while she is already onstage exposed in her nervous anticipation to begin performing “for us” and I suddenly realize that I’m already in it with her and that there is so much about what this work is doing that is being proposed right in this very charged moment of the intersection between what Jimena has been going through, in this very same room up until now, and the moment that we come to be let in as witnesses to her process.
It all seems very matter-of-fact yet it takes on a profound meaning and metaphor since we are coming into a room where the artist is simply being with us seemingly as she has been on her own during the process. In other words, there is no artifice, no representation of anything, just Jimena in a latent state of readying herself with an open and vulnerable presence, with eyes that do not look away but that reveal to us the risk and the fear and the courage of the performative act. This energy, this realness, these unassuming transparent choices make my heart feel more open, my eyes less in search of meaning, but opening into a peripheral seeing that senses and feels rather than just seeing the image in front.
This work asks for an empathetic viewing. Jimena is doing nothing more than taking us by the hand through the practices that she has been putting herself through during the process, a research of unearthing, hearing, seeing, understanding, and perhaps even reckoning with the memories in her body, her training, her culture, her dancing living body’s history. Living and dancing and learning in Argentina many years ago and then abruptly leaving all that behind, and from then on forever being a foreigner, an Other, going through Europe and then staying in New York.
Ver a Jimena en escena me hace llorar. No tiene que hacer nada más que estar ahí parada frente a nosotros, dejándose ser mirada mientras que se escucha una hermosa canción. Su cara tiene la mirada de alguien que está sintiendo mucho y me hace sentir case como que no debería estar mirándola, como que es demasiado íntimo este momento para ella y que nosotros como público deberíamos mirar para otro lado, pero sin embargo nos produce una especie de fascinación mirarla porque no hace nada más que estar ahí sintiendo algo que nosotros no podemos saber exactamente qué es, nos deja ahí mirándola sentir con total incertidumbre y a la vez con total certeza de que hay un mundo interno al ser humano al cual nunca tendremos acceso. Que siempre seremos extranjeros en la tierra del cuero del otro. Y sin embargo, me siento a la vez fuera de su mundo, de su cuerpo, y muy cerca porque hay también en ella una íntima invitación a vivir con ella su experiencia. Siento la distancia entre lo que ella está sintiendo y viviendo en escena y yo aquí desde el público tan desarraigado, desconectado de lo que viven los bailarines o actores en escena. El público somos como los extranjeros en el mundo de Jimena Paz…. Pero la canción me hace sentir a mí también y mucho! Reconozca el tipo de música, la voz de la cantante, me hace acordar de quién soy yo, de donde vengo. Quién es? Es Mercedes Sosa? Puede Ser… creo que reconozco la voz aunque no conozco la letra:
“Más allá de cualquier zona prohibida
hay un espejo para nuestra triste transparencia.” *
Lágrimas y lágrimas y muchas… ya no puedo seguir tomando apuntes de lo que voy a decir cuando tenga que escribir sobre este momento, sobre “la obra”; ya no puedo seguir mirando desde la cabeza, ahora es mi corazón latinoamericano el que mira con mis ojos de coreógrafa neoyorquina… Ya me siento más cercana a Jimena, más cercana a ella que al público, ya son ellos los extranjeros y ella y yo las del Sur.
As I cry and feel so much empathy for her standing there feeling her foreignness as this song in Spanish is playing I wonder if the audience feels anything at all. I wonder if they feel touched by her in a universal human way even though they might not understand and get the cultural reference, even though it doesn’t make them cry…? I wonder if they just engage in it in an intellectual way, thinking about what this might mean, and what it means to be sitting watching someone feel something onstage, especially a dancer who is not yet moving. I wonder if this makes them feel like foreigners in their own land. I wonder why so much fear and discomfort comes from not understanding another language, another way of feeling and being.
All of a sudden, the repetitive song is no longer playing and Jimena has moved towards the corner of the space with her arms open as she turns with a ritualistic, meditative quality that is clearing, cleansing, healing after all that crying and feeling and nostalgic remembering of a distant land and peoples. Her turning washes the tears from my face and opens my eyes to a wider seeing. Now I can see her feet and feel the reality of this moment passing and her feet feeling this ground that we’re all sharing and not that ground where they came from; but those feet are performing a very specific pattern, technique that they learned from one of her influential teachers in Argentina (this I know from conversations during her process), a practice that she was deeply invested in learning and that got abruptly interrupted by her leaving the country but that still remains in her body. She’s been coming back to this practice of turning during her process and she’s sharing it with us now and it grounds us in this moment, reminding us of the ephemeral nature of life passing by moment to moment, turn after turn. It is fleeting but also very grounding as we feel her feet turning and feeling the ground as we feel this ground. And with this act Jimena connects us with the time when her feet learned this practice years ago in Argentina. And then her fingers, still outstretched, begin to slightly brush up against each wall and it’s so satisfying… her fingers feel like the antennas of her body keeping her safe from collision, from getting too close, and at the same time kind of plugging her into the corner grounding her whole body and movement not only to the floor but to the walls as well.
