The Performing Kitchen Book by Cozinha Performática

The Performing Kitchen

1st Digital Edition - 2015 English

When something begins, IT HAS ALREADY STARTED. Things fall into place without any pre-established order, and the mind turns to determining temporal relations and how to create an organization. Who can specify where the beginning and end are? Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve always struggled to understand how the creative processes work. How much is the work of chance, and how much is our work? How is the creation forged in this sea of thoughts, desires, anguishing inconveniences about the lack of this or that - a sense, a line, a logical development on the immaterial? Matter seems simpler. Beings are born and they die. Things are what they are, until they are transformed into other things. But in the meantime, we are alive. And we are not alone. 5

How much of others is in me? Everything that exists is a compound formula, they are thousands of meetings, synapses, repetitions, contamination and other so on. The river of Heraclitus incessantly murmurs its impermanent current. When can it be said that a project, an idea, or an artistic work began? Plato and Aristotle battling it out for my soul. One on each shoulder. It’s beginning. Present tense, past participle, the verb tenses become mixed while we, abstract, linearly count the days, the minutes, the story, the narratives of a life. I don’t know how my creative process comes about, but I know that it is heavily influenced by others. Alterity seems to be the most important enigma of life. It is necessary to worship it, observe it, examine it, bore it, rebel against it, give way, deliver oneself, be crossed and transformed at every moment. I wanted to look at this in more detail... I think while I am cooking. Cooking provokes interesting thoughts in me. Firstly, it activates a personality that sometimes becomes so part of me that around the conventional it would seem only an inertial farce to which I resign myself to prevent misunderstandings. But I am not

myself; it is another who is cooking. Secondly, I take enormous pleasure in cooking for someone else. And furthermore, the effects of this alchemy alchemize more things than just the food that is served. In this sense, the act of cooking is like a dance. I dance because it transforms me. I don’t know what its relevance is. But the alchemy of the body sets in motion the density that resists impermanence, or rather believes to resisting to it. A transport Dance. “One day the traveler set off from a place To this very same place.” No one knows exactly why, but some things have the power to excit us. One becomes lit up by them. So the why of nothing doesn’t matter. It is lived. Art should be able to provoke that. What are we having for dinner? The Banquet or a cookie? Combinations of the most varied ingredients. Take what there is, or go specifically to a particular place in search of a unique seasoning that is only found there - spice. Spice is a beautiful word. I swallowed it.

There is still this identification with the generation of the 1960s and 70s, its breaking away, its direct opposition of the market, which did not appear hegemonic yet, as they would have us believe today. All this discussion about ways of existing germinated there, at the moment when the capitalist machine adjusted its gears to submit the imagination to its control. The taximeter now charges us even for minutes of sleep. Each snore, a cent. We wake up exhausted, owing a good portion of the day. The power still resides in us. But we need a little silence. Thinking is the greatest luxury nowadays. And the warning bells ring at the slightest threat of virus, that virus of conscience that inoculates the social organism, and its fear. Small occurrences of light, like fleeting fires, igniting on atmospheric contact. Judson, Fluxus, the people of the performance and dance preserve its charm and its lucidity, and their aromas waft up to my kitchen. Gordon Matta-Clark opens his “Food” restaurant and declares it a performing act. I am always thinking about this while this work is cooking, even from here, from the scary Brazil of these times. I don’t know if because of the small generation gap, or by some kind of prior identification,

when I contemplate the generation of artists who, in the 1960s and 70s, were producing really powerful and fresh thinking in Brazil, I still mourn the struggle that led to the coup and repression. It’s strange, but also symptomatic, that having been born in the middle of the dictatorship, I would feel close to this generation, like one who is similar. Perhaps because the devastated land that has followed still remains painfully in our undercooked meat. I don’t know where it has started, or how my creation process occurs. Everything is so schizophrenic that I need to make these temporary agreements, and sometimes, quite frankly, I let myself be led by them. We all agree to go to the same side, and although not everybody really understands what it was that we agreed to, we stumble along, heading in this or that direction. Sometimes the marriage ends. Sometimes we are the sole survivor in a little boat made of shipwrecked boards, rationing a single cookie for days, while Orlando sees the boat spinning round and round in the Serpentine. I started to like several people and maliciously, I invited them to dinner. This text is not yet complete.

Marcos Moraes

From: marcos moraes (marcomor@hotmail.com) Posted: Tuesday, May 28, 2013 05:17:28 pm To: Diners Subject: To Diners/Cooks

Dear, (I could say that I am honored etc. etc. etc.) but I don’t have much time for that (right now). So, let’s start: after talking to each one of you about The Performing Kitchen Project, we would like to set up the first meeting to talk about the project as a whole, especially the part that refers to ourselves: the Dinners. During this ‘zero’ dinner, we would get to know one another, introduce ourselves and discuss the project, the triggering ideas, our conditions, the implications that we imagine, and thus everyone may confirm their belonging to this smaller group, which we imagine would be part of the 5 dinners. Location to be decided on. My thanks .Marcos Moraes, Ana Teixeira, Jaqueline Vasconcellos (it’s cold and I’m going to have potato soup, which I made yesterday; potato soup - with shrimp - and humus with pitta bread)

THE UNEXPECTED CONFIGURATIONS OF THE MEETINGS Rosa Hercoles

The invitation came from Ana Teixeira to write this text for the Performing Kitchen project, which relies on her curatorship in partnership with Marcos Moraes. A request that was immediately very welcome, due simple to the fact that combined two subjects of great interest to me: dramaturgy and food. And so, one pleasant Saturday evening, I participated in one of the Dinners; actions that constituted the project. I take this opportunity to publicly express my thanks to Zeca (JosĂŠ Carlos CatĂŁo), for the wonderful food. The meeting brought together all the participants of the project, and I was surrounded and enveloped by a combination of elegant and experienced voices. The landscape of this meeting showed contours of a complexity1 that was unattainable in an initial and unique moment. It was based on the premises that our speeches carried many other speeches - coming from our lifetimes

of experiences, our relational learning, and our esthetic practices - that my first sensation was formed. It would be unwise of me to dare to write something about the dramaturgy of this process that becomes embodied from so many voices, as I am a foreigner in it; however, I feel motivated to write something concerning the policy of sharing, undoubtedly present in the construction of a possible dramaturgy of cooperation (remembering that etymologically, the word dramaturgy means “the composition of the action”). Although many projects claim to be collaborative, reaching a state of real cooperation is not as simple and peaceful as it may seem, and many attempts become shipwrecked before this multifaceted task. In my view, there are two basic issues that must be faced when it comes to cooperation: the first concerns the authorship; the second, the challenge of understanding how to operate in the difference. I believe that the biggest problems concerning authorship relate to the fact that it is usually

1 The term complexity refers not only to a quantitative relation, i.e. the number of participants, the number of fields of knowledge involved in the production, etc. What the complexity comprises is random phenomena loaded with uncertainty, unpredictability and ambiguity, as in it, chance is felt with greater incidence. Thus, relations with only two elements can present a high degree of complexity. For further clarification, see Edgar Morin’s Introduction to complex thought.

understood as synonymous with ownership. Foucault (1992) deconstructs the idea of authorship linked to a specific name. For him, the latter relates more to economic interests and legal responsibility than to artistic issues per se. Obviously, someone came up with the idea of starting some project, and its creative process, but although ideas may emerge in a particular subject, they are not exclusive or private. Ideas always arise out of a context that is favorable for their formulation, having as a characteristic a multiple nature, populated by social, economic, political, educational, historical, cultural issues, etc. The idea is already a result, always circumstantial, of the action of the information that make up this context in the body of the subject. Although its formulation may be inaugural, due to the uniqueness of the agreements established between the information incorporated by those who first came up with the idea, it must be admitted that its originality is arguable, since ideas are not immune to the fact that they belong to some conceptual lineage, configured by inevitable and inherent relationship of codeterminacy between the body-subject and the environment-context. Thus, what conquers aesthetic existence is inevitably conditioned and contaminated by many voices, both past and present. Ideas are not manifestations devoid of history; in short, knowledge is not restricted to us, neither does it begin in us.

Fortunately, the speech of Marcos Moraes, during the Dinner, was contrary to the understanding of authorship as ownership, and announced a more promising trajectory: the curator said that the project would not have taken its present shape if different people had been involved. This speech leads us to the second question: how to operate in the difference? Confronting differences requires, at the same time, a rigorous look and an available listening, both without any certainties or preconceived assumptions. The fact that someone thinks differently to us does not mean that he is against us. Corporatism, fundamentalism and tribalism are examples of behavior marked by the search for equity of positions, a recurrent theme in our society. Actions aimed at reaching understandings and consensual conducts detract from the personal complexity, and as a result, that of their resulting encounters. Thus, any attempt to unify discourses/actions reduces the field of possible intelligibilities. On the other hand, we must not forget that the capitalist strategies, focused on the generation of socially desirable behaviors, promote the isolation of the individual, increase competitiveness, and render individual experiences spectacular. Unfortunately, the consolidation of these behavioral predicates has made us increasingly unable to engage in the close physical contact that is so essential for cooperation.

The act of cooperating without growing weary, or eradicating differences, inevitably entails conflicts, and without doubt, its management requires a good and generous dose of notions of alterity, making it imperative that we look to the other as other, and not as an extension or mirroring of ourselves or our own isolated desires. Perhaps the greatest challenge of the meetings, not shored up by relationships cut short by their short expiry dates, lies in interacting with the others, based on terms placed by them, so as to ensure that all those involved have the right to speak, even if it is to disagree. It should be remembered that the possibility of cooperation depends on how we perceive this other; thus, it is necessary to recognize that the action of perceiving is always incomplete and fallible, due to the operational properties of this cognitive process, which includes successes and failures in its processing. For Richard Sennett (2012), the practice of cooperation at work can be defined, briefly, as a type of exchange in which all the parties involved are benefited. For this, these parties need to develop what he calls dialogic skills. As a skill, it is something that we need to learn to do, and this requires the exercise of a type of repetition that understands, and at the same time, exploration, discovery, and the proposal of operational resources. In a way that ensures both the

a cquisition of specific skills, for purposes that are equally specific, and the elaboration of different ways of acting in circumstances similar to those previously experienced, given that in artistic production, no causal relationship is expected between the ends and the means.

the dialogic exchanges, despite the occurrence of a common understanding of the consensual type, personal arguments find a favorable space and time for their outworking. What is gained in this type of exchange is an increase in mutual understanding of the arguments presented.

The distinction is low, and being attentive to the discourse of the other, keeping calm when conflicts arise, recognizing similarities, detecting possible areas of convergence, accepting and managing the differences, have become rare conducts in our daily practices, particularly as that they are not always favored by modern society. For this reason, any initiative that promotes these values will be an eminently political action, albeit at the level of micropolitics. According to Sennett, we are losing the cooperation necessary for the functioning of a complex society, since it is in the predisposition to cooperate that social and cognitive aptitudes are intertwined, favoring the maturation of instances of experimentation and the possibility of communication with the other.

Thus, the parties involved are benefited as they advance in the understanding of their own formulations, and expand their perception of the possibilities and impossibilities of texture with other and distinct acts, expanding the field of negotiations. Therefore, during the experience of exchange, which is common to all, processes of emancipation are instituted. For Sennett, far removed from this are the imaginative acts of identification which, besides debilitating the processes of exchange in terms of the extraction and construction of knowledge, neutralize the singularities that should be seen as a valuable and desirable presence in the cooperative processes.

Thus, dialogic skills also relate to behavioral traits present in the discussions arising from relations covering the exchange of symbolic goods, the objective of which is not restricted to reaching a common understanding about the topic under discussion, though this may occur. But during

Thinking of cooperation as an action implies adopting the premise that all exchanges of knowledge, or practices, are somewhat political in nature, or rather, intrinsic and beneficially political, in that the thing that unites the participants is a willingness to competently perform the tasks entrusted to them. And this, fortunately, frees the project from undesirable and sterile isolated and auto-referential contributions that

In the case of cooperation aimed at the creation of aesthetics, mediation procedures will need to consider some questions. The first of these relates to the ways in which the different forms of knowledge and practices will be articulated, in order to meet the needs of the artistic project underway; the second relates to how the different ways of giving visibility to these practices and forms of knowledge will be agreed between the participants; and the third relates to how the possible relations between these forms of knowledge and practices will be considered, bearing in mind the establishment of a dramaturgy of cooperation aimed at establishing relations of composition, and not of opposition or imposition.

The stated procedures of mediation find some parallels with what Muniz Sodré (2006) called sensitive strategies, referring to the transits and connections between the discourses produced by the actions, in our case aesthetic actions, and the position of the subject within this production. In addition, the forms of knowledge, in turn, delimit and constitute specific fields of knowledge, and in order for them to affect each other, it is necessary that their operators (rules, norms and restrictions) be made more flexible, to promote experimentation of other conceptual arrangements. In this proposal, there is no room for unilateral relations of dominance of one field over the other; the quest is to reconfigure their means of production (movement, word, image, etc.), as well as to readjust their operators. Such strategies are necessary for the affectation, and the relationship between different branches knowledge, so that a field of shared operations can be established, involving a drawing together and uniting of the singularities of these forms of knowledge in the realm of the sensitive. For Sodré, the fact that these actions belong to the realm of the sensitive does not exempt us from the responsibility to formulate a critical thinking, or even to systematize intelligibly the emerging forms, observing their communicational possibilities.

From: Cozinha Performática cozinhaperformatica14@ gmail.com Sent: June 13, 2013 02:18 pm To: Diners Subject: Zero Dinner – The Performing Kitchen

are linked to the acquisition of benefits for the self, governed by private interests. It is in this sense that I propose a dramaturgy of cooperation, understood here as the mode by which the actions that are composed based on the sharing of information and knowledge that each one brings to the project, both to identify and to resolve the problems that have arisen. It is not, therefore, about establishing new forms of power over the other, seeking to divide and conquer, but of creating mediation proceedings that will allow for coexistence between diverse people, and promote the suppression of absolute certainties.

A loose, provocative passage “Selective, narrow oral tradition authorizes us to enter the Banquet as speakers; a banquet of words, of ideas, of ideas and words, slowly absorbed. Otherwise, we would be subject to an intolerable, overwhelming drunkenness. Let us put off until tomorrow what cannot be assimilated today. The pleasure is in the holes, in the gaps. Faithfulness to Plato doesn’t concern us. In literature and philosophy, faithfulness is disastrous because it condemns us to barren servility. Moreover, how can we be true to Plato if he is not even true to himself ? Each dialogue is different from the others, which is consistent with creative thought. Instead of trying to repeat Plato, let us try to think along with Plato. There is no greater faithfulness to an inventor of thoughts than to think along with him or her. Omissions from the text propitiate our own emissions”. (‘Na Caverna’ - Donaldo Schüler’s introduction to Plato’s The Banquet)

However, to feel presupposes the existence of the body, which means to say that both the construction of a thought and its intelligibility are, equally, bodily phenomena, since their substrate lies in the sensitivity. The cognitive operations, although they have specific functions and carry out different tasks, are all physically inseparable and simultaneous, i.e. they are codependent and codeterminant. To deny the centrality of a legitimizing and absolute reason means to assume that without the existence of a body that thinks, there can be no possibility of systematizing each and every thought. This, in turn, may acquire specialized forms, but it is always conditioned to the material properties and the compositional possibilities of its environments. Obviously, this includes the aesthetic forms and their environments: dance, performance, poetry, and photography, among others. Jacques Rancière (2012) adds other questions to the reflection, and to the proposal of a dramaturgy of cooperation, above all by intertwining aesthetics with politics, and by understanding aesthetic acts as fields for formatting experience that foster new ways of feeling, and inducing other forms of action. The system of evidence that mutually establishes both a common shared thing and its exclusive parts he termed The Distribution of the Sensible. This affects the choices on how and which participants will come together in this

sharing. Something that is defined not by issues linked to watertight hierarchies of power, but rather, by the skills and abilities of those involved, a criterion that promotes the mobility and transience of existing hierarchies. The Distribution of the Sensible, when considering the inseparable relationship between aesthetics and politics, proposes that aesthetic acts intervene in the ways of feeling and doing of a community, because they evidence, break, or anticipate paradigms that operate within the community. The modes, as aesthetic practices, are materialized through the artistic forms that acquire and carry concepts and understandings of the world and are, therefore, possessors of a sensitive ethics, a cognitive specialty that detects the social operators in force, and puts them under discussion, proposing another way of looking at the world phenomena. This is accomplished through the formatting of some arrangement between the material properties inherent to artistic language, in order to strengthen the intended discussion. It is in this reconfiguration of the dimension of the sensitive that the political responsibility of the artists lies. For Rancière, the real must be transformed into fiction in order to be thought; in this way, variations of the sensitive intensities, of the perceptions and of the capacities of the bodies are promoted,

f avoring the emergence of other forms of existing in the realm of possible things. But returning to the Performing Kitchen project, it finds its inspiration in Gordon Matta-Clark (19431978), and it is necessary to look at the period in which his artistic proposals were configured, especially in the dance environment. Post-modernism, as an artistic movement that was characterized by a questioning of what was already established and promoted an antirepresentative revolution, has moved away from the hegemonic idea of movement of dance. This understanding, consolidated by ballet and modern dance, were focused, respectively, on conveying a message or expressing an interiority. Governed by the idea of the fine arts and their noble themes, productions took care to hide their material properties, and as a result, attributed to the body in motion the status of a mere vehicle of the message or expression, reiterating the idea of the body as an instrument. Post-modernism definitively broke with the representational logic that existed in the dance produced up until the 1940s, always guided by a political-social monarchic order, or by the idea of a progressive sequencing of the production line type, with its products ready and finished. The fact that the premise of being in the service to some idea that is foreign to the materiality of dance was broken does not mean that there

is no representation in its aesthetic practices. This would be an impossibility, given that in an ontological sense, it always occurs, i.e. a representation is something that is for, a very different understanding, and is a far cry from the idea of formulating some discourse about something. For André Lepecki (2006), the dance produced during this period (1950 to 1990) presented an exhaustion in relation to the current understandings about movement in dance - as a synonym for displacement, like a drawing in a space to be occupied, with large dimensions and in continuous flow. Certainly, we were faced with the death of the idea of a dancing figure committed primarily to the image that is projected. But that period has gone, and dance today shows a trend that seems to make peace with its object: movement is resumed, after all the changes that have occurred over time; after the various questions that led to the transformation in the ways in which it is understood and choreographed. As a negation of the consolidated models, in a way, it does not cease to put the past in evidence, and contributes very little to its evolution, the question remains that still demands other forms of intelligibility that are not detailed by the negation: what is the place of movement in the production of contemporary dance in the 21st century?

