Video
20 minutes & multi-screen installation
2008
Brazil/Argentina
A physical investigation of three South American landscapes: Rua das Flores, in Pelourinho-Salvador (BR), the city of Curitiba (BR), and Salta, in Argentina.
Concept and performance Marila Velloso
Direction and Editing Olive Bieringa (NZ)
Camera and Assistant Director Otto Ramstad (USA)
The project is supported by FUNARTE and Petrobras and won the Klauss Vianna Prize, in 2007 (Parana State).
Screenings
2008
premiere and installation, Curitiba, Brazil
Yokohama at the International Dance Film Festival
2009
Video Dance Festival of Le Breuil, Burgundy, France
SEEDS Festival, Massachussetts, USA
Post production commentary from Olive Bieringa
In teaching site dance we often work with a score of making sensory “movies”. One person leads a partner eyes closed from one environment to another without speaking, leading them by the hand, carrying them, offering sound cues or with any other non verbal guiding technique. At specific locations the guide asks their partner to open their eyes to offer a series of visual and kinesthetic images, framed or created by the guide. For example looking through a keyhole watching the guide dancing in the distance or watching trains go by below from a bridge.
Working on this project was a macro version of this exercise as we knew little about the locations before we arrived. We took planes to Curitba, Brazil, Buenos Aires, Salta, then we drove 4 hours up a long windy road to the high altitude salt desert of Salinas, which sits on the border with Bolivia. Each day involved hours in the car, altitude sickness, new food and feet encrusted with salt crystals. From here we flew back to calm of Curitiba in southern Brazil and then to heat, sea and urban wilderness of Salvador. These physical journeys and the body’s survival and kinesthetic empathy in these contrasting environments became the material of the work.
Residue collected in the body from one site and experience created transformation in our experience and understanding of the next environment at every stage of the production process.
Salinas is a spatial puzzle. The body becomes a subjective measuring stick and interpretative tool to understand what we are seeing within an unrecognizable monochromatic landscape. The sound of the performer footsteps as she exits the frame, help us to define the surface and measure space and time. Her speed and the texture of her skin give us clues to the temperature and viscosity of the water and air in this surreal landscape.
Rua De Flores offers a dense social landscape in which the performer tests the membranes and the interstitual spaces of the neigborhood. The heavily gendered and deeply lived streets of Salvador create a world that is once chaotic, beautiful, aggressive and invigorating.
Curitiba. Here we see time passing, a body in a modern city. The small dance of nerves and muscles contracting and releasing, subtle perceptual shifts and the residue of past experiences moving through her body. her flowers in hand, pants, boots and shirt still crusted with salt.