No pares, quiero estar acá para siempre, viéndote girar, sintiendo la calma y lo sanador que se siente compartir esto contigo. La posibilidad de suspender el tiempo, suspender el cuerpo en giro, la posibilidad de colapsar aquellos giros de hiciste en Argentina y estos que estás haciendo acá. Y me pregunto si este proceso, este “ejercicio” de volver a las prácticas y a la historia de/en tu cuerpo no tiene en sí un deseo de conectar, unir, sanar las distancia geográfica, temporal, cultural y por lo tanto emocional de todos los giros y pasos y saltos y danzas de allá y de acá. De cocer, tejer, unir, curar de algún modo esa constante sensación en el cuerpo de vivir desarraigado, de ser un “inmigrante”, un cuerpo inmigrante que vivió un exilio de sus danzas allá a otras danzas acá.
Pero no es para siempre, todo cambia (como dice la canción de Mercedes Sosa), y Jimena ya no puede girar más. El cuerpo se cansa y envejece y no aguanta más, es una simple y necesaria realidad pero me da tristeza. Algo en la honestidad de Jimena en escena, en como cambia de una acción a la otra da mucha ternura, debe ser su vulnerabilidad. Su cuerpo es fuerte, hay una fuerza interna y una capacidad y maestría, años de experiencia, de sofisticación, técnica y acceso al cuerpo que se nota en los pequeños detalles de su movimiento, incluso en la claridad de sus transiciones.
Vuelve la música y esta vez es una Murga y esa fuerza interior que se intuía en ella se vuelve externa y una vez más siento en ella una necesidad de volver, de entender, de tocar, de sentir su tierra, sus músicas, sus danzas para deshacer esa distancia, ese desarraigo que tanto nos parte el corazón a los inmigrantes. De repente la vemos Bailar con mayúscula, saltando, moviendo las caderas, disfrutando y trabajando duro a la misma vez; el trabajo del bailarín, el trabajo de la liberación y del empoderamiento. El agotamiento. Y ahora no veo tanto a Jimena bailando su Murga Argentina sino que veo un manifiesto feminista, una mujer latina bailando su manifiesto. Y otra vez las lágrimas…
Now the music is off again and Jimena, exhausted, lies face down and begins to speak into the ground in Spanish. She speaks about a memory with her grandma. Again I wonder how the others feel, how they feel about her speaking Spanish. Once again I feel like an accomplice to her Latinidad, her Otherness, and I wonder how the non-Spanish speaking audience members feel. I know she wanted this written partly in Spanish or translated into Spanish, so I know that there is a political intention of claiming our language in this imperialist xenophobic first world country, but it feels like there’s more to it; perhaps simply letting herself be vulnerable and transparent enough to be the body from which Spanish flows out of instinct, the body with memories in Spanish.
I ask Vicky and Colleen after it ends if they felt alienated by not understanding and they say that they didn’t, they felt the feeling that emanated from her speaking and they “listened” as they “see or listen” to a dance. Perhaps that is what feels most feminist and feminine to me about Jimena’s work and performative body and presence; that she calls for a different kind of understanding, a heart-body understanding, a peripheral-seeing understanding, a felt understanding, an understanding of our feet in the ground and a desire to connect all of the grounds, especially those from which we have been uprooted.
¡Gracias Jimena!
*Excerpt from Arbol de Diana by Alejandra Pizarnik, Argentine poet whose poems are known for their stifling sense of exile and rootlessness.
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luciana achugar is a Brooklyn-based choreographer from Uruguay who grew as an artist in close dialogue with the NY and Uruguayan contemporary dance communities. She has been making work in NYC and Uruguay independently and collaboratively since 1999. Her work is concerned with the post-colonial world, searching for an undoing of current power structures from the inside out. She is a two-time Bessie Award recipient and was nominated for a 2016 Outstanding Production Bessie for her work An Epilogue for OTRO TEATRO: True Love. Other accolades include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Creative Capital Grant, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council President’s Award, and the 2017 Alpert Award. In 2015, OTRO TEATRO was named “Best Touring Work” by Austin’s Critics Circle. She is currently a 2017-18 Brooklyn Arts Exchange Artist in Residency and will continue on for a second year developing her current project: Brujx.