Opening our 1st meeting by citing this quote has the purpose of emphasizing the desire of the project in which you were invited to participate. That passage serves as a synthesis of the dinner, ie “... the pleasure is in the holes, in the gaps.” A meeting where chance will be present in the way we have met, how we will meet, how we will share our ideas, work and desires. The Performing Kitchen that is announced as an event of that making which is dear to us: “Art.” So, starting with that quote by Schüler, we all are invited to venture into the alchemy of the meeting. 1st meeting: starts at 8:00 p.m. (we would like for everyone to have arrived by 9:00. There will be a miso broth for those who arrive early and very hungry) See you later, Marcos Moraes & Ana Teixeira 20

PERFORMANCE AND THE RISK OF INOPERATIVENESS of the common Christine Greiner

When we think of the history of performance as an artistic genre, we are initially dealing with two apparently contradictory situations: individual experiences, and autobiographical and collective manifestations. In the bridges with daily life - which are a key aspect of performance, besides the notion of artistic genre -, it is essential to address a recidivist feature of this stage of capitalism in which we now live. This is the lack of operation that casts a shadow over the notion of community. To deactivate it, it is necessary to test other ways of sharing, of having collective experiences, and of creating strategies of provision to the other. The project of which this publication forms a part was, in a way, mobilized by this concern. This is not a recent theme, but the fact that it is gradually getting worse is a cause for concern to many people, and is mobilizing artists the world over, especially in the so-called areas of risk, where the “fringe cultures” are struggling to survive. 27

Over the past 30 years, philosophers and writers have explained the main dilemmas that guide the debate on what they have identified as “negative communities”. Never has so much been said on the question of the collective and communities, in senses proposed by the social networks, by artistic collectives, by political demonstrations on the streets, or by the resistance of minorities. However, there is a series of ambivalences surrounding these modes of being together and that, not infrequently, enquire as to how far these groupings may or may not be considered communities. Authors like Georges Bataille and Marguerite Duras (1957), Maurice Blanchot (1983), Jean-Luc Nancy (1986), Giorgio Agamben (1993) and Roberto Esposito (1998) identified a collapse of the common and the failure of the modern concept of community that, especially throughout the 20th century, authorized authoritarian practices and excluded the manifestations of the collective. Roberto Esposito, probably the most didactic of the authors cited, performed an extensive literature review, explaining the fundamental distinction between the two most common perspectives for dealing with the notion of community: the substantialist and the desubstancialist. The first encompasses much of traditional poli tical philosophy, based on the understanding of preconstituted individuals, merged into a larger whole (the people or the nation). In the desubstancialist perspective, there is a relationship of

sharing and an idea of community based on the notion of communitas. The objective of this essay is to bring together these bibliographies of political philosophy, which analyze the genealogy of communities of some topics proposed by scientific bibliographies that helped me to substantiate a redefinition that I propose for the performance, understood as a cognitive operator of destabilization. In my view, there is a harmony between these discussions, as the main argument from the desubstantialist perspective of communities refers precisely to the singularity of the bodies – from the body-to-body confrontation that has marked the political demonstrations to the constitution of artistic collectives. These are the perceptual processes that initiate the action of the subject in the world, in all its incompleteness and discontinuity.

Starting from the etymology of the word Communitas is the Latin word for community. It is from this that Esposito explains two important roots, cum and munus. Cum reveals the presence of another besides myself, and munus has three possible meanings: Onus, officium and donum. Donum (dom) indicates duty, debt, obligation, and cum refers to the insistent presence of another

From: Cozinha Performática cozinhaperformatica14@ gmail.com To: Diners Date: July 4, 2013 00:04 Subject: Letter #2 to the Dinners/Cooks

Letter #2 to the Dinners/Cooks Dearest Ones, At the first meeting, ZERO dinner, we introduced the general issues of the project, and began to introduce ourselves. Some could not attend; others brought something of their work and moments of creation, research and reflection. It was clear that the platform of this project is structured by sharing ideas, concerns, desires, fears, accidents, questions, actions ..., regarding artistic areas. A crossing of knowledge (and actions) in order to build a network of affinities; in it, we assume that theory and practice are organized jointly in a rhizomatic way, according to the theory of Deleuze and Féliz Guatarri.

Evaluating the first meeting and the challenge that follows, our central question for the dinners is to provoke your participation, eagerly encouraging you for the preparation of each meeting. Thus, we propose another dinner, which we shall call ZERO1. Best wishes Marcos and Ana,

( hidden). Thus, cum and munus, or communitas, means a type of relationship in which the subject gives himself unconditionally to another (any). This is the kind of gift that is referred to. But, according to Esposito, it is also precisely the significance of community that has ended up being altered by modern thought, constituting the externality that corrodes the subject. It should be noted that the fundamental concept of community has nothing to do with the current community logic that sees the community much more as a possession, a property, than an obligation or gift that, according to Espósito, would be a not belonging, or an impropriety. In other words, the improper, in this case, is the other, which is not the belonging, or the proper; it is the opening of oneself to the other that constitutes community. Jean-Luc Nancy reiterates Esposito’s discussions, emphasizing that community is also, first and foremost, a “being-in-common”, mit-sein (beingwith). Cum is something that exposes us, bringing us face to face with the other. In this sense, the experience that is had is always the experience of being with... It can be said that Esposito and Nancy identified the point at which the structure of traditional community was broken. What is of interest to both authors is the common of community; a common

previously presented as substance (territory, language, culture, customs, etc.), but that would still be more than that, in that it reveals a debt (munus); a commitment to the other. Thus, an ontology of community cannot be limited to what it shows or has, i.e. to that which has substance. The desubstantialist perspective brings back to ontology its improper constituent, which Georges Bataille has defined as the “community of those without community”; a community of deserters and renegades, disobedient to all transcendental common. The examples cited by Bataille were linked to the notion of an elective community, brought together by empathy, and not by any substance or common interest. In the second part of his book, La Communauté inavouable (The Unavowable Community) Blanchot writes about the «community of lovers» swept away by passion and condemned to live as nomads, without a destination. Blanchot comments on a long interview given by Bataille to Marguerite Duras in 1957, for the newspaper France Observateur, and recognizes in several of Duras’ works, such as La Maladie de la Morte (The Malady of Death) (1982), an empathy with the themes that were closest to Bastille’s heart, like expense, risk, loss, the relationship between sexuality/death and excess. For Blanchot, Bataille and Duras, expense is not only financial. Increasing subjectivity is spent and exhausted. The community would be a way to resist this over-

spending, to the consumption of the subjects. And the impossibility of the community would have, first and foremost, an emotional cost, linked to the impossibility of love, the gift, and friendship. Love is as old as chaos, and is presented as a mistake in the logic of the universe because it never makes sense; it never shares anything of purpose; what it puts on display is simply itself, making everything that is proper absolutely improper. For Bataille, Duras and Blanchot, there is no possibility of homogeneity and consensus. On the contrary, community is often a place of conflict and dissent. There is always a confrontation of singularities, as community is not a homogeneous mass with an identity given a priori. What constitutes it are processes of communication that are, of themselves and in their plurality, its plural conditions of existence. But how should we deal with clashes? How can we avoid the labels? By letting go of substances that stigmatize the notion of common and community? Giorgio Agamben suggests, in The coming community (1993), that these singularities and clashes have historically been its biggest threat to the totalitarian State, based on the notion of quodlibet (whatever pleases). The manifestations of quodlibet are precisely the singular manifestations that do not claim any identity, and do not represent any group, or class.

They are the most dangerous to the establishment. They are resistors without any consolidated political party or social movement. They constitute, precisely, singularities without identification or territory. This makes the action of power over them difficult. The expectation for this “coming community” exposes the crisis of modern representational politics, which is incapable of repressing the flow of singularity. The absence of substance, property or self-dominion exposes not only the conditions of a future policy, but also what is really common in the community: the munus. One might think of community, in this sense, as an event, a sense that awakens the original condition of men, originally indebted to each other. Thus, the experience of community, according to Esposito, constitutes an experience without a subject. If for some, to be dragged out of themselves (the improper) sounds like something negative, for others it can represent a unique opportunity to live a life full of vitality. Wandering away or losing selfcontrol opens the possibility of an outbreak of the new, or an unexpected meeting. This meeting may occur both in the individual himself or outside of him, in the most varied social spaces, in the most unlikely collective situations and in the most trivial, such as when sharing a meal.

Rethinking performance To create a bridge between these issues raised by political philosophy and some studies of body, developed by philosophers who study the processes of human cognition, I would like to propose the hypothesis that the performance is a cognitive singularity that invades and infects languages (dance, theater, film, visual arts, etc.), destabilizing its particularities and questioning certainties and evidence. In this sense, performance is, inevitably, political, especially when it is constituted in the relation with the other: to celebrate together, eat together, reflect together, dance together. To develop this proposal, I would like to share three issues that I have been discussing, especially over the last five years, in different situations.1 The first question is: When and how does a cognitive process begin? For decades, it was assumed that perception comes before cognition, and that its nature is distinct from action. I used to say that perception is a stimulus from the world to the mind, while action 1 Preliminary versions of this essay were presented at Encontro do Instituto Hemisférico in Sesc Vila Mariana, january 2013, and in an article published a few months later in the book Corpo em Cena, volume 6, organized by Lenira Rangel and Karin Thrall..

is a stimulus from the mind to the world. In this case, thought would be none other than a process consisting of “between”. However, more recently, the philosopher Alva Noë (2004) explained how this separation of perception and action (as well as that of perception and cognition) is very dangerous and inadequate. Thought cannot be considered merely as something that is between one thing and another, as perception is, intrinsically, a thought, and what lies behind it is a working knowledge of the ways in which movement drives changes in a subject and its surroundings. This means that perceiving is a form of acting. Perception is not something that happens to us, or in us, but something that we do; therefore, it is always, inevitably, singular. No-one does the same thing in the same way. Noë goes on to say that perceiving is not having a sensation, or receiving sensory impressions, but having sensations that someone understands. And this leads me to my second question. Can a movement be considered a concept? Under what circumstances? According to Noë – and authors like Lakoff and Johnson (1999), and Alain Berthoz (2001) –, among others, the whole basis of understanding is conceptual. This hypothesis is very peculiar, because it involves the recognition that a large part of perceptual content

is conceptual, while in general, it is assumed that to formulate a concept it is necessary to be able to make judgments and to articulate them as language. If, instead of this, we consider that the perceptual content is conceptual, then perception is not something that precedes the conceptualization; it is already cognitive in the sense that it is a sensory-motor ability from which organized protoconcepts emerge as bodily movements. The sensory-motor ability is therefore, in itself, a conceptual ability. Movement would be, in this sense, basically cognitive, because the way in which we understand how things happen always occurs in sensory-motor terms. At this level of description, it is impossible to separate theory from practice. Perceiving is a way of thinking about the world, or in other words, the whole experience, even without being configured as a judgment, is thinkable. Thus, to have a motor experience is to be confronted with a possible way of the world. The contents of the experience and the content of thought are, in many ways, the same. The ignition is in the movement. It was these studies on perception and action and cognition, and following up on some research practices that led me to think of a stage prior to language and artistic genres. In other words, the moment in which the bodily movement triggers changes that destabilize all certainties and evidence. Not every movement triggers this type of change. This, in my view, is the role of

erformative movements. They are not necessarp ily classifiable as an artistic genre, but rather, as operators of cognitive destabilization. They create epistemological territories in which the classifications, models, and rules given a priori cease to be sovereign. Thus, contrary to what is often said, performance does not consist of a hybridization of multiple artistic languages. It never consisted of identifiable paradigms, strengthening, with each experience, its ability to destabilize all the other languages. I then ask the third question: Can we think of performance as a unique way of perceiving/knowing, whose function would be to reinvent the body to activate powers of life? In the context of academic research, Michel Foucault (1977) was one of the authors responsible for the radical destabilization of the relationship between body and word, body and discourse, by drawing attention to the importance of statements. He was not referring to what has always occupied the daily lives of traditional archivists i.e. propositions and sentences. What interested him more was statements as an “outflow of singularities”. In the statement, he identified that everything is real and that all reality is manifested. Statements are inseparable from what he called a “space of rarity”. To explain this, he recognized three slices of space: 1- The first is the collateral, associated or adjacent

space, which is formed by two statements. It didn’t really matter whether it was the space that defined the group or whether it was the group of statements that defined the space. The two were always confused in their rules of formation, as we never stop moving from one system to the other. Statements are always transversal. 2- The second modality of space is the correlative space, which is not to be confused with the associated space. It is the relation of the statements with the subjects, objects, and concepts. According to Deleuze (1988), it is here that the murmurs without beginning or end are situated. This is because the statements, in the form in which they were studied by Foucault, were like dreams, each one having its own world. The correlative space would therefore be the discursive order of places, of the positions of the subjects, objects and concepts that form part of a family of statements. 3- The third modality of space is the complementary space. This is the non-discursive formations (institutions, political events, practices and economic processes). It is here that we can identify his political philosophy more clearly. The discursive relations relate to non-discursive means that are neither internal nor external to the group of statements. All the limits between inside and outside the different systems (including the body) are blurred. The “microphysics of power”, proposed by Foucault, always goes hand-in-hand with the political

investment of the body. Power has no essence, it is operative. Is not an attribute, but it is configured as a possible relation, or rather, a set of relations of forces. Thus, Foucault does not ignore repression and ideology, but, like Nietzshe, he recognizes that they do not constitute the combat of forces, being only a kind of index of combat. It should be noted that it is not only what happens, but also the metaphoric implications of the events, and the relations established therein, that are fundamental for understanding the complexity of the operations of power, and their relationships with the body. When analyzing the different manifestations of reality in a non-literal way, art explains some of these operations that are not always visible. Recognizing that every society produces diagrams and cognitive maps, Foucault recognized flexible and transversal alliances that define practices, strategies and procedures, rather than given and fixed structures. I see here an important connection with the artistic experiences that also recognize unstable physical systems, always in imbalance, rather than a closed circle of exchanges. It is in the form of a diagram that the relations of force that constitute power are exhibited. The visible is, almost always, inevitably enunciable. Hence the option for the construction of a possible epistemology rather than a phenomenology. Knowing it would be a practical agencing, a device of statements and

v isibilities. It is not separated from perceptual experience, nor from the imagined values. What is seen and what can be described is also thought.

transit between the movement and the apparent non-movement, which is nothing more than the movement that folds within itself.

There are numerous examples of artists who have chosen to transit in the gaps that, the same time, singularized their testimonies and guaranteed the impossibility of testifying. Many chose to present, precisely, the events that are impossible to testify to from inside (it is not possible to testify from within death) and also impossible to testify to from outside (those who are outside are excluded from the event).

This does not include all artistic activities or creations. Nor does it include all dances, or the whole gamut that goes under heading of gender performance. It is necessary to transit through a certain precariousness, and cross a threshold of deep darkness, for the movement born of this urgency to unmask all the evidence, without confining itself to manipulating it for any other purpose. Rethinking all the studies that I have gathered in the search for new ways of discussing performance, dance, and the arts of the body in a more general way, it seems to me that there is a point of inflection in this difficulty that is ever more present among us, identified as that deep inoperative that is always present.

The examples of performances immersed in situation without any way out have proliferated throughout the 20th century and overflowed into the 21st century, in keeping with authors who explained the so-called negative communities. Even before the emergence of the field of studies of performance and its inclusion in artistic languages, some issues were present. There are examples of experiences that were born out of diagnostics of terminal diseases, traumatic political situations, abandonment, punishment, exile, and so on. However, what makes me think of performance as a cognitive operator (before and beyond the language) is precisely these situations of deadlock. What gives testimony cannot be a language, a writing, but only a non-testified, a gap expressed in the

At this point, it is no longer a question of choosing between this or that aesthetic model, or this or that artistic genre. It seems more important to find again, with urgency, paths to sharing. But without the recognition of this improper that constitutes us, and of the lack of control and the discontinuity that characterize it (the subject is never ready and is never self-sufficient), it would be foolish to follow with the primer of sophisticated vocabularies and delivery research that guide the experiences most victimized by the art market. After all, this market, in the majority of cases, is pure fiction.

Small book of recipes

The culinary alchemy of Gordon Matta-Clark Cláudio Bueno

Welcome to the recipes section of this publication. We invite you to view them as instructions for performances. Thus, both the act of cooking and the texts of this book can become performing acts. During the preparation, the suggested mixtures tend to activate experiences and transformations in the state of the bodies, of foods, and of the spaces involved.

in a badly-written note - and, in these transits, we hope they will be altered, and even taken apart, generating other recipes. But if they are stored for many years, we hope they will create mold, moths, dust mites, and other species that make them impossible to read fully; or, even, that the digital file becomes corrupted, so that, once again, they are transformed.

Recipes are also forms of sharing, whether by email or

The three recipes below are based on some of the culinary

experiments of Gordon Matta-Clark. They precede or complement his work at “Food”, the restaurant founded collaboratively by Caroline Goodden, Matta-Clark, Rachel Lew, Suzanne Harris and Tina Girouard, in 1971, in SoHo, New York. “Food” was also a meeting place, receiving different artists to cook as guests on Sunday nights, among them Donald Judd, Keith Sonnier, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Landry, Italo Scanga and others.

Be our guest. Reperform; mix; fry; wait; share; enjoy.

PHOTO-FRY Preparation 1) Heat a frying pan with vegetable oil;Â 2) Fry each photo individually; 3) While frying each photo, add a sheet of gold; 4) Stir well until all the chemicals evaporate and the image disappears; 5) After taking leave of the guests, wrap each of the polaroids in a cardboard box and send to friends and members of the audience, as Christmas cards; 6) Avoid cleaning the scene.

AGAR PIECES Preparation Time Over an hour

Preparation

Portions 10 Servings

2) Mix all the ingredients, leaving the metals to last;

Ingredients 10 Polaroid photos of Christmas trees. 10 Sheets of gold. 1 L of vegetable oil. 1 Clean, white room and lots of guests. 10 small cardboard boxes.

4) Spread the trays and serving platters around the area;

1) Heat a large pan with water; 3) Stir everything together for one hour; 5) Pour a little of the recipe into each one. 6) Leave to dry for several days, until the substance is chemically transformed and its surface hardens; 7) At the end, donate everything to the archive of a museum or simply burn it.

Origin of the recipe

Origin

Photo-Fry (1969) was a performance given by Matta-Clark at

Between 1969 and 1971, Matta-Clark produced a series of

the John Gibson Gallery in New York, in an exhibition entitled

mixtures with an agar base (a gelatinous substance extracted

Documentation. During the opening, the artist prepared a

from various kinds of seaweed). One of these series was the

small stove and a frying pan, where he fried polaroid photos of

installation entitled Museum in 1970 at the Bykert Gallery in

Christmas trees with leaves of gold. After the end of the display,

New York. Another series was Incendiary Wafers, performed

when the above elements were still present as traces, and also as

after one of the agar mixtures accidentally exploded at his studio,

records of the performance, the artist wrapped the photos and

and the artist took them outside and burned them.

the sheets of gold in cardboard boxes and sent by mail to friends and professionals of the art circuit, as Christmas cards.

Preparation Time At least seven days Portions Variable Ingredients 2 Kg of powdered agar; 1 L of liquid chocolate. 1 L of cranberry juice; 1 L of vegetable juice; 1 L of corn oil; 1 kg of salt; 1 kg of sugar; 300 g of baking powder; 300 g of meat; 200 g of dextrose tryptone agar; 100 ml chicken stock; 100 ml of whale spermaceti; Various Metals: screws, tacks, galvanized trays; sheets of gold. 1 large pan. Between 10 and 12 trays/ serving platters. Separate the quantities that you find of the substances below, and add any other perishable elements that are available: Aspergillus negro (black mold); Mucor racemosus; Rhizopus apophysis; Penicillium notatum; Streptomyces griseus.

PIG ROAST Preparation 1) Choose a big event in a public space; 2) Clean the viscera from the hog; 3) Sprinkle the animal with salt and pepper; 4) Assemble the trestles and place the pork on the skewer; 5) Place the coal and other flammable substances under the animal, about 1 m away; 6) Use the matches and the alcohol to light the fire; 7) Wait until all parts are baked; 8) On the sound system, play MP3 files of Philip Glass (if possible, invite him to play); 40

9) With a sharp knife, cut small pieces of pig to fit into sandwiches. 10) Distribute to the participants of the event. Preparation Time Between 12 and 18 hours

Origin of the recipe

Portion 500 Sandwiches

Matta-Clark and Caroline Goodden presented the performance

Ingredients 1 Large pig; 2 Trestles; 1 Skewer or similar metal bar of approximately 2 m; 500 bread rolls;

It took around 12 hours to bake it (the process began in the

At the end of the Brooklyn Bridge Event in New York, in 1972, Pig Roast. On that occasion, they prepared a pig on the spit.

1 box of matches. 1 meat knife; 1 sound system; MP3 Files with music of Philip Glass. Salt and pepper to taste (the original recipe uses pepperwater); 1 L of alcohol Flammable Substances, such as coal, wood, grass, etc.

afternoon prior to the event, â&#x20AC;&#x153;obligingâ&#x20AC;? the artists to spend the night at the site). At the end, they served more than 500 sandwiches to the public, to the sound of Philip Glass, who played during the event. 41

PERFORMANCE AND THE RISK OF INOPERATIVENESS of the common • Christine Greiner AGAMBEN, Giorgio. A comunidade que vem. Trad. Claudio Oliveira. Lisboa: Editora Autentica, 1993. AGAMBEN, Giorgio. O que resta de Auschwitz: o arquivo e a testemunha. Trad. Selvino J. Assmann. São Paulo: Ed. Boitempo, 2008. BERTHOZ, Alain. Le sens du mouvement. Paris: Odile Jacob, 2001.

The culinary alchemy of Gordon Matta-Clark • Cláudio Bueno Printed publications HOARE, Natasha. Matta-Clark’s FOOD. The Gourmand: a Food and Culture Journal. [editado por David Lane & Marina Tweed], 2 ed., Londres, 2013. LEE, Pamela M. Object to be Destroyed: The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2001. THOMAS, Katie Lloyd. Material Matters: Architecture and Material Practice. Abingdon: Routledge, 2007. Movies

BLANCHOT, Maurice. La communauté inavouable. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1983.

Food. 1972, 43 min, preto e branco, som, 16 mm. Câmera e som: Robert Frank, Suzanne Harris, Gordon MattaClark, Danny Seymour. Edição: Roger Welch. Parte do acervo do EAI (Electronic Arts Intermix). Source: <http://www.ubu.com/film/gmc_food.html>. Accessed on: December 4, 2014.

DELEUZE, Gilles. Foucault. Trad. Claudia Sant’Anna Martins. São Paulo: Ed. Brasiliense, 1988.

Websites

ESPOSITO, Roberto. Communitas. Origine e destino della comunità. Torino: Einaudi, 1998. [Communitas: the Origin and Destiny of Community. Trad. Timothy Campbell. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004.]

Under the Brooklyn Bridge: The Origins of the Restaurant FOOD. Bethsheba Goldstein entrevista Carol Goodden. The SoHo Memory Project. Source: <http://sohomemory.com/2012/06/30/guest-post-series-bethsheba-goldstein-interviews-carol-goodden-aboutfood/>. Accessed on: December 4, 2014.

FOUCAULT, Michel. Vigiar e punir, a história da violência nas prisões. Trad. Ligia Ponde Vassallo. Petrópolis: Ed. Vozes, 1977.

The Story of Food. Canadian Centre for Architecture. Source: <http://www.cca.qc.ca/en/study-centre/1838-the-story-of-food>. Accessed on: December 4, 2014.

FOUCAULT, Michel. Microfísica do poder. Trad. Roberto Machado. São Paulo: Graal, 2004.

When Meals Played the Muse. The New York Times. Source: <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/21/dining/21soho.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0>. Accessed on: December 4, 2014.

FOUCAULT, Michel. A história da sexualidade, a vontade de saber, v. 1. Trad. Maria Thereza da Costa Albuquerque e J.A. Guilhon Albuquerque. São Paulo: Graal, 2006. GREINER, Christine. O corpo, pistas para estudos indisciplinares. São Paulo: Ed. Annablume, 2005. GREINER, Christine. O corpo em crise, novas pistas e o curtocircuito das representações. São Paulo: Ed. Annablume, 2010. NANCY, Jean-Luc. La communauté désouvrée. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1986.

Exhibitions Gordon Matta-Clark: desfazer o espaço. Exposição no Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo. Curadoria: Tatiana Cuevas e Gabriela Rangel. Source: <http://www.mam.org.br/projetos/gordon-matta-clark-desfazer-o-espaco/>. Accessed on: December 4, 2014. Food 1971/2013. Frieze Projects New York. Source: <http://friezeprojectsny.org/projects/food/>. Accessed on: December 6, 2014.

LAKOFF, George; JOHNSON, Mark. Philosophy in the Flesh. Massachussets: Bradford Books, 1999. NOË, Alva. Action in Perception. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004. 42

THE UNEXPECTED CONFIGURATIONS OF THE MEETINGS • Rosa Hercoles

Artists and works

FOUCAULT, Michel. O que é um autor?. Lisboa: Ed. Vega, 1992.

Joseph Beuys: DURINI, Lucrezia De Domizio. Joseph Beuys: the Art of Cooking. Milão: Charta, 1999. Images source: <http://annecane. wordpress.com/2012/05/15/ joseph-beuys-the-art-ofcooking/>. Accessed on December 6, 2014.

LEPECKI, André. Exhausting Dance – Performance and the Politics of Movement. Nova York: Routledge, 2006. RANCIÈRE, Jacques. A partilha do sensível – Estética e política. São Paulo: EXO experimental, 2012. SENNETT, Richard. Juntos – Os rituais, os prazeres e a política da cooperação. Rio de Janeiro: Ed. Record, 2012. SODRÉ, Muniz. As estratégias sensíveis – Afeto, mídia e política. Petrópolis: Ed. Vozes, 2006 42

Bruce Nauman: Body Pressure (1974)

Regina Silveira: Pudim arte brasileira (1977) Yoko Ono: Blood Piece (1960) 43

From: Cozinha Performática cozinhaperformatica14@ gmail.com To: Diners Date: July 23, 2013 01:32 am Subject: next meetings... Letter #3 to the Diners

Dear Diners/Cooks,

Also, we’ve set the September meeting for Saturday, the 21st, in Cotia, in Natalia Barros’s home.

We would like to invite you to our next meeting. The agenda for this meeting is going to be cooked slowly, in ‘bilateral’ meetings (some are already taking place) so that our ideas can start to ferment... But we have a few topics in progress; at Ferron’s suggestion, let’s (re) state the basic questions: What does each one of us desire to cook? What do we want to suggest or place on the tray? Maybe some of you like the idea of meeting us – Ana and me – to talk more. That would be good.

Let’s remember that we have the page ‘Cozinha Performática’ on FaceBook, and that a lot of people have accessed it and are interested in it... indulge in it. Kisses, Marcos

From: Cozinha Performática cozinhaperformatica14@ gmail.com To: Diners Date: August 4, 2013 01:27 pm Subject: more communication with the diners/cooks

Dear, Attached is a letter, also reproduced below, so that we can continue the discussion ...I ask your patient reading ... sincerely, Marcos “Advanced conversation attempts for a cartography of The Performing Kitchen. This text is an attempt to talk more about the project, starting with questions that I have been asked in these conversations that we are having... It is something that is hard for me. Because, sometimes, what guides me is intuition (and the exercise of putting it into words needs more working time to match it); on the other hand, I sometimes feel lost, that is, I do not always know where I’m going ... I alternate between what has been

lost with what has been found. I believe that creation is like that, and you who are creators certainly understand this. But let’s go: this project was born from a sensation: the fact that I do what I do because something is stirring within me. The desire; and lack of. It was also born from a sensation of loneliness. The fact that I feel very lonesome and we must be closer. The fact that what I have to say may not be very interesting; it’s just more of the same. But with others, between what I have and what others have, it seems better and more fun. So I invite others to approach, to help me out of myself, my limitations, and together we can explore the possibility of doing something together. Something from the area of coexistence, of performativity and of thought. These ideas are present in the origin of the dinners. Then, because I feel a deep weariness in the ‘show’ format, in the idea that few people will leave home to see a scenic work without 48

the “proto-Hollywood” marketing apparatus, that is, only for the pleasure of a meeting with something that touches them and enables them to live an experience. This is hard ... I don’t want to give up; instead, I want to radicalize more, but I can’t help feeling that the challenge is greater than ever in these times... In dance, we always talk about “process” and how our processes are more important than a “product.” But then, what to do so that those who come into contact with the work, for example, watching a video or a scenic spectacle, may be partially traversed, at least, by that process? It is not something they just feel, turn off their cell phones momentarily, see a product, like it or not like it, and then proceed to the next subject, unchanged. The same for certain places of conversation. Sometimes we leave an interesting lecture, but the good conversation occurs even at the bar table later, when, relaxed, we let the thought flow. We are trying to approach such places: the social, the thought, the performative... 49

If the visible, established schemes are linked to the already given, and, therefore, to a reduction that objectifies us at the mercy of a voracious and concentrating market, one needs to create other places, other markets. The Kitchen wants to experience that and part of the deletion of the lines that separate (?) process and product; the language of dance and other arts; authorship, speech, emissionreception, etc. Everything has already been thoroughly discussed in various media, but not always clearly, as we are integrating concepts and perceptions, each from their own questions. For now, let’s think about ‘between’ spaces; what is not this or that, but this and that, or ... an attempt to create another ethic of doing to create other forms of life. And as we need to act dialectically with existing material resources, this project benefits with the corresponding consequences of the São Paulo Dance Development Grant. The proposal creates tension with the 50

uses of public funding calls, but cannot do without them. Therefore, the project has three pillars: the dinners; the performative experiments; and the scenic work. The experiments and the scenic work are also an area in which my authorship, in collaboration with possible collaborators (so I hope and so it is) is more decisive. I am the main person responsible for them. And I’ve racked my brain thinking about where to go and what I want from them, just as Ferron asked me. But during the dinners/lunches/brunches, I would like the creation and research platform idea to predominate. That is, that all guests feel welcome to try out what arises from their desires and this meeting. Perhaps a thought, a performative action, an idea for publication, a food recipe, a simple place of presence and a look at whatever is produced; a brief intuition, without requiring too much self-consciousness about the results. 52

In talking with Ana, she has always pointed to the challenge that this proposal should not turn into a comfortable place for a social party or event. We have been thinking and thinking about that. And Edith put it well: you need some kind of proposition so that the guests do not feel up in the air, in the dark, not knowing how to touch the walls and, therefore, be prisoners of immobility. I agree and have been wondering how this proposition might come about. What to do to make you feel invited and, with enough light, be able to look and propose ways. How to offer an inviting and relaxed space so that the guests feel comfortable and can express their co-creative power, together... I think that the next meeting – the brunch on August 31 – will address that matter. I am open to proposals, questions, teasers. On our Fbook page, ‘Cozinha Performática’ (Performing Kitchen), you can post images, photos, texts and videos that seem to address the proposal. We are working on a blog to raise these materials, recording what will occur, 53

Talk with

Cláudio Bueno ANA TEIXEIRA: There were five meetings, and there is a lot of material from these five meetings, but to transform this material into content would also take time, and we just realized that while on the making... | MARCOS MORAES: Meetings are much more organic than the format of the book. | AT: Fair. And then I thought about this, that each one came with questions and that sometimes, the topic that was being discussed disappeared, only to reappear later. So it is a type of dynamic that calls for continuity – in my opinion, that is; it may be that others see it in another way – to understand what is the flow from this, and how to transform this type of narrative, which is sometimes dispersed and sometimes contained in a narrative that fits inside a book. | MM: It is a matter of looking for what is of interest in each conversation, because everything sounds interesting at the time of the conversation. But it is necessary to choose what is of interest, and to think, develop and relate; what is it that gains relevance from all that. It is a difficult job, because every day you close your eyes and think about something different, something else that is also important... It is a work in movement | AT: And, discussing it with Edith - We talked a lot - I spoke to her about this question, of the need for a time other than the cooking and eating time itself. Not as if though they were separate things... | CLAUDIO BUENO: Edith was at the meetings? | AT: Yes, she is part of the project. Edith, Sheila Ribeiro... | MM: Aricia Mess, a singer, Luis Ferron, also a dancer, Natalia Barros, a poet, and Dalva Garcia, a philosopher. This group is invited, but there’s also all of us, both those who are registering the work and those who are producing. Everybody is together. So it’s a group of some 14 people that gathers. | AT: Reflecting on this question, I thought: “How to use what happened in the performing dinners as a prompt for the whole publishing?”, in other 54

since the writing of this project is its own doing. Once we have prepared it, we will forward it to you too, but the meetings/ dinners are also like a blog. They are open spots for your oroposals. I know that I am inviting you to venture out in the dark, but that’s just the way it is: if you feel it’s going to work and it interests you, then jump. We will do our best to meet your needs. The Kitchen is open to other collaborations, and if an idea starts to materialize and turns into something concrete – a proposal for further work in partnership on something – we will have to sit down and see how to reward each case, according to the implications of the task/project/ development/participation. A hug to all of you, and we will be working from now until our brunch on August 31. Sincerely, Marcos 54

words, “I’ll bring people from outside to write”, even if they haven’t experienced that, because it’s the issues raised there that will prompt people, not only the participation. Therefore, when Marquinhos applies for his project, which already bears Gordon Matta-Clarks photo on the cover... and so bringing the question of alchemy… | CB: You proposed the project with a picture of Matta-Clark on the cover? | MM: Yes, he is the inspiration to the project, especially with the creation of “Food”...1 | AT: So, people understand this as an action, that was his proposal, to discuss... | MM: This is the project that I sent in for the São Paulo Dance Development Grant. I’ll speak a bit more about that in a little while. | CB: When I see “Food”, in fact, I see it as a performance device, you know? That’s how I have thought of my work. In short, in creating devices, so that other people can perform stimulated by them. That’s what I call the device as an open thing that the other can use to create a performance situation. So when I think of “Food”, for example, it’s a kitchen, available there, for a night when you might invite Rauschenberg to make some food \(laughs). So, “Food” for me is a little bit this place of a device created to be appropriated by to other artists, more than the logic of reperformance, present in productions such as that of Marina [Abramovic], for example. | MM: How do I represent something that is not in the field of representation? I’ll pull a thread from here, make the most of it. Sometimes, to build my own speech, I need to do a little “come and go “. So when I think of where this of Matta-Clark came from, I think of Vitor César, who commented with Enrico da Rocha, and Enrico when he saw me speaking of food, in the previous project, DSF, which was a project where I was beginning to think about the issue of desire, and how desire sets things in motion; how things that move are moved by desire. And on this idea of collaboration, of meeting with other people. In which each meeting gives rise to its own dramaturgy, because that meeting is specific. So, these are the bases on which I began to focus. But when you formulate, you start to look, and the gap goes deeper. How is it that this thing concerning

1 Born in New York on June 22, 1943, Gordon Matta-Clark is part of a generation that directly challenges the commercialization of art. Teeny Duchamp’s godson (Marcel Duchamp’s wife), an architect, Matta-Clark worked with photography, film, video, performance, drawing, collage and sculpture, through interventions on a large scale and site-specific work. In the early 1970s, he and other artists founded the “Food” restaurant, a place in SoHo at 112 Green Street for meetings, creations, exhibitions and performances. According to Matta-Clark, “Food” was a performative action per se.

me, and attracting me, will be materialized? What devices emerged, what procedures, what spaces, which people? And what about chance? Chance, always. So this was a process that lasted a year and a half, two years, and at each of these meetings, some work was produced that I later developed, and that went up to a certain point. I was little concerned, perhaps too little concerned, with the products. Throughout our discourse of process and of contemporary, procedural art, etc. in the dance field. “I couldn’t care less for the market, I couldn’t care less about it”, except that you also communicate to people through this, when you share. So the readings that are made, even to continue the collaboration, the exchange, have to do with the works. All that was in there, as part of my thinking. When I went to do The Performing Kitchen, Enrico had mentioned to me of Gordon Matta-Clark, so I went to have a read, I went to search. And I said: “It has everything to do with it”. But what was it that moved me? When he opens a restaurant and declares that this is a performative act... Besides that, there’s that book Pioneers of the Downtown Scene that brings us closer, through its radical attitude of occupying SoHo, at that time still marginal in New York, with Laurie Anderson, Trisha Brown and Gordon. Those doings, for me, brought a seed of that moment, of that attitude, to which I feel related. And art developed into another situation, a contemporary one, of crossings and in a certain way the idea of the avant-garde lost its meaning, together with all that that constitutes our current thinking. But there was also something I felt we had in the counterculture times in São Paulo, in the 1980s, for example, an attitude to art, “life and art”, which I have spoken about. “This here converses with me”. CB: In the video they are going to the fish market, buying, haggling with the guy. Then they go back to the restaurant, smoke a joint. They start to talk about: “Ah, are you making dessert?”, “you aren’t”. And there’s the atmosphere of the restaurant. The video is great because it takes away a little of that idea that it was a place frequented only by artists, or

just hype; so it wasn’t about the hype. It was a normal restaurant that people went to. There’s a couple eating over there, there are the guys playing. But you see that was something like that, it didn’t have the glamour of the New York art scene. It was very low profile. This is incredible. | MM: That’s fantastic. So, the affiliation of the project has to do with that. What is it that motivates it. It’s the idea of dinners, it’s an open idea, because it happened in different ways. For example, I don’t know if you can see it here, I’ll show you a video of Goiânia. I was called to Goiania for a project called Conexão Samambaia. The video is on the Facebook page of The Performing Kitchen. When Kleber, who directs that project, invited me; he asked, “what are you doing now?” “I’m doing The Performing Kitchen, but it’s only just beginning.” This was in June 2013. So they said: “Let’s do a Kitchen here”. One of them, Guilherme, has a cafe that opens on to the sidewalk, like a garage. I said: “Anyone who wants to propose something, it’s open”. And then Kleber said: “I’ll call Bebel, who sings, and the boys who are monitoring of the project, who are university students”. Well, I arrive there to do it, and three days after, there was going to be the launching of Conexão Samambaia, a performing dinner. They made an invitation with some aubergines in skirts, they delivered them personally. They filmed everything, so one of the videos is this invitation. I had said. “I want a team filming everything, because I’m going to do a making of video, with me shopping at the market, etc. “I arrived there, Gui’s mother, who is of German descent, had a method of smoking meat and agreed to teach me. I went to her rural property – her chácara – to learn the secret, then I did a smoked fish. I went to the market, there were a few musicians who had been playing in some places in Goiania, passing the hat, and who, by coincidence, came to the market that day. Afterwards, I learned that these were the musicians Bebel was going to invite. So, there’s the video of people shopping, with the musicians playing, and a woman street vendor gets up and grabs me to dance. All this has just happened; finally, you have the ingredients, people at the fair discussing whether this was a performing act or not, the smoking of the fish, and the day of the dinner arrives. At the dinner, Bebel made this song about the couscous, which was in the dish, and everybody, the monitors, working as waiters or in the kitchen, as assistants and so on. I thought “wow, this has already happened at the start of the project... It’s there”. Our dinners here have another character, because it’s a closed group and there is a purpose that each time, we felt the need to explain over again. | CB: I understood, because each time the purpose changed. | MM: Because it changed all the time. I feel, now that we have done five meetings, that from the beginning there are reverberations that are not measurable, for example, for a publication. Sheila detects this very well, when she finds Aricia in London. They were both in London in the same period, and Sheila said: “This, for me, is a reverberation of The Performing Kitchen. I’m getting to know Aricia. Everyone is meeting here in London and is talking here, because of this project. This should be counted 58

as a result of this project.” And it’s the same with Yuri Pinheiro, a photographer, who knows Sheila because of the project and has begun to think of the visual programming, or Natália, who gets a text from Dalva with the memories of her grandmother, and sees poetry there. All these reverberations point to a series of things. Some of them I have the desire to capture in some way, others no. So the collaborations arise: Marcela, the photographer who documents the projects, was going traveling, and said: “First I want to photograph your rehearsals”. So she did an essay on the rehearsal. With Yuri, also a photographer, we worked on an idea that I’ve had for some time, which we call O porquinho (‘Piggy’), and that brings this question of the artist giving himself to be eaten, and I’m there with an apple in my mouth. We did a photograph essay with his vision, the aesthetics of his work, which has a history in fashion. We looked for what these meetings could produce. The character of O porquinho is my creation, I can do what I want with it, but it turned into a work of this meeting between Yuri and I. Osmar did something of his own, during a trip, with a video that he had filmed of people on the beach on a weekend, with the texts in which Ana was working with the idea of the desire, so he works with this, and with the musical bands that he was seeing on the trip (the video is called 4X desejo). Finally, these reverberations, for me, were partly my desire, because I consider this project a platform for creation and research. The idea is that it adds the yeast, so that various things are baked. From the outset, we had a guideline to turn it into a publication. And we find ourselves facing a series of complexities, such as how to work with this whole universe, how to name it, which is it that we feel has more power, more relevance; or sometimes, even, with a concern that Ana and I had from the beginning, from when I invited her to work together, which is the relationship of dance and discourse about dance. That is what is happening in the contemporary dance scene of São Paulo, where we have the Dance Development Grant, which was an achievement of great political struggle but which, being one of the few things that offer a working condition, 60

and because it is a public grant for which everybody competed, also generated a generalized and homogenizing discourse on the artistic act, which often does not seem to be what the artist wants; far less what he appropriates from that discourse that he himself promotes. We started to discuss what several of us, dance artists, were thinking. Questions like: what is “ongoing research”? Something that everybody is now speaking about, because that is supposedly the aim of the law that created this grant (supporting continuing research on dance). What is a continuing research? What is transdisciplinarity or indisciplinarity? As Christine Greiner brings, what is a hybrid? What is this in dance? So these questions are all raised there. Even if they are not the specific purpose of a work that seeks to answer this. But these are questions that are out there, too. And for me, the question of collaboration continues to be asked: how do we stop being one, to work with others. Because the work is not serial, of the type I contract such and such, I know this, you know that, then we come together in the production line and produce it. No. I have to stop being me so much. | CB: It’s the alchemy of Matta-Clark. | MM: Exactly. | CB: So, it’s an unlikely mixture of things, that can generate something that you don’t know. This is the place of research, if you already know the answer, it doesn’t make sense to do it. | MM: Exactly. And it was gradually, it’s now that things are getting difficult, you know what I mean? Because everyone did a series of five meetings, with lots of questions. Recently, Aricia went to watch the work of Ferron and said: “Bloody hell! That’s how I want to rethink my own work with music”. With Sheila, we are developing a work. Another work with Ana and Ferron, the three creating my solo, discussing movement... We are thinking about a video with Osmar, and all this process of creating the book with Ana, Edith, Ruth and the collaboration of all those involved. In short, there are lots of irons in the fire. | CB: But what a beautiful project. When Ana sent... It’s funny, because she sent it and I was closing this story of the VB platform, and I thought, the ideal person to write this story is Jorge Menna Barreto ... |

MM: Like, I’m not going to take anything else in my schedule. | CB: Then, when Jorge said: “Darn it, Cláudio, I can’t manage it”... He went traveling, it just wasn’t possible. I said: “No, wait, I have to have a beautiful exit for Ana”. Because it was Ana who was in contact with me and... | MM: We’ve spoilt your vacation [laughs). CB: What I think is really cool is this space that is not an institutionalized space, you know what I mean? It’s the space of the kitchen. I think that contemporary art was building a place that, in one hand, is a necessary place, of visibility, a circuit of visibility that is very important to achieve funding and circulate a production, etc., but it was becoming too institutionalized. So, it lacks this kitchen place. Yesterday I was at a dinner with somebody and a friend commented: “So I went to Juiz de Fora...” - I don’t remember, she passed through some place, giving curatorship workshops and so on. I don’t know if it was in Belém or in Juiz de Fora. Someone told her. “But we need space, we don’t have any space here to circulate our production and so on”. Comm’on, to create a space: put the sign here on the door and call the audience in, thus it’s created, you understand? I don’t need the... Alright, the museum, or the space of the museum, it creates a record in history. So you speak: “I exhibited at Itaú Cultural. I exhibited at MAC. I exhibited I don’t know where. “So, it creates a record in the history of art, but if the problem is to circulate a production, then this space is much better than the museum. The museum created this place, which has its importance, but which also has a rigid side. Now a work like this, a performing kitchen, is the place of the diversion... And it’s great, because Matta-Clark created this problem too, because in one of the recipes he fries that sheet of gold, “golden…” – in short, the work is gold leaf – inside the Gallery. So, it is the oil inside the white cube being fried during an opening that makes that clean space of the white cube, an unbearable place. I thought about that when you invited me... And it was great, this invitation, because it made me think about lots of things. Because for Matta-Clark, the business was transforming things, or alchemy; unlikely mixtures. This unknown zone was the most beautiful thing. And what could arise in this kitchen, what could come out of this, that we are not familiar with. For example, you came here today to meet a person you’ve never seen before; I think this is the place and whatever may come out of it. And that is so beautiful; that’s the beauty of the project. Well, I’m thinking about what this book of yours – ours – is after all... What Matta-Clark’s cut actually has to do with Edith, maybe, in a graphic project; you know, something that has a cut in the middle... Because the idea of the cut is beautiful, I started thinking about this after your invitation. So, when you think about the food, the cut of meat, the cut of things... And how Matta-Clark did that with the buildings, and how the cut is the place to create a temporality, of dividing, of multiplying. And finally, how meaningful this idea of the cut is when we’re talking about food, architecture...

This is the time of experience. That’s what I’ve been thinking a bit about... There are two Matta-Clark’s recipes that take him to “Food”... | AT: What is the “Photo-Fry,” “Agar” alchemy? | CB: “Agar” and “PhotoFry” – that of the fried photographs, right? He fries the photo along with the gold leaf and inside the gallery. So, it has the chemistry of the photo; the result should be awful, but it’s great, nonetheless. Until the image fades. I’ve been also thinking a lot about the fact that we live in an image culture and this is very powerful. I’ve been thinking less and less about image and more and more about those areas of invisibility between people, between spaces. And he produces that area when he fries the photo, erases the image and creates a new area there that has to do with the other senses... So, what I want to do is to create three recipes, improve the texts I sent to you just as a model, and improve those recipes. There are three recipes and a brief introduction about the logic behind them; the idea of a recipe as performance instruction. Less of an academic text and more of an intervention. Well, I don’t know what your ideas about it are. It’s an attempt to think more conceptually about the project: what kind of place this is for cooking; what type of device the book is, and how it generates other situations. It is the same thought that is present in that piece involving the other’s body; it invites the 64

other to be together. | MM: I also like Bruce Nauman as a reference we ought to have because he connects with everything. It’s really funny because, as we are making cuts, everything that belongs together gets connected. It’s a bit what Lepecki talks about regarding the future of the work, which for me, has to do with putting desire in motion. Things have their own angel, so going back to Deleuze, it’s important not to scare off the future. I was recalling my grandmother cooking. She was the daughter of Portuguese; she used to serve one mega banquet and you would say: “Grandma, this is fabulous!” and she would answer, almost bluntly: “Yeah, I made some stuff.” She had that Portuguese attitude. You’d borrow her recipes, and, obviously, if you borrow someone else’s recipe, it always turns out a bit different; but we saw that it would turn out completely different. And when you watched her actually cooking, she didn’t do anything like what was in the recipe. When she was beating the egg whites, and a piece of something would fall in and she would mix it with I don’t know what, and she would toss in some flour but not the amount on the recipe. And she knew because she understood it differently. For me, this has everything to do with the recipe being a triggering device. The recipe isn’t what will actually be made; it’s not the thing itself but a reference, a place. And I think we can see the book being a bit like that too, because it expands beyond itself. It’s what we’ve talked about since beginning with Edith. | CB: Actually, it’s just an illusion of control. I mean, the instruction’s there in the world, but if I do this on that wall, or in your home, everything changes. Or, if I do it in a museum, or in a place I’m not familiar with, everything changes. So, that’s exactly what the recipe is. Sorry about using that word so often, but the recipe is just a device; it’s not the thing itself; it’s something to be activated; something for, not something in itself. I like to think about it as a performance. | MM: I like that a lot and I think it’s very appropriate that you’ve brought it up. | CB: I’m wondering, what if they’ve already been using recipes from the book and I’m being obvious. | MM: I don’t think so. That’s another matter altogether. I’m sort of thinking about how I’m going to

arrange the Solo piece. Ferron said: “It’s like that meal of Zeca’s (at dinner #4): it’s just one thing, but it’s got everything.” Yes, and perhaps it’ll involve guests, maybe appetizers, a main course, dessert; maybe it’ll just be one course – I don’t know. I need to think about that, about how I’m going to set it up. It’s the same with Sheila. Those things go in there as ingredients; they go in there and everything becomes one thing; is it a soup or several dishes? | CB: I brought this magazine to show you. It’s called The Gourmand and it talks about art and food; and it’s got this picture ... | MM: The same picture as in the project (Matta-Clarks ‘Food’). This picture is great because he himself has written about it and described it. | CB: It’s beautiful. He talks about 16 thousand squeezed oranges. He talks about rabbits, carrots, fish. And it has a story – I sent the magazine’s link to you – but this is the printed version. This is the article that talks about “Food,” about the recipes he made before creating “Food”; these are the ones that I sent to you, but I thought I’d include one more, which I think is kind of symbolic, but important, the one where he burns the pig on Brooklyn Bridge ... It’s an event ... | MM: It’s his piglet. | CB: It’s called... “Pig Roast, 1972, and marks his most direct use of food as artwork and was staged at the end of the Brooklyn Bridge Event.” So, it was an event there and he bakes the pig at the end of the show on the night before the closing and until the next day. “Accompanied by the music of Philip Glass, Matta-Clark makes about 500 sandwiches” out of that pig. | MM :. It’s smoked. It is a smoking process; he smokes the meat. That’s what I did there in Goiania; I smoked the fish too; I got it from Gui’s mother’s secret recipe - we couldn’t even film it; not the secret ingredients, just everything else. Later, when you can, check out The Performing Kitchen site. Do you use Facebook? There’s a link to Conexão Samambaia, which has all the videos; there’s one showing me shopping at the grocery store; I don’t think it shows it in the edition; security made me stop; hauled me out, saying I couldn’t shoot there... | CB: Do you know Berna Reale? She’s a performer from Belém do Pará... | MM: No, I don’t know her. Somebody else mentioned her too. So many people doing stuff with food that in England there’s already a

erforming arts festival with just food. I’ve got a friend that does that in rural Brazil... | CB: There’s a p work of her’s where she’s transported like an animal inside a refrigeration truck; guys get out of the truck with her hanging inside, and they keep driving around town with her hanging in there. It’s a little activist... | AT: Then, Cláudio, with Edith, we can think about where we’re going to put the recipes and the issue about the cut. | CB: I think it’s a cool idea to think about the cut as ... It has to do with food, with Matta-Clark, with architecture ... What I’ve also been thinking about, Marcos, is the idea of the performativity of the text. I don’t know, but I’m telling you guys because I think this will come up with the making of the book ... But it’s the text that performs. It’s the text seen less like something already established, but as... How can I put it? For example, in my thesis, I’m writing about the work of Ricardo Basbaum, who makes a game out of exchanging pronouns, when I turns into YOU, and so, suddenly, we become I-YOU; so, his thing... Then, in the text, I create tags that mark when the commented-on situation becomes I-HE, I-YOU, etc. So, this is to make the text perform. I think it’s really cool because it sees the text as a dynamic situation also, that dialogues conceptually with the idea of performance... MM: Matta-Clark was Duchamp’s wife’s godson, Teeny Duchamp. | CB: Wow! Now, his idea of cooking sort of sullen things that create mold in certain places is a reaction against the asepsis of art in the 1970s in New York ... The video is really good because it’s nothing. Then, there are moments when a guy is cooking and someone comes in with a camera: “What are you doing?” and the guy doesn’t want to answer; he’s sort of in a bad mood... A cool detail, it’s his thing in the 70s, because at that time the American minimalist movement was The Thing in New York. Everybody was sort of criticizing the white cube. I think that, unlike Brazil – where only today there are institutions, a strong market – at the time, in New York, the market, the circulation of artworks already existed. If Richard Serra goes to a public place and makes a Tilted Arc right there on the Federal Plaza, an arc that cuts the plaza in half, and says:: “The work was made for here; it can´t be removed. If it’s removed, it ceases to exist”. He creates a place for the artwork which is not a place of mobility, not a market place; it can’t be sold to Europe. It has to be right there; it has to exist right there. It’s entirely site-specific. And this causes a new problem for the American market. And I think that from another perspective, that of performance, the kitchen, from this situation inside the dirty gallery, he does the same thing. He’s burning a photograph, an object that would be the object of mobility, and that object would circulate as a commercialized work. | AT: Dear, this has been a great chat, but I’ve got to go. Shall we?

Interview

Lucio Agra ANA Teixeira: Lucio, I’ve prepared some questions, but they’re only kick-starters... This is more of a conversation than an interview; everything has been thought out in terms of what we experience in dance. Of course, this is a conversation between performance and dance; we can’t separate the two. So, I’ll start with the title of one of your texts: “Why should performance resist all definitions?” I’d like you to talk a bit about that. | LUCIO AGRA: Because performance is already born within a philosophical context, of thought, when the notion that you could define something was crumbling, was almost over. That would be the primary reason. If you were talking strictly about studies on performance, that would be a scientific, academic field – as you’d like to call it – which surrounds performance, but which isn’t a field in the traditional sense, since most of the practitioners of these studies also perform. They have no critical distance in relation to their subject matter, and the object is not the classic “object,” and so on. But besides that, what happens is that there has already been (and no need to go further on that) an effort, since the 1950s at least, to undo this perspective of definitions. The idea that definition is not definitive. Science has perhaps long established the impossibility of establishing areas with defined contours, and so has already abandoned the possibility of setting definitive parameters. What was being done were actually the last definitions... In the case of performance, it was not possible either for the following reason: since it is a language of languages, like many others; it’s not the only one in this sense. What has happened more commonly nowadays is that you have languages that are hybrids of others. To the extent that there are people who think (and I’m one of them) we won’t see traditional art forms any longer; they will be a thing of the past. What we’ll see more often will be big hybrids, since there’s a huge mixture in there too, which is the 70

mixture with life itself. I always quote Donasci: “We perform so that we may know why we are doing it.” For a while, there was a sentence that was misunderstood, but I remember repeating it to myself over and over, trying to understand it. I was kind of ignorant because I didn’t know certain things, but at the same time, I had an intuition about other things. The sentence went like this: “Theater is life and performance is art.” By that I meant that what the theater was meant to be, a kind of inventory of existence, it had been sucked into existence itself, and the very existence had become a theater. Even if you consider a Brechtian theater, a place where you perform an illusionist or anti-illusionist tactic, anyway. And then somehow it didn’t make much sense going to the theater to see what was already going on in life itself. In a way, I suppose dance also did the same, when it suddenly said, “No more music accompanied by the body; the important thing is the movement.” Then, it began to build something whose boundaries with everyday existence are becoming increasingly fluidic. And so, what happens? Performance has always claimed that. Has performance always said it was the real presence? No. It’s actually building something that might have been possible as art in the 20th and 21st centuries. You could see that attempt, for example, by what Beuys proposed, an aesthetic existence. So, what are we talking about when we talk about performance? We’re also talking about other modes of existence. This is felt deeply by those who perform all the time; you suddenly travel from a space, something ordinary, repetitive, to something extraordinary within the daily ordinary. To the extent that, at any given time, these two instances of the ordinary and the extraordinary are mixed in together and begin to have a kind of behavior that is well known and talked about, for example, (that’s why I suppose it has been discussed so much) that of psychotic individuals. So, it also has a “schizoid” behavior, which performance triggers... And a “schizoid” behavior is non-defining by nature. This seems to be another reason. And lastly, I don’t think it’s only a matter of cliché to say that a definition imprisons something, but rather because a definition will fall into the void. There are lists and lists of definitions for performance; everyone has given it a try, but no one has truly succeeded. I remember, for example, Renato Cohen, who was really good at coming up with definitions; there are several such instances in his books... I wanted to remember a specific one, but I can’t right now. 1 But he makes some that deal with, for example, the dimension of ritual in daily life, the issue of the ordinary and the extraordinary. When he says that if you paint a picture in the studio it isn’t a performance, but if you paint a picture in the middle of Paulista Ave. it could be. 2 But at the same time, you have to take into account that the context in which Renato is talking is one in which there was a demand for the uniqueness of the performance. And today you already have people who are producing a performance work in their studios; in a way, one of the alleged origins of performance is what Bruce Nauman was already doing, because his work was somehow a work in the studio...

1 One of the most famous definitions by Renato Cohen is the understanding of performance as “the foreign legion of the arts.” 2 Correcting the reference, made from memory: “Performance is primarily a scenic expression: a picture being shown to an audience does not characterize a performance; someone painting that picture live – that could already characterize it “ (COHEN, Renato. Performance como Linguagem (Performance as Language). São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1989, p. 28; italics by the author). Note the enlarged notion of “scenic” he proposes. 3 Which at the time was the reel, the videotape before the VCR.

MARCOS MORAES: There’s a lot in video format. | LA: Yes, of course. And that has been fundamental. I mean, performance expanded decisively with the development of that type of record, which allows you to record a maximum of 90 continuous minutes. That is essential. Because, before that you had 16 mm magazines or three minutes of Super 8. You couldn’t do a continuous action. So much so that Vito Acconci, and even Bruce Nauman himself, went crazy with the potential of real tape.3 You could let it run and run and run… And that’s interesting … Chris Melo, I think, has done research on it, and that’s very interesting. If you notice, there’s an expansion of possible temporality there, with increasing memories; you can store more things from that continuum of existence ... of the other temporality that is too extensive and that has nothing to do, for example, with what you traditionally do in dramaturgy, which is retelling, editing, assembling and creating a narrative that has to have an ellipsis. Because, otherwise, you can’t tell the story in just two hours. Even if the story is totally dismantled and such. Think about Robert Lepage – he tells the story of his life, his relationship with his mother, etc., all in two hours. But you can also think about Zé Celso, who spends six, seven hours in a gigantic ritual, which tells a story, extending it from all angles. But that is something else. Not to lose the thread of meaning ... I’m going to another subject… That’s what a lack of vagueness is. I find it interesting to claim vagueness. I think it’s an interesting idea. | MM: I think the discussion is very apropos in the area of dance; very similar. The old argument about representation, non-representation, what the body builds, what place the body has, the place of movement. But I was thinking about the issue of definition and lack thereof, linking with your performance, which I saw the other day, when you said that every time we talk about performance, people want to know what it is. Hence the need to try to explain and define it somehow. I also thought about Caetano’s music that talks about Americans: “Americans are very statistical... While down here, vagueness is the norm.” Do you think

the way we perform has something to do with Brazil, with this place of “vagueness as the norm?” | LA: Absolutely. I think that in that aspect, Brazil has the upper hand. But, at the same time, there is a paradox going on among us, which is the very indifference we’ve produced, and maybe that’s something we need to think about: Why don’t we pay attention? Why have we let performance disappear? I see the constant test of the live experience, and I can see it now in Promptus; people who know about performance hardly approach it. And so you see that there is a tremendous weight, an aesthetic judgment on top of that; it’s funny. Because these so-called traditional countries, which have more difficulty with these issues, even the United States, perhaps because of that rationalistic pressure, they get along really well with the possibility of the expansion of other things. And here, in Brazil, there is often a lot of resistance. Let’s talk about two paradoxes. First: we have a huge desire to be able to be accomplished; this is our parameter due to our colonization – the European parameter. But, at the same time, we fear that we won’t live up to everything we do; then, we throw ourselves like wolves on our own production with a preposterous requirement. Which, in some cases, has been extraordinary. In the case of concrete poetry, I think that this requirement was right because that cut was necessary at the time. It set aside a lot of interesting things that those who came later recovered, like the Atlântida slapsticks. For example, Glauber, who belongs to a generation that said “No, slapstick 74

is nonsense,” was very important. And then slapstick came back in all its grandeur. So, we have those dilemmas. There’s another paradox, which is the issue of performance per se ... You mentioned Caetano... I watched a show by Caetano and he said: “In the United States, white is white, black is black and mulattos aren’t a big deal.” And then, well, performance is already by nature what gives rise to the possibility of saying that, because you already start with an aesthetic, creative, cognitive stance, etc., which becomes inclusive; which doesn’t see art as a mechanism of selection of something that may have special aesthetic features; something that all western classicism produced. EDITH DERDYK: In some ways the issue of definition and vagueness of performance is similar to the definitions and the uncertainties about an artist’s book, permeating a hybrid ground that deals with the porosity amongst languages... So, considering that fluidity, that porosity in which all languages are mixed, in which the area of experience and the order of the event prevail over the area of representation, we could finally say that each performance establishes its own theory, its own concept, since it would be impossible to delimit performance and performative acts under the frame of a single definitive definition? | LA: Certainly; each of these experiences, although establishing an area that could be limited within itself, has tremendous contamination capacity. | MM: I have an interest in this issue in order to create situations where some of the social “assumptions” are loosened, generating a level of relations, a “particular environment” that focuses on the creation, on what is done. Therefore, the idea of definition is fought against, but, at the same time, there is a search for ways to exist within it, which has an impact on what you are creating. | LA: Absolutely, and in no way would I say the opposite; I think that for some sensibilities – not to use artistic lingo – this special relationship with the environment is crucial; it’s defining of many things. The relationship of the environment with performance is one that can be translated in terms 75

From: Cozinha Performática cozinhaperformatica14@ gmail.com To: Diners Date: November 4, 2013 09:47 am Subject: November and the Kitchen

Dear, After the October inward,” we are envisioning a November ”forward” so we are thinking about having a dinner at the end of November (pre-scheduled for November 29 - to be confirmed), which will have as a motto the issues of the publication, i.e. our meetings. Edith, who will be working on the design of the book, thinking of the publication as “a moving territory, but also as a map of all our pathways till now, and then from here,” has sent us the following statement: “For our next Kitchen meeting, I would like for each of us to bring, in terms of what was spoken, eaten, cooked, picked, cut, lived, traded, imagined, and desired (all in the past, right?), but also considering in these choices a projection of the future - what you would like to talk about, desire, imagine, exchange, cook, experience and other verbs that I do not even know what they are, and that each one of us could also list the following things here:

of context. That is, it doesn’t have the same crucial character that it has for other artists, like dancers, and even sports people. But it does have to do with a kind of conceptual conversation with the space, because you can be producing something that has both direct and indirect dialogue. [...] So, when you see a naked body lying in a certain place during a performance, it doesn’t represent just a naked body lying there. So, there’s a great demand from performance: if you read it only by what’s going on, you won’t grasp the meaning of it, since you won’t understand anything. There’s a whole discussion in relation to time; you extend it by doing silly actions, and this will spread into other things. So, in the Western tradition of understating art, we haven’t been able to, despite how much we have wanted to. Dadá did what it did, but we still follow some precepts like: you can’t be stupid, disappointing, a failure, awful, distasteful; you can’t be this, you can`t be that… I mean, all the dimensions of a daily life where all those things are at play are being set aside to create the territory of the extraordinary in art. And this combined with that idea of the context, of the context being a certain way in the animistic traditions, somewhat transformed by interferences. This is something that Paul Zumthor talks about beautifully; a poet is a person who wants to win the hearts of others, to create a new environment. So, the place from which they speak is no longer that place. The poet who comes to church reciting a verse. It’s clear that the church is no longer the same; the church changes with poetry. And that type of change, which some call energetic or something like that – but I’d rather call material, an actual change in space – has a conceptual dimension, which cannot be solved only if you have an explanation in terms of relationships with the environment – biological relationships, relationships between space, time, temperature, etc. – because none of that will work. See? It’s also clear that this notion of contextual art is a precarious artifact, just as our understanding of it is. Because we, in the Western tradition, (and here I quote a little bit of our main thinker on this issue, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro), we’ve abandoned all such ideas... Those who work with visual arts know that if you put this white wall here, you will have a level of reflection and luminosity, and the gray wall will not be the same anymore. But most people who live in a capitalist world like ours only notice this when they have an expert who says so... And there’s the thing about feng shui and such like. There are several mediations, because you live in a totally fragmented, spiraled world, and you can’t see that world as a whole. All that has been lost, and art has felt it deeply. It’s important to recall that when he made those holes in those buildings about to be demolished because of the construction of the Pompidou Center, Gordon Matta-Clark was virtually unknown; very few people knew about him. I remember, and I always tell this to my students, that when Hélio Oiticica died, both he and Lygia Clark had been completely forgotten. In 1986 there was a throw-back to Hélio and Lygia, and this retrospective is told about in a book. They approached her and asked, “Hey, Lygia, 76

– words: may be poetry, some text – either theoretical, philosophical, culinary, literary, anthropological, scientific, from a magazine ... well, words of any type, log, source or nature – but words! – images: may be copyrighted or not; may be a drawing or photography; may be out of some science book, newspaper, or some art work, biology – from anywhere – but images. – sounds: a song, classical, nature sound or noise, from any source; you can bring a recording of it... – Books: bring books that you like because of the content or the shape, or publications you like for whatever reason.... and which somehow relate to our performine kitchen – whoever wants to can also bring notebook annotations, drawings, 76

what do you think?” And she answered somewhat apathetically. She felt discouraged because that work, that power that we feel today, was completely thrown out. There is also this dimension of the context, the combination of things that are making these things emerge. I have often experienced the situation when talking about performance, and people look at me as if I’m talking complete nonsense, as if I’m being delusional. As if teaching performance was something completely meaningless. And here’s something that Thomas Kuhn used to say about scientific revolutions: when they arise, they are understood as witchcraft, magic, anarchy, craziness... It’s been like this to this day. Talking about anarchy, the worst is not to be considered anarchists; the worst is people not being able to accept that we accept this very well. And they say: “No, that’s not anarchy”. When Bia Medeiros says “it’s Fuleragem”, (it`s nonsense), she’s telling the truth, but at the same time, it’s not. Because we perceive that, because no one is stupid, the way others look at us... That’s why Erving Goffman, one of the authors cited in studies on performance, brought us the issue of the social stigma. And all performance people have a stigma within the environment of artistic creation. That happens here, in Europe, in the U.S... RoseLee Goldberg, a woman who puts on a festival – the Performa – at the Guggenheim Museum, doesn’t have to deal as much with that, but she still has to deal with it. It’s a power game ... And it will continue to be like that, Marcos, because that’s what performance does; and it’s not only performance, it’s performance, mash up, the game change, and a lot of other things I could mention here: the exchange of music via the Internet, the creation of music from other music, the sampler, the loss of the notion of authorship... These things radically destabilize what sometimes is the support... AT: I’ll go on with that issue about those terminologies. We read a lot about them in those releases, for example, not only in dance, but in the arts in general; terms such as performativity, performative... Could 78

s cribbles, little words that were spoken during our meetings… that would be fantastic!!!!!!!! Hence, the back stages of thought and actions right here at the center stage!!! Or finally, some sign, indication or record will be a clue; beautiful stuff for us to put in the publication that we will materialize, like a dissonant chorus, because the difference is everything! A thousand hugs Thanks, and see you very soon Edith”.

you give us some contextualization of what the relationships might be? Because sometimes, they’re used as a synonym for performance. | LA: This is also a symptom of the situation. So, one of the first places the term performativity appears is in the book by the psychologist-thinker, J.L. Austin...4 By the way, this year we lost a great expert on this, who I saw at the Hemispheric Institute. What was his name? An American fellow – I think of Peruvian descendant – who worked in Performance Studies, and who put on one of the most brilliant performances I’ve ever seen of Austin’s5 ideas. Because Austin had an argument with Derrida and Derrida told him off. He, as an American… one of those things… But he was one of the first to speak about this performativity business. And he talked about it within a specific field – linguistics – and that was developed outside, in other areas of research. A good source in order to understand this is Marvin Carlson. There’s a book of his, which is a book about a theater theorist who wrote about performance, entitled Performance: A Critical Introduction. It was published here in 2010, and it’s a book from 1995; it hasn’t been re-published. There’s so much demand for it, but the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) hasn’t reprinted it; the book’s amazing. He introduces the issue of performance in sociology ... The same guy that wrote that history of theater...6 He talks about performance in linguistics. In anthropology, performance is a term that has been used since the 1980s because of Victor Turner, who first used the concept of social drama to show how societies and civilizations used to function; then, he began to use the term performance due to his contact with Richard Schechner. So you have performance in all those areas. As for performativity in particular, the term showed up in linguistics, especially with Chomsky and Austin. Then Searle starts working with it, doing something called the theory of the acts of speech, which was widely used in literary theory. One of the scholars who used the theory of the acts of speech here was Luis Costa Lima, who, not coincidentally, is also the one who uses

4 American linguist, and author of How to do things with words (Brazilian translation: Das palavras nascem as coisas) see details at <http://pt.wikipedia.org/ wiki/John_Langshaw_Austin>. In the book Performance: A Critical Introduction, by Marvin Carlson (Belo Horizonte: Ed. UFMG, 2010), there’s a chapter dedicated to discussing this notion in linguistics. 5 José Esteban Muñoz. There’s a fantastic interview with him in the video bank on the Hemispheric Institute’s site (<http:// hidvl.nyu.edu/video/003305734.html>). 6 CARLSON, Marvin. São Paulo: Ed. Unesp, 1997.

Zumthor’s ideas, who, in turn, also mentions it in the book Performance, Reception and Reading; he describes this idea of performance. He talks about Dell Hymes, an antiquities anthropologist. So, it’s a long history... Now, when it’s suddenly starting to come back, when we live during a new outbreak of interest about performance, then what happens is that people cling to some keywords. When you have, for example, a press release or something, that’s when this happens the most, because today we live in a fever of press releases. I know that’s the case, because I experience it and so do you. People copy a whole bunch of nonsense and that’s what goes to press; no one writes anything anymore; they just copy what’s in the release... It goes to press. That’s what needs to be pointed out. Because there’s a type of dynamic in Brazilian Culture against which we should fight more strongly to change. It ends up by cannibalizing every concept as a way to get the money you need. It’s all a big farce and everybody’s part of it. And it’ll all blow up before long. I don’t think it can bear up much longer. I think it’s disgracing Brazilian art. That’s another issue. Regardless... I think it’s a question of lack of awareness about the matter... So, strictly speaking, the notion of performativity was molded in a way... by J.L. Austin in How to Do Things with Words, which was translated here as Das palavras nascem as coisas - I think it would have been better to have translated it literally instead: Como fazer coisas com palavras, which was exactly what he meant to say, i.e. words have the power to make things happen. He was interested in this, the actantial character of the word, without the sense of semiotics, the character that makes the action, the word happen. The word-body, the speech-event, the word that makes it happen. This is power we know very well in the West, through a thing called prayer. People pray because they believe in the power of the word, the word as poetic production, because a prayer is a poem. That performative character, that’s what it means. Now, performative is an adjective that began to show up mainly in the 1980s, when a lot of people approached performance, and also as a result of the emergence of discussions about gender, which arrived mutilated for us here in Brazil, even though there have always been gender issues. Some groups, such as the transvestites who were already on the border and had already exceeded any limits, liked to use that term because they’ve always used the term performance. “I’m going to put on a performance.” And they’ve used it accurately, as it should be used. Dressing up in another socially-constructed sexual identity is something that is discussed a lot by Diana Taylor, building other sexual identities. It’s a process, in which you keep building another way of acting, that is, another performative action, if it weren’t already redundant to say “performative action,” or another performativity, if you wish. That’s a bit how I see it. Guillermo Gómez-Peña talks about performativity as pertaining to action amidst all the theoretical, epistemological, conceptual and aesthetic formulation that performance entails.7 So, in that sense, it’s a lot like

theater too, because theater has a performative character. I still think that Hans-Thies Lehmann was more on the mark when he talked about post-dramatic theater, because the issue... And he talked about Peter Szondi; he attacked the issue head on; i.e. drama is the problem. We have a contemporary impossibility about drama: the decline of narratives. Narratives fall in on themselves; they collapse and at the same time they draw attention to those that have never collapsed, which are the ancestral narratives. Roland Barthes – and this was a bit forgotten – used to say: “No use talking about the plot of the story, because the plots are always the same; what does change are the stories, the way stories are told; the modalities.” But besides that (just to conclude) you have this issue that others propose, as Josette Féral proposes: the performative theater. And this is another type of approach since it focuses on the action: things don’t happen anymore. You go see a play by Frank Castorf,8 then there’s a guy that keeps saying: “You will,” “You won’t,” “I will,” “No,” “You will,” “No,” “You won’t,” “aAh...”. Nothing ever happens. This is post-Beckett; nothing’s going to happen; don’t expect anything, because nothing’s going to happen. Peter Pál Pelbart recently gave a speech at Promptus in relation to Ueinzz. He said: “Absolutely nothing happens. The plays by Ueinzz can only be called so in a very precarious way, because nothing happens; there is no event.” When there’s no event, dramaturgy is destroyed. How can you sustain any idea of drama if nothing else happens? Nor as a result of movement, since the movements are not sequenced in any way. All the notions you may want to learn no longer work or they work precariously; they will go up to some point and then break down. They’re crystal goblets; you put them there and they’ll soon get broken; the liquid leaks out. So, in this sense, performance comes as a great help. Because then you say: “Good; there’s nothing else, so it’s performance.” That’s what’s going to happen: “Look”... Every time you speak of performance, someone bumps into something, or something falls: “Look; that’s

erformance.” Because you begin to see the degree of inclusiveness in the concept. And that is also p extremely dangerous. But it also draws attention to something else: Isn’t this perhaps what we call performance, a mistrust of how the world works, which begins to happen? Where all possible emergencies are increasingly frequent? We now have a climate crisis on the planet which could result in terrible storms, but which from one day to the next are just the opposite... What they’re talking about is delayed. We’re living in a world like that...

7 http://www.scielo.br/pdf/ha/v11n24/ a10v1124.pdf 8 See recent talk at http://vimeo. com/78892524

AT: You’ve been following all that movement of dance, that coming close to performance? | LA: Yes. I think dance has approached performance in the same way that theater has approached performance... Not in the same way, because each has its way of approaching it, but at a generic level a lot of things are coming close to performance because of what I was talking about before, because of that whirlwind that performance accidentally... I didn’t used to think that would happen, because performance accidentally became a kind of tidal wave. I think Renato used that idea himself, but he used a really cool idea, that of the “carrefour of the arts.” The carrefour is the market where all these things are mixed in. This strange attractor, performance, from one moment to the next, began to suck in everything around it. Because you sense there’s a crisis and you want to understand it: what is that place of freedom where that guy is doing that? You’ve spent a lot of time trying to do that and he just goes there and does it: “I’m going to get closer to that because I want to understand what it is.” There were a lot of people approaching me and saying, “I want to understand it.” A lot of people. I’ve found it funny because not even we understand it very well. It’s not a matter of understanding; it’s another issue that also has to do with making the right choice in life. That is, to produce a certain shift, what I can talk about for myself. And that’s why the autobiography is a key thing in performance... Because that course also defines a lot of things. I come from poetry and it took me a long time to understand that it was only possible to really do poetry when poetry was body, when I was reciting it myself, to mention a more traditional term. But then, when I bumped into performance, it struck me and produced in me a desire to make my body belong to the scene, in an amplified sense; it wasn’t only reading or reciting a poem. [...] What it had more to do with me was what Leminski was doing on Vanguard TV, where he’d take a text by Guimarães Rosa and perform it, imagining a gun pointing at the camera lens. That was the way I started, thinking how I could get into that. Then, there was another moment, a time when the word disappeared, when I started doing these personas that are Jesus Christ Parangolé, Frankenstein Psy, Indian Multimedia, hybrids like that. Too see, for example, Guillermo Gómez-Peña produced a great impact on me. But at the same time, I was

i nfluenced by Renato, who was teaching us to work with long time frames. Renato never let me get into a scene, Renato always ... I don’t think we had time for that possibility. But, somehow, when I went back to performance due to his influence and went on to do “Ursonate” by Kurt Schwitters, he was sort of distant, but then he ended up giving me some tips. We were sort of doing it together in some way, but it was already my work. It was hard for me to pluck up the courage to show it to him, mainly because I thought he had very high standards. And I wasn’t going that way, until I’d found another way. Performance, in my case, was the possibility – to use the cliché – of finding another territory, of building other territories, which are now areas of the worst precariousness. Because I’m often very dissatisfied with what I do, but at times, I often feel tremendously amazed. So, I’ve found that... My generation had to endure the stigma of “There’s no way you can be an artist. Being an artist is ugly. No one is an artist anymore.” And it took me a long time to understand that I could say that I was an artist. There was that thing that demonized you. It was really necessary... When I found out later what that is, I found that being an artist is never being sure of anything. But that never being sure of anything, and then I follow Beuys, it was necessary for us to build another way of life. It’s you building a life out of possible uncertainties. Because there are also the impossible uncertainties ... You can jump to the other side of uncertainties, which is to keep smoking crack until you die. You can do other things in your life that are absolute uncertainties. But that’s not it. Sometimes we’re on the verge of it... AT: There’s something Diana Taylor says about having to question the term “performance.” Why is it that in Latin America we use the same expression? And this idea of universalizing the concept, as if it would work out fine. | LA: Bia, for example, suggests using the term “fuleragem” because she wants to take sides. I think that’s a strong position, very interesting politically speaking, because you categorically state the possibility that the whole thing you’re watching is a farce. Something that some artists knew how to do extraordinarily well like Marcel Duchamp, for example. Which often led people to say: “Is what he’s doing a farce?” I think the idea that Bia’s developing is a point, a path, even in the most traditional arts, which says: “We can’t be sure any more.” But I think this is just one aspect. Then, we have Felipe Ehrenberg, for example, a traditional Mexican performer, who thinks about the term “perform,” (which would sound better in Romance languages, particularly in Portuguese, Spanish, etc.) literally meaning “through the form.” In fact, the artist who performs goes through the form, the idea of going through something ... The “going through” has to do with the idea of the middle, which is very dear to performance. In the third forum of performance we did, I suggested as the title the words 84

“Going through with performance.” Going through in music means getting out of rhythm in portuguese. Sometimes, going through is necessary. When the performance is right on the mark, you have to go through. You have to have a broad sense of rhythm. It’s known that some drummers work with a minimal variation between the bit and the downbeat... So this idea of going through is really important. It has that terminology. There are others that are being suggested. Guillermo Gómez-Peña doesn’t use the term “performer.” He prefers to use “performero,” which I find very interesting. I think we could incorporate “performero” into the Portuguese of Brazil. I defended and I’m still defending the word “performance” because we have already eaten it. And we’ve made it into something else. The point is not one of saying: “it’s a foreign word.” Of course it’s a foreign word. Of course, we run the risk of keeping on making performance as it was done long ago, using the model of RoseLee Goldberg, which was the only narrative there was. But at the same time, there’s a power of ours that swallowed it up and made it into something else. So when transvestites used the word performance, when rappers use the word performance, and others use the word performance and put on a performance, performance is no longer that. That’s why I loved it when the boys up there in the Northeast of Brazil did the BodeArte Circuit, and took the word body and turned into “goat” (bode, in Portuguese) ... And particularly in Rio Grande do Norte, there’s a centrality... Making bodearte could be another name for performance. Performance in Brazil is the art of the goat, which is actually the theater. There’s the story of the goat that Zé always talks about, the ritual goat... The sacrifice of the goat. So, there are a lot of attempts like that. And that is also part of the process. Returning to the beginning, the word doesn’t have a definition, since the term itself is grossly unstable... And this is really going to disturb you: “I’m the fly that landed in your soup.” It’s really disturbing; it’s that very instability. But for us at the university, it’s a problem... Performance is also an art for us to learn from crises. 86

COFFEE WITH ROLLS DALVA GARCIA POETIC ADAPTATION BY NATALIA BARROS I remember by grandma Luiza making rolls. With two fingers mangled in an accident with my grandfather’s electric saw – he was a carpenter – she used to wake us up with the promise of her rolls. She would make coffee with her sugar sack cloth strainer and would fill the glass with very sweet coffee for the “preto velho.”1 She would put the glass on the kitchen’s window sill. In the silence, I would wonder why “the preto velho” couldn’t just drink the coffee at the table. But I soon figured out that it was because the table was busy with bread dough. We would take the cans with the ingredients and juggle them in fun, trying to catch the eggs that wanted to roll around on the table. The mixture was started, and at that very moment, my grandmother’s mangled fingers would grow and take shape in the hodgepodge of ingredients. We would stick a hand in

ous roiling that was hidden under the dish towel that covered the bowl. My grandmother would take a bit of that consistent, opulent body and would make a delicate, graceful ball and put it in a glass of water next to the “preto velho’s” coffee cup. “When the ball rises, the dough will be ready to bake.” How I wanted to understand the secret shared by the two communicating glasses! In the “preto velho’s” glass, the coffee got thick, and in the glass of water, the little ball of dough did its rising. Revived in that sudden memory, the past vibrates, gently rubbing the fingers of my hand while I rewrite the recipe, which I know by heart. I can smell the coffee and taste the rolls. I really miss it. Life offers us such rare gifts, which, when we think of them, our lungs seem to expand to smell

the bowl to discover the tissue of the dough that brought my grandmother’s fingers back, but little by little, the dough would let go of her fingers and begin to take on some shape. Next, it was time to let the dough rest, to let it sleep in order to grow.

the aromas that have hung in the air from time immemorial, and we are inebriated. Thank you for your presence – communicating and communicable – of hunger and thirst. It is precisely because I miss it today that, 40 years later, I can

A growth that involved no action; just a mysteri-

bake rolls and strain coffee.

1 A religious manifestation from Umbanda, a syncretic Brazilian religion that blends African traditions with Roman Catholicism, Spiritism, and Indigenous American beliefs, Pretos Velhos (Old Black Men) are spirits of old slaves who died enslaved. They are wise, peaceful, and kind spirits that know all about suffering, compassion, forgiveness, and hope. They are frequently the most loved entities in Umbanda and it is very common to see a person consulting with the same preto velho year after year, and develop a love for them. They frequenlty drink coffee and smoke pipes.

The banquet First act: The Cook. A man, alone, in the middle of the stage. With a rumpled, thick cotton apron, yellowish by use. He is sharpening knives, one against the other. A long time in silence. Only the piercing sound of metal on metal: metal on metal, metal on metal, metal on metal Unhurried, looking off in the distance, like a sailor, on the pier, looking in anticipation for a ship to appear (may it appear) And may it appear on the horizon, coming into port. He gets ready Without knowing what the ingredients will be For the day to day dish each guest will interfere in the recipe being consumed, actually in the simmering fire

Natalia Barros

At that moment: he is sharpening the knives In the spheres of desire [ nothing of what we are and vibrates] now Swirls around, boiling hard In the kitchen : tableware cauldrons, and ceremonials at the table learns by mouth words, bites, flavors, tongue and language of the house of hunger looks of the sharp hunger of the starving animal of the bulky and absolute animal of the human species

desiring a pure act of the bear explicit from the gesture that comes and goes to the meeting of the orbit of the metal of the archaic steel in that banquet [all or nothing] it burns while the cook sharpens the knives.

the performing kitchen on facebook

These pictures are a stroll through the daydreams generated in the process of the dinners of the Performing Kitchen. We have created these pictures by using social networks. We hope you can make your own inferences and connections of what it represented to share looks and inspirations in those â&#x20AC;&#x153;socialâ&#x20AC;? spaces. Each picture is a poetic narrative through which we have strolled with our looks.

protein ARÍCIA MESS _ Eating without guilt, Aricia Messias da Silva, metabolized in Aricia Mess causes hiccups in high doses. Prevents any stomach ache or even constipation, since it stimulates different types of spasms. What is the self-esteem of the black person in Brazil? What is the self-esteem of the black person in Brazil?

self portrait | Yuri Pinheiro 2013 #datribo #atoron #naarea

mineral YURI PINHEIRO _ Savoring it insatiably, this mineral eats and is eaten until the pot, the package, the pan are used up. It can cause indigestion in some metabolisms. eating technology “the sensory experience of using the iPhone without a protective cover is very symbolic. This week I saw a super style guy on the subway. He plopped down on the floor and made the trip lying on the floor with an iPhone without a cover; he was typing with unequaled speed; I, already somewhat experienced, did not have the same spontaneous courage, but I got it. Afterward I went over to touch the uncovered thing ... Wow! The sensation of touching it was very interesting: two thin sheets of glass, the ideal weight, a perfect structure, architectural thought. . It is an interesting sensation of power; a minicomputer that runs well. We live in that future and it is palpable.” #artist

#acozinhaperformatica

yuripinheiro.com

kaleidoscopic | Alessio Migliardi

detail | spring | Philip Treacy 2013

breathing URLs | myself, by Yuri Pinheiro 2013

Arícia Mess – black is beautiful | credits by Arícia Mess, in London Tube Brazil Nuts (x) Chocolate (x) Light (x) Coffee with cream (x) Jambo (x) Orange (x) Coffee (x) Beans (x) Cinnamon (x)

“Indian half Canadian Japanese mutant type of sarcasm, assumed lucid crazy, fast, imagery, performative, catalyst attention, “the interfering propotency” and uses available Mascara’ from “leftist luxury Brazil” mixed with Italian mascara Kiko, pop in all layers. Sheila Ribeiro, you don’t exist existing!!!” https://www.facebook.com/hashtag/ datribo

“Angola prohibits the operation of all Brazilian evangelical churches in the country for ‘taking advantage of the weaknesses of the Angolan people’”

www.ariciamess.com

By Arícia Mess, at Lapa, São Paulo

BURNING

Vitamin MARCOS MORAES _ In the oven: O.U. – other users (a dance-twitter, DETOX-INTOX, of Marcos Moraes and Sheila Ribeiro).

is sheilaribeiro.net and chamandoela.com

A lot of tasty foods are indigestible to artistic health. The non-tasty, the flat, the most expensive, those that need the correct hand or those that take a long time to cook sometimes result in stupendous dishes. THE PERFORMING KITCHEN has food: important nutrients for the functioning of the artistic body, of course. Pleasure in what one experiences; sacrifice not to keep fit. The absolutely worst diet!!!

Marcos Moraes (@marcosexpress) replied to one of your Tweets!

PRATO-FEITO PRÊT-à-PORTER Marcella Haddad

Sheila Ribeiro

Reset… https://twitter.com/marcosexpress

The dancing foodscape of Marcos Moraes and Ana Teixeira toasts the pleasure and heartburn from eating each other, themselves - and others that are out there (and in themselves). In a metabolism between feeling hungry and controlling the food, one desire ends, another begins. Let’s get to the properties: 99

Regarding the double pages of a book in motion Edith Derdyk Here is place: where territory is a moving one Now is time : the presence of the moving waves in the turning of the double pages Here is volume: the table is set Now is where the eyes live: tactile sight that touches the words Here is the body: it awakens images by coming from the memory in continuous resolution Now are the actions: the book is a choreographic score Here are the double pages: site-specific now are words and images: vital ingredients - food for the book form Here are spaces in transit: in a continuous going and coming from the sheets of paper now are narratives that unfold: they are recombined into a double play releasing temporalities Here are rhythms: a convocation of times and adjoining spaces, simultaneously now: one day I was invited to be part of a banquet where a group of people, coming from different sources, many of them never having met before, would combine the time, distill the wishes, enjoy the sounds in word form, in no hurry at all. Sitting at the table, we stretch time as if it were a rubber band, as if the hours that pass by were capable of being suspended for the seconds to take longer and longer, dripping liquids one by one. We taste colors; we weigh textures and hues; we swallow sounds; we look at smells and gusts of wind, like a Babetteâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s feast in which knowledge and flavors merge and get diluted, sailing without knowing the course

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here the knife cut: crack leaked between 2 notebooks; a clearance that crosses the volume of the book like the dry architecture of Matta-Clark now the dry cut in the moist matter: the Food experience of MattaClark embodied in the proposal released by Marcos Moraes and Ana Teixeira at the banquets of The Performing Kitchen: potential enlightenments in the meetings, generating friction between the bodies, beyond the bodies, in the bodies here are the bodies: alloys, mortars and effusive nutrients, merged and liable for our actions - the cooks: combine, knead, mash, shape, warm, cool, cut, mix, separate, multiply paradoxes, themes, narratives and fleeting dramaturgies , lost pretenses, contents desirous of form here: the surprise of the encounter between words and images: alternations that challenge, chop and disturb the dramaturgical links which, in themselves, always want to bring the parts together in a cohesive whole now: the narratives live together in their differences How to join together in one single body - the book - multiple repertoires and contents, different languages, different experiences of life and art to inhabit this moving territory? How to generate a type of mortar that connects the branches and roots - from philosophy to performance, from poetry to video, from the visual arts to music, from food to words, from desires to materialization in editorial format; from foci, blurs, throws, outcomes, encounters and dis-encounters that struggle atavistically in the urge to build something that is not yet known, but which is desired as movement?

How to be a collective chorus composed of dissonant, plural voices in symbiotic accord, without losing the range of personal and nontransferable singularities? Impulses, attractions, estrangements, boiling thought matter, thought of matter in conjunction, connecting ingredients that are related at times due to antipathy, at other times due to empathy or sympathy - there lies an almost involuntary want, struggling with the predated form. The sweat and the breath, the heat of the fire and the natural state of the food; the dry cut and the choice of grains, spices and moods - everything is a reason for the book to incorporate a genetic that updates a kitchen - always ephemeral. How to think about publishing a book that fixes substances without using anchors, enunciating the wishes of not only announcing the records and references of this shared pathway, but to be itself, the book, another body in itself, capable of moving us? How to make the mortar squeezed from these frictions take ownership of the light density and the dense lightness that glue sticks links and connects without letting each grain and cell escape from what it is and from what was done, to what it will become? How can we shelter in this house-book, mobile and combinatorial spaces, without losing sight of the detail and the whole, the map and the territory, the desirous impulses of The Performing Kitchen?

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Dance and publication Ana Teixeira

What has driven the dance artists of São Paulo, in this case, to become interested in registering their stories and their works? Ever since the implementation of the São Paulo Dance Development Grant in 2006, there have been many projects that have embarked on the adventure of leaving recorded, for posterity, artistic careers published in book and notebook format, in digital magazines, printed magazines, catalogs, websites, blogs, social networks, documentaries or movies. The reflections contained in these publications are anchored in the desire to give visibility to the dance thought of these artists, following a timeline or seeking to promote discussions with guest theorists concerning a specific subject, and with other artists who discuss their creative processes. Over the eight years of the life of the São Paulo Dance Development Grant, we can mention the publications of Cia. Borelli de Dança, Murro em Ponta de Faca magazine and Sonhos intranquilos; 105

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by Taanteatro Cia., Taanteatro: teatro coreográfico de tensões and Mandala de energia e danças [im]puras; by Nova Dança 4 company, Trilogia em revista; by Caleidos Cia. de Dança, Arte em questões; by Cia. Fragmento de Dança, Pontes móveis; by the group Musicanoar, Musicanoar 20 Anos: deslugares?; by Cia. Lost, Peças curtas para desesquecer (digital publication); by Corpos Nômades, Corpos Nômades Catalog; by Núcleo de Improvisação, Sobre o imprevisível; by Plataforma Desaba, Arqueologia do futuro; by Thelma Bonavita COMO_clube, Jardim equatorial (digital volumes); by Núcleo LuisFerron, Sapatos Brancos CD-ROM; by Ângelo Madureira and Ana Catarina Vieira, Em busca de novos caminhos para a dança contemporânea (digital texts); by Cia. Danças, Caderno da Cia.; by dona orpheline | Sheila Ribeiro, Catálogo chamando ela.

One of the major complaints in the area of dance is the lack of bibliography. Here, there seems to be a paradox, because bibliographies have been published more and more in the ambit of the São Paulo Dance Development Grant. But are they really bibliographies? Upon consulting the dictionary,1 one of the definitions of bibliography is: “Discipline whose objective is to group printed texts according to various criteria (chronological, authorial, thematic, historical, etc.), to facilitate access to them.” However, one thing is certain in relation to these publications: they are documents which will remain in time, and which may be consulted since it is the prerogative of most artists to make them available to the school system - public and private universities that include dance in their curricula in public libraries, documentation centers, etc.

In this sense, there seems to be an urge to accentuate, in different ways, the existence of these dance professionals. Why such interest? Might it be that it is part of the media-focused times in which we live, in which any situation of life is published on Facebook, Twitter, a blog, or a website ...? Might it be a way to prevent disappearance, to which productions are doomed, since there is no record of the culture in our country? Might it be part of the famous “counterpart” of any announcement? Might it be that the desire for an archive, memory and history is latent in the context of São Paulo’s artists? Or...?

This question of writing has accompanied dance for a long time. Without dwelling on the iconographic documents of prehistory, I will underscore here some of the manuscripts, treatises2 and notations3 of dance dated from many centuries ago. From the Italian Renaissance, we remember the 1 HOUAISS, Antônio; VILLAR, Mauro de Salles. Dicionário Houaiss da Língua Portuguesa. Rio de Janeiro: Objetiva, 2009, p. 284. 2 The production of the treatises is linked to the prevailing concern in humanism to establish rules to regulate the individual and social life of a community. Of a religious nature, this practice advocated that exercise could be used to mold the body, discipline it and organize it, thus acting on the health of the soul.

first treatise ever found: De arte saltendi et choreas ducendi, by the Italian Domenico de Piacenza (1390-1470), written circa 1435. Two disciples of Piacenza, considered the first master and dancer in the history of Quatrocentto,4 Guglielmo Ebreo (1420-1481) and Antonio Cornazzano (14301484), also left their manuscripts: De practica seu arte tripudii (1463) and Libro del arte de danzare (?), respectively. Il Perfetto ballerino (1468), by the Italian Rinaldo Rigoni (?), is also part of that list. These treatises sought to put on paper a technical heritage that would be used for the transmission of knowledge about a practice that is meant to be preserved, since it was performed in the midst of the court, away from folk dances. It is important to note that these manuscripts, besides renewing the transmission of knowledge (oral transmission was current at the time), they bestowed a professional status on the dance master. He had control over the writing of dance texts, that is, it was a discourse about dance that signaled the beginning of systematization of a technique. In the following century, also in Italy, Fabritio Caroso (1527?-?) would write Il ballerina (1581), considered to be, according to Lehner,5 in the European context, the first complete book on the history of dance. It was divided into two parts: one explained the basic steps and their combinations for each dance style, besides the behavior that would be used to dance them; the other part

consisted of a series of 81 choreographies dedicated to the ladies of society. It is said that this document is “complete” in the sense of having important, richly detailed information available, and written in such a way to allow easy reading, configured as a system of notation. The fact of giving dances the name of a lady had the objective of getting closer to the nobility, a way to create “a clientele.”6 In that stroll through the records of dance, many would still be added, such as Cesare Negri (15351605) and his manuscripts La grazia d’amore (1602) and Nouve invenzione di balli (1604), besides those that have never been published. It is important to remember that those who financed the publication of the documents were members of a secular society, who made them according to their judgment of importance. Let us go to France and remember L’Art et instruction de bien

3 Term borrowed from music, which in the art of dance, refers to a graphic system for transmitting movement. In modern times, it will replace the term “treatise.” 4 Terminology used in the 15th century to refer to all cultural and artistic events in Italy 5 LEHNER, Markus. “Le ‘Sermoneta Code’ ou l’anotation de la danse en Italie au XVIe siècle”. In La Notation chorégraphique: outil de mémoire et de transmission. Stipa-Montreuil, 2007, p. 25 6 NORDERA, Marina. “Pourquai s’écrire la danse? Italie XVe–XVIe siècle”. In La Notation chorégraphique: outil de mémoire et de transmission. Stipa-Montreuil, 2007, p. 17.

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danser, considered to be the first printed book, published at the end of the 15th century by Michel de Toulouze (?) in Paris; Orchésographie (1596) by Thoinot Arbeau (1520-1595); and the system of notation by Raoul-Auger Feuillet (1653-1710), with the title Chorégraphie ou L’art de décrire La danse (1700), already very similar to the system proposed by Pierre Beauchamps (1636-1705) (which, by the way, was not published), which made Beauchamps accuse Feuillet of plagiarism in 1704. It is worth mentioning that Arbeau was concerned with the transmission of dance to his contemporaries because, if it was not written down, it would be doomed to disappear, even if each generation produced its own repertoire. In the case of Feuillet, his system, sponsored by King Louis XIV (1638-1715), was required at the French court, and was used as a model by other dance masters in the realm. Thus, the teaching could be unified - remembering that all who took part in the palace dances should know how to dance. Dance was a constituent of life amongst the nobility. The proposals of these writings released during the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries by dance masters were linked to the idea of “codifying,” of “systematizing” ways to dance in ballrooms, and later in ballets; they were manuals that provided and do provide clues to understanding gestures, steps and music, as well as aspects of life in society at the time.

In Brazil, the first book published about dance was by Pierre Michailowsky (1888-1970), A dança e a escola de ballet, in 1956, published by the National Press Department of Rio de Janeiro - which does not preclude the existence of other writings, which for some reason did not reach the public domain. In it, the Russian master and choreographer emphasizes the history of European ballet, highlighting the prominence of Russian ballet, and arrives at the classical ballet education in Brazil. From 1956 until today, there have been many publications that have made their way to the shelves of bookstores and libraries, mostly telling stories about the history of artists and companies, and about historical events that have marked our understanding of dance. Of course, the national and international research artists of the 20th and 21st centuries are not interested in creating manuals and treatises along the lines of previous centuries, but we can mention some special and very important initiatives that think dance goes beyond a linear narrative that contemplates paths, such as those proposed by Lenora Lobo, Dani Lima, Klauss Vianna (1928-1992), Rudolf Laban (1879-1958), Marta Graham (1894-1991), Ted Shaw (1891-1972), William Forsythe, Steve Paxton, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, and many others. Something in them is aligned with the previous attempt, the research on, and the body that dances - dance as

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a language for the senses and produces knowledge, which, therefore, communicates. And it is in that sense that I propose this text: to think about a publication that crosses knowledge, which problematizes, which is rebellious, and not a museum with textual and iconographic collections of precursors. However, nothing prevents investing in content that interweaves doing and reflecting, and which seeks to include other areas of knowledge that are not only dance. This proposal still has to configure a frame that also needs to be rethought. After all, a publication is in a moving state; it does not end with its pages, as if it were padlocked. The text is re-signified with every reading, with every handling, which is why we must be attentive to what we propose with a publication.

e ncouraged the conversations. Music, dance, philosophy, visual arts, performance, food, meetings, trips, and heated discussions operated as the necessary ingredients for a recipe that was made and remade at every moment. My job in this project was to understand how it was possible to bring this venture to light. I will not make a presentation of the texts of this publication, because if it needs an introduction, it would mean that it did not communicate its purpose.

This is the central question of this book: how to give visibility to a process lived in a dance project that had publication in mind, without its being imprisoned in the private domain, becoming, instead, public property? How to put on paper the poetic and aesthetic experiences of a group of artists from different areas, who met one another during a few dinners, each bringing his or her worldview to rethink the artistic endeavor? In that intense exchange, the “desire” to be active, alive, restless was recurrent among all participants, and was reflected in the sharing, collaboration, togetherness, the insights that

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Although I believe that I am me, ... a person with a first name, last name, social security number, tastes, memories, relatives, ex-lovers, desires, bills to pay, phrases spoken hastily, necessary or indecipherable silences, accelerated mental activity, misogyny, stories to tell, teeth that are a bit crooked, hair falling out, self-referential thoughts, shyness in approaches, accepted or unresolved grief, accumulated errors, ignorant fears, voter registration, spontaneous reactions, etc. (a whole bunch of et ceteras), and although I still fully enjoy my mental faculties, I actually do not exist. This: all this is an invention. I would rather think that, at least in part, it is an invention of mine. But it is more reasonable to assume that it is mostly an invention of others, of the world. Maybe we would prefer to think that we are our own creation, as a way to reassure and reaffirm ourselves, as a way to remain lucid. Illusion?

Your wish is my miss command Natรกlia Barros

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Everything is all mixed up. The fire burns. The small circular voids appear in the background, gradually joining, rising and exploding on the surface. Blop. Let us toast each other with the glasses and the wine that unite us. We shall eat soon. It will soon be over. And everything will start over. Desire is set in motion. Or: desire is motion. That which moves us is from the land of mysteries. When we started this edition of The Performing Kitchen, there were several issues in play. Like good teasers, many have remained throughout these months and have generated more & better blues. We thought of producing an environment in which, although we would not be constituted as a community, we would form a network. The network’s singularities are somewhat social and at the same time they benefit from the entire concentration present in the individual: that invention of many. Meetings have been proposed, held and reverberated amongst the participants and the network. What moves us? What is moved when I move myself? The invitation was set for possible partnerships. Everything that was born from our creative and aesthetic desires. On the way, we produced two photo essays and a videographic essay, poetic records that opened our eyes to others; we presented them in a facility where the public

could watch the work and enjoy a meal made right there on the spot, the smell as a witness. Even before the experience was constituted clearly, we received invitations of exchange in other cities and we made dinners in collaboration with artists from Goiânia and Ipatinga. Afterwards, from the body and movement, we began creating a work; we are still creating it as it is being written; it is a threeperson solo. We also work with the digital and the analog cultures, with Twitter and applications in mind, and this has become/is becoming another two-person work. This publication you are leafing through is filled with talented hands and heads; there are many individuals who took part in it. We recorded a challenging video with many collaborators and distinguished participations, which racked our brains until we were ready.1 We roasted the pig. Shared spaces, meetings producing otherness and “sameness,” tracing out the plot of the possible and imaginary, which we strive to control, to no avail; crossed by millions of stimuli /bits per second. The body makes what it can of itself. But it does it because it can and because it wants to. Ah, the desires of a body… I begin to move around again. As I move, I rediscover bodily patterns and new places. The 1 For a more detailed look at the project, see www.acozinhaperformatica.com.br

repertoire of a body with a past/present in dance carries specific information merged into life’s experiences: plus disjointed knee, hurt foot, spine full of curves. And determinisms, and revolts; the here and now; presences; beliefs, especially the tie of beliefs, their guidelines and my rebellion in ongoing negotiation. Adjustments. One does not understand anything. It’s like contemporary art. With speech, we expect comprehension. Thinking, western beings, their plight in search of meaning; their censure of all that is not rational, explainable. I don’t know if we understand each other. I think we do. And if you think so too, we smile, perhaps, due to a shared understanding of things, after all. What matters is that it is good for us to commune, to smile, to share some synapse because then, in fact, we do exist. Like a transpersonal body, we exist. By myself, I do not exist. With a pan-individual body, we exist. Not as a compact mass that moves, hypnotized by the promises of some sort of fascism – and they abound. But as a field of permeables that touch each other and perceive their affections. It is created in our own image and unlikeness. The Performing Kitchen mixes ingredients, leaves free spaces, offers full plates and others empty, overturns everything, reorganizes. It serves or it doesn’t serve. Self-serve.

I think it would be good to talk about why I started dancing. I don’t know the answer; it has already changed a thousand times. I do know that if I hadn’t begun, I would not be here today. This I know: I have no patience for the density of matter. The flesh is weak; the fire keeps on browning, keeps on burning; while I am burning, the flesh is mixed in with others; mistakes with other mistakes; their surprises and their smoldering. A writing inscribed: The Body. The body is multi-directional; its true movement escapes us. Everything is in the about-to-happen. I, you, my desires, yours, ours, those of whom we do not know – we are all in the about-tohappen. At one moment, good words cheer me up. At another, they seem foolish to me. I recognize the archetypal place. I try to play with it, since it certainly plays with me. It is up to me to balance the game. Maybe there is currently more radicalism in what we do not say, in what we can hear on the inside. In the space-time that sustains us, something instantly reduces us to dust. You need to add water, a gap, and then things may perhaps be able to return to being things. Thus, the writing itself calls for the poetic dimension and its voids, as in Donald Schuller’s quote in this publication: “Let us leave for tomorrow what cannot be assimilated today. The

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pleasure is in the holes, in the gaps.” I think that, for a collaborative work to really happen, more attention must be paid to the space between things and people than to their sequential and constant statements. And time. Time is needed because othernesses are cooked over a slow fire, or get burned. My wish is a miss command, a defeat of the ego. My wish is a party. My wish is to be devoured. My wish is to be desired. To become food for someone else. At times, delightfully. At times, undigested. Keep moving around in the stomach, like the swallowing wind of a boa constrictor. My wish is famous and unimportant. My wish is your wish. The ingredientes of The Kitchen have been: Ana, Arícia, Artur, Bahia, Beto, Candida, Claudio, Christine , Dalva , Daniel, Danielle, Debora, Edith, Elielson, Fernando, Ferron, Francisca, Gustavo, Jaqueline, José Carlos, José Júnior, Leonardo, Lucio, Marcelo, Marcella, Marcos, Marcus, Mauro, Natalia, Osmar, Osvaldo, Rosa, Ruth, Sheila, Silvia, Talma, Waldomiro, Yuri... Before the end of this banquet, it is likely that other ingredients will be added.

The fire continues burning. Embracing, burning, firing, conflagrating, setting on fire, inflaming, heating, animating, baking, stoking, enthusing, encouraging, exacerbating, exciting, inciting, instigating, snatching, charming, raising, marveling, transporting, shining, sparkling, blazing, lighting.2 By the end of this issue of The Kitchen we will have shared seven dinners, two shows, two photo essay, a videographic essay, a video dance, a publication and a multitude of network posts and on-line relationships that keep communicating and exchanging knowledge, tastes, smells, odors. Fruits of desire, desiderium, of the sidereal; fruits of the act of looking at the stars, of listening to the winds of the indomitable spirit, of hearing the clinking of wine glasses, of imagining the unimaginable, of producing reality that copes with existence, of strengthening our human ties, our affections, our senses. Sharing them with you is a risk, like every encounter. Sharing looks can be irresistible. A passion or disenchantment can hinder us when we least expect it. The dish is served. It is what we can offer today.

2 Nothing like a good thesaurus.

Marcos Moraes

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Ana Teixeira is an artist, professor and researcher. She has a PhD and Masters in Communications and Semiotics from PUC-SP; she teaches at the department of Communication of the Arts of the Body (PUC-SP) and at CLAC (Free Center for the Performing Arts – SBC/SP) and is a member of Centro de Estudos em Dança (CED), (Dance Studies Center), coordinated by Dr Helena Katz. As a professional dancer, she has danced in several dance companies, such as the São Paulo City Ballet (BCSP), for which she was also the assistant artistic director (2003 - 2009), and the Staatstheater Kassel (Germany). She is a member of the São Paulo Art Critic Association (APCA). Christine Greiner is a professor in the Body Languages Dept. at PUCSP, where she teaches in the Semiotic Communications graduate program and in the Communication of the Arts of the Body undergraduate program. She is the author of O Corpo em crise – Novas pistas e o curto-circuito das representações (2010), O Corpo – pistas para estudos indisciplinares (2005), among others. With the support of a CNPq productivity scholarship, she is currently working on the book O corpo no Japão – Murmúrios e reverberações. Cláudio Bueno is a multimedia artist with a doctorate in the Visual Arts from ECA-USP. He has presented his research at Casa Tomada, Whitechapel Gallery (UK) and Humboldt University (Germany), and at several Brazilian universities. He has participated in exhibitions at the Galeria Luciana Brito, Itaú Cultural, Paço das Artes, La Chambre Blanche (Canada), among others. He has received awards and support, such as: Honorable Mention at Prix Ars Electronica (Austria); Prêmio Transitio_MX (Mexico); Rumos Arte Cibernética; Videobrasil em Contexto; Festival Arte.Mov. Dalva Aparecida Garcia graduated in Philosophy from Unesp with a Masters in the Philosophy of Education from USP; she teaches philosophy in high school in the public system in São Paulo, and is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at PUC-SP She was coordinator of the Brazilian Center for Philosophy for Children, where she worked on teacher training projects in different areas. She is currently part of the Research Group in Ethics and Politics at PUC-SP.

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Edith Derdyk is a visual artist, illustrator, educator and writer. Awards and residences: 2013 – Can Serrat, Spain; 2012 – Funarte Artes Visuais Award; 2007 – The Banff Centre, Canada; 2004 – Revelação Fotografia Porto Seguros Award; 2002 – Vitae de Artes Scholarship; 2002 – Categoria Tridimensional (APCA); 1999 – The Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, Italy; 1993 – Vermont Studio Center, USA; 1990 – Fiat Scholarship, Visual Arts. www.edithderdyk.com.br

Natalia Barros is a writer, singer and landscaper. She has worked with XPTO group (theater) and Luni (music). She has participated in Fanzine (TV Cultura) and Telecurso (Globo) programs. She is in a show in which she sings and narrates the poems of Caligrafias, her first book of poems and short stories, awarded by ProAC 2011. She continues writing as a result of that, and in spite of that.

Jaqueline Vasconcellos is an artist, producer and articulator, acting in Latin America. She has a Masters in dance (2012) from the graduate Dance program at UFBA. She works as a cultural articulator on the ZAT Connection (www.conexaozat.org). She won several awards between 2011 and 2013, such as Klauss Vianna 2012 (Funarte), Iberescena 2010, in two categories, and the Meses Temáticos Award 2013 (Funceb).

Osmar Zampieri is an artist, dancer and video maker. He has worked in various dance companies, including the Ballet Stagium, the São Paulo City Ballet, and the Staatstheater Kassel (Germany), where he began his research in video and motion. He participates in the artistic direction of Grupo Grua, which has performed at major dance and video festivals in Brazil and abroad, including the SESC Cariri Culture Exhibit (Ceará, 2012) and the Carolyn Carlson Atelier (France, 2013).

Lucio Agra is professor of performance in the Communication of the Arts of the Body undergraduate program at PUC-SP, the same institution where he earned hir doctorate in Communications and Semiotics. His artistic production is a mixture of poetry, performance, music and technology. He is President of the Brazil Performance Association (BrP) and leader of the Performance Studies Group at PUC-SP, as well as curator of some exhibits held in São Paulo (Paço da Artes, Sesc and Abrace).

Rosa Hercoles has a degree in Eutony from the Eutony School of Latin America. She was a student and assistant of Klauss Vianna in the 1980s; she has worked in dance dramaturgy since 1997 and has a master’s degree and doctorate in Communications and Semiotics from PUC-SP. She has been a professor for the Communication of the Arts of the Body course since 2000, and is head of the Department of Body Languages, both at PUC-SP.

Marcella Haddad is a photographer, with an undergraduate degree in photojournalism, and a graduate degree from the University of Cardiff, Wales. Originally from São Paulo, she has lived in London for over 20 years, doing jobs around the world for large development agencies, such as Cafod, Cese, Christian Aid, War on Want, Kinetika and also the British Council and Arts Council. In recent years, she has incorporated video into her original work.

Sheila Ribeiro is a transmedia artist who likes to cross beauty (her own and that of others) with new technology, dance, film, fashion and mental health. She is interested in the dynamics of contemporary communication, and in poeticizing aesthetic-political tensions. Dona Orpheline is her area of cooperation. She lives and works in transit with her husband, Massimo Canevacci. Sheila Ribeiro is sheilaribeiro.net

Marcos Moraes, has a degree in dance and body-mind techniques from Espacio de Desarrollo Armonico - Río Abierto de Montevideo, and is a performing artist, professor and cultural producer. He is an activist for public policies for culture, and was dance coordinator at Funarte/MinC. He is currently directing The Performing Kitchen project, a platform for research and creation in dance and performance based on collaboration with professionals from different specializations and who are moved by desire.

Yuri Pinheiro is a self-taught multidisciplinary artist from São Paulo, and has worked since 1991. He has various specializations: clarinet for the Tom Jobim Free University of Music (ULM); photo publicity from Talles Trigo; cinematic lighting from Waldemar Lima Jr.; sound engineering from the Audio and Video Institute (IAV); web design and structure of information from Senac; direction of movie photography from the International Film Academy (ICA); among others.

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The Performing Kitchen 5

When something begins, IT HAS ALREADY STARTED Marcos Moraes

The banquet Natalia Barros

15 THE UNEXPECTED CONFIGURATIONS OF THE MEETINGS Rosa Hercoles

27 PERFORMANCE AND THE RISK OF INOPERATIVENESS of the common Christine Greiner

36 Small book of recipes The culinary alchemy of Gordon Matta-Clark Clรกudio Bueno

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96 the performing kitchen on facebook

98 BURNING Sheila Ribeiro

101 Regarding the double pages of a book in motion Edith Derdyk

105 Dance and publication Ana Teixeira

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bibliography

Although I believe that I am me, ... Marcos Moraes

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Talk with Clรกudio Bueno

Biography

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interview Lucio Agra

credits

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COFFEE WITH ROLLS Dalva Garcia

Making off

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The Performing Kitchen Project

Book The Performing Kitchen

Direction and Coordination

Coordination

Marcos Moraes

Ana Teixeira

Talks in The Kitchen – extension activities with the book

Project Design

Ana Teixeira and Marcos Moraes

Edith Derdyk

Production Núcleo Corpo Rastreado

Dance Solo Direction Luis Ferron Performance The Pig & The Cook Marcos Moraes Ingredients Ana Teixeira, Arícia Mess, Arthur Kohl, