http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_YeqbVaM5Y 

MAUERMUV

Rocking - In Process



You can see the video

https://vimeo.com/30162156 

Maria Augusta Bárbara is an autobiography translated into dance. This is an auto-referential piece where she recalls all of her experiences in 20 years of artistic education as interpretative ballet dance. In this piece all methodologies of corporal movement, not just dance, but of our present-day society, allow the emergence of possible discourses about alienation and discipline processes. It proposes a performance-installation where classical dance codes are deconstructed through the dissection of its three pillars: equilibrium, lightness and verticality, in an attempt to contrast and promote a critical reflection about the corporal postures required both in execution and by the laws of behaviours that society imposes us.

In order to promote this dissection, the interpreter insists on repeating of the codes to the point of exhaustion. Repetition and exhaustion promote, in contrast, instability, weight and rupture with the vertical axis. Therefore, it renders problematic the procedures used in educational systems – school, family or the arts – proposing the first objective of the piece: to question educational methodologies that condition the body and submit it to castration and detriment to its creative and spontaneous potential. To this end, Maria Augusta Bárbara inquires about behaviour rules that we are submitted to in different spheres of social life. The piece asks at what point does one really have the autonomy to position themselves against the procedures and evidenced borders between obedience and subversion.
The narrow margin between body and environment is evidenced through the construction of the scene and the trajectory of the body through the space, experimenting with ways to re-signify the elements of the scene (leash, point shoes, muzzle and corset made of tape), rendering the installation a platform for dialogue between body, context and images.

Thinking of it as “functional architecture,” scene and movement impose conditions on the dancer’s motion, requiring of her a certain level of accord in order to make the performance possible. The movement of the dancer doesn’t allow the installation to be understood as a series of scenes, but as a collection of experiences/actions that makes itself explicit as she makes choices in this environment or which characterize the piece as an unfinished and continuous process, always subject to new connections.

The ambiance in Maria Augusta Bárbara is thought of as a compilation of information which takes place in the space where the body performs. The objects used compose the scene, more to a functional end and as imagery than just purely illustrative and allegorical. Therefore, point shoes, muzzle, tape, leash and rope compose this collection of objects that make explicit the relationship between body and ambiance. The performer, in direct relation to these objects, projects the discourses presented in the piece which refer to the “used, transformed and improved” (Foucault) at the same time as it generates strategies to help her to change her corporal state.

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