure whether I’m transmitting technique, style or whatever, actually the classes I teach are not dance classes, it is a composition class, so I try to… I try that they ask themselves questions around what is it that they’re doing and that they want to do and how to translate their ideas into movement or into a choreography. And many times there is this idea of the ignorant master, from Rancière, how to put yourself also sometimes in an ignorant place where actually you’re maybe following intuition but you don’t really know how this should be because actually… like it’s very hard to teach art somehow, I think somehow it’s an oxymoron. Normally on the first day I tell them that I cannot really teach you how to make dances, the only thing I can do is to guide you through the darkness, to hold your hand and to make sure that you are ok, and give you some tools to face this darkness, but you’ll have to walk alone through darkness and figure it how to deal with that, there’s no recipe or anything. And in that facing darkness, we discover things together and this I like a lot…​

​S: I mean I have a sense of what you’re talking about very clearly, em, different art schools, different dance schools, different academies have completely different ways of working, so… I mean in visual art, there’s the same tradition of copying the master's work and of course that’s not how I was educated and it’s not how I would teach at all either, it’s very much the same process of trying to support somebody to find out what they want to do and continually asking questions, finding different angles, figuring out is the work doing what they want it to do – it’s somehow more like that I think.

A: Yeah, and then, something I normally say is don’t forget that whatever it happens, it happens in your body. So that to me is a great present that I get from dancing – that it’s a practice that reminds me continuously that I have a body and my body is a place for the experience. And now that you are saying that the academy sometimes, or lecturing…  I think the academy sometimes has allowed to speak about things that are not embodied or that…

​S: Yeah, I mean I think, maybe historically, I think that’s changed quite a lot, but it’s also different in different places.

A: Yeah, but it definitely is an issue, like where do you speak from.

S: Or if that’s something you should acknowledge or not – like your knowledge has a place and it’s not… you know, up here somewhere.

A: Yeah, it’s not in the cloud… maybe a computer has a way to store knowledge outside the body of the computer, but humans I don’t think we have this ability.

S: We have other people I suppose… you know, if you share your memories or your experience, there’s these other sort of hard drives out there.

it’s a practice that reminds me continuously that I have a body and my body is a place for experience.
> aimar

A: Sure.

S: But they’re still bodies.

A: Yeah, I like that. Yes, but still, they are bodies. And of course, we are also archiving memories from others, I mean, we are archiving Amanda Baggs, and it’s embodied in our body.

S: In your work when you talk, because we talked yesterday as well about this idea about the body being an archive, and I wondered what happens when that archive is not only choreographies or… what happens when the archive is traumatic in some way. Is that a consideration for you, I suppose? 

A: Well…

S: Or is that different for a dancer’s body that has been trained and is articulate in certain ways? Has different tools?

A: No, normally, when I speak about a body archive, and I just put the example of the dancer because it’s somehow very clear to understand, like, em, if I ask you where do you archive your works, probably you will say ‘in an external disk’ – like, all the videos.

S: Hmmm… there’s a room, there’s always material.

A: And like of course I have material from choreographies and the costumes and props and stuff, but the choreography itself is archived in my body and when I go to rehearse it is basically to remember that, to go to this archive and take the dust off and recover that choreography. So this image I think it’s very clear… it helps to put as an example of the body as an archive, the dancer is a good example to understand that. Of course, any body is an archive – of course, we are all our own archive and we carry traumas and we carry memories and we carry choreographies and we carry how to ride a bike or how to play basketball or how to bake brownies… we carry these gestures and these memories.

S: Is there a way of taking something out of the archive, is maybe what I’m asking. Do you think?

A: How?

S: So the body is an archive of different experiences, knowledges, patterns, movements… that’s really clear. And then, I know I have certain movements that I wish I didn’t have, or that are connected to different social experiences and I’d like to find a way of working through those, so I just wonder when you are working with your body in the studio and also working with the bodies of others, is that something… cos I guess maybe I guess some experiences the body archives willingly, and welcomes, and then other experience are there but maybe they’re not welcome… so is there a way of like, 'de-accessioning' material from the archive.

A: Yeah, I’m not sure, normally I don’t work with traumatic experiences or I try not to get there, I don't know, it's something I probably haven't been interested to… although I think that dance has some therapeutic results, I don’t approach dance in a therapeutic way. But of course any art has a benefit for existence. But I don't use dance with that goal.

S: Sure, I think the idea of the body as an archive is really rich, but I guess we need to recognise that it’s not all chosen stuff in the archive.

A: No, it’s like memory that you don’t choose what you archive. I can probably remember a choreography that I hated and can’t figure out the steps of a beautiful dance I made once, and it’s like ‘dammit!’ Why do I remember that one and I don’t remember the one I like? It’s a bit like this sentence from Yvonne Rainer, she had this work that was called The Mind is a Muscle. And in Sweating the Discourse, I say, not only the mind is a muscle, but the muscle is a mind. And maybe we go back now to the octopus, how to understand the skin and the muscle and the whole body as a mind. So there are things that happen faster in the skin or in the muscles, and later they become a rational thought, and that’s something Steve Paxton in contact improvisation and Nancy Stark Smith, they were developing. How fast the body reacts before I can make a decision, a rational decision, and to trust that the body knows. And that’s probably because we have archived patterns. And the same happens when you stumble into something and then you fall but you are not hurt – and you're like ‘how did I fall like this? And so gracefully!’ Well, because your body knows how to react and if you try to think how to fall properly, probably you will hurt yourself. But we are not used to trust the capacity of the body… So, I think maybe we’ve talked enough? 

S: Sure. 

A: We can follow up later. Thank you!

​S: Thank you Aimar!
This conversation was broadcast on ddr. (Dublin Digital Radio) on September 30th 2019. To view the works mentioned by Sarah and Aimar during this conversation, visit this page.