VENICE NEWS
Interview with Andrea Peña, choreographer, dancer and designer, guest of the 17. Dance Biennale
Young, overwhelming, Andrea Peña founder of Andrea Peña & Artists won the call for a new creation at the 17th. Dance Biennial with Bogotá. We asked her about her new show, her research, her artistic vision. It was a pleasure to meet her.
We sometimes forget that dance answers society’s need for order and communality—that’s where Andrea Peña works. A rigorous, precise choice of body movements in a space that is as much a protagonist as the performer, with each item on stage being given meaning. “Things have a life of their own… all you need to do is to wake up their soul” said gypsy Melquíades to José Arcadio Buendía in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Andrea Peña is a young Colombian-Canadian choreographer. She worked with prestigious Ballet BC and Ballet Jazz of Montreal, is an Industrial Design graduate, and in 2014, founded her own multi-disciplinary company AP&A (Andrea Peña & Artists). Peña won the Dance Biennale’s international open call with her project and upcoming show Bogotà which will premiere on July 13 to 15 at the Arsenale in Venice.
You rightly stated that technology has always been used in dance and in the arts. I remember in 1980 the stir caused by Stelarc in his performance art; all managers already in those years were studying body language and Watzlawick. What is there that is really new that technology can offer the dance world today?
I personally see technology not as a medium that offers solely aesthetic possibilities, but as an intelligence, and this is where I find room for play and investigation within my practice. I think of the term technê, which has its philosophical root in craft, practice, as founded in the form of knowledge; as a form of “knowing-how”. Technê here denotes a type of intelligence, a technique, technology in the “how” we know, and it’s this fluid and hybrid definition that guides my relationship to technology, to reframe not the technological apparatus, but rather the “knowing-how” of a technology, (its intelligence). I’m thus curious to use technology within dance as a way of revealing the intelligence inside of a system or a thing.Recognizing that technology is predominantly opaque in our society, how through dance/art do we use technology as a way to demask its opaque veil, and reveal the possibilities and internal complexities of an apparatus or technological system. In a way, de-masking technology to get away from smooth beauty. Smooth beauty is the artificial deceit of beauty that we are consumed by in our contemporary society, and which keeps us dormant in the possibility of our engagement with complexity. I think technology can offer dance new ways of thinking rather than new ways of representing or decorating.
"Smooth beauty is the artificial deceit of beauty that we are consumed by in our contemporary society, and which keeps us dormant in the possibility of our engagement with complexity."
In your admonition to “Returning, individually and collectively, to our essence as humans” a turning point seems implicit: have we really ever been human in a positive, or has violence always been inherent in humankind? The artist choreographer, the performance creator, dance in general how can they intervene and contribute to this return?
As humans we are built from polarities and it’s these polarities that allow us to understand the depths and resonance of each, however we forget to continuously return to the vast range within these polarities as that which makes us human. Constantly wrapped in artifice, we forget our vulnerability, humility, fragility, resilience, purity and insecurities as the complex core elements that define human. For me that’s where the choreographic practice holds potential to reveal that which makes us humans. Artists who bring themselves to a work, allow an audience to witness them as vessels of their own and a larger human fragility and vulnerability. The choreographic practice then is about carving practices of time, space and movement to allow for the sacred and profane of humanness to co-exist within the individual and collective of the performers as much as the community that is created with each public who witnesses and share the experience of the work.
I am fascinated with the term pluriverse, by philosopher Felix Guattari, who offers pluriversality as a departure from our desire to construct a uni-verse towards an understanding of coexistence through plurality. Where uni-verse denotes a singular goal towards commonality, pluriverse denotes the capacity for plural or multiple universes to co-exist. It’s here where I find choreography has room to shift, where the role of the choreographer has room to be challenged and questioned. Where works have the space to engage with making space for complexity rather than singularity. Where a piece can be seen as a vessel for the pluriverse experience that contains a harmony of multiplicity through difference within the interpreters themselves.
In my works we attempt to investigate not emotions but rather sentiments, as the attitudes towards emotions, places where we can contain not a singular emotion like melancholy, joy, desire but rather the physical and lived states of these emotions as visceral layered experiences that contain multiple emotions at once. A pluriversal state of sentiments and perspectives shared through the varied perspectives of each interpreter.
