Calle de las 7 Cruces (Street of the 7 Crosses)

Proposal for a Route

 

YEAR 2008

FORMAT Dance-performance

CREDITS concept, choreography and performance: Valeria Andrade (full technical credits at the end)

PRESENTATIONS OCHOYMEDIO, Quito (2008)

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To have a body is to suffer the body that sooner or later, more or less often, with greater or lesser gravity, breaks its unity in pain and illness. Situations that open that chamber where one purely is, beyond code and sign; because there is nothing more real, more present, true and self-sufficient than pain.

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This is the passage that must be crossed, for better or for worse. Anticipation of death. And as a passage, it is arriving from one side to the other, which is a new dimension of the human. It is the state of vulnerability, of contingency, of the ephemeral nature of that perfection made in the image and likeness of the Lord; where the person ceases to be what they were, innocent, and passes into another state of being.

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In personal experience, my body constitutes itself as a field of conflict and controversy; it becomes a territory of rebellion, of resistance. It is stage, support, tool. It is the face of my self. It is the vehicle and metaphor of my emotions, sensations, feelings, thoughts, actions. It is the construction of my stubborn desires. It is the only one that answers my demands. And from it I learned, all my life, to pass through illness, and to stretch its limits until reaching pleasure.

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As a woman, I am always subjected, by nature, to cycles of pain and blood. As a dancer, one works on the physical ailments of a body that is demanded beyond its limits; as a quiteña, I inherit the martyrdoms of a Santa Marianita de Jesús, proudly displayed in the Museum of our City. As an ordinary person I suffer the aggressions of the environment and the constant lacerations of my skin. As a symptom, a subject constructed by a culture, I arrive at existential emptiness, at the hole in the heart, postmodern nihilism; at the disenchantment of a saturated system that overexcites experience, without spiritual backing, and it comes to nothing.

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Is there a difference between the cuts and scars caused by “nature” and those caused by my own hand? What is the threshold of acceptance for a self-broken body or one attacked by streptococcus, staphylococcus, atopic dermatitis…? In experience, there is no difference between self-aggression and illness. Physical pain is pure emptiness, where anguish already disappears. It is the unspeakable bottom from which one comes out only alone. New.

 

 

where does pain lodge?

what is the distance between the heart and the skin?

does it have a moral limit?

is it accepted within an end, a value, a meaning?

after going through the experience, does one remain the person one was before?

if our body is a construction of signs, what are our maps of pain like?

and what do they mean?

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Project

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It is a hybrid between dance and performance that poses pain as voluptuousness and self-aggression as a limit that, to some extent, overflows instinct. The choreography to be performed is a work made for an installation that reflects on the heart as a pure, untouched space of desire, always in force: Tu Cuerpo en el Mío (Your Body in Mine). The idea is to dance this three-minute choreography (the time it takes a blood cell to leave the heart, travel through the veins and return to it) as in a loop, again and again and again. Meanwhile, the audience will blow out seven candles arranged in the space, and each candle less will be one more cut on my body. In the end, one will be able to see the path of the blood in the bodily space and the external one.

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TECHNICAL CREDITS

Concept, choreography and performance: Valeria Andrade

Video, VJ: Pedro Cagigal

Audio: Jorge Espinosa

Graphic design: Dayana Rivera

Photography: Andrés Arízaga, Diego Bravo

Documentation: Falco, Diego Arteaga

Production: León Sierra, Ocho y Medio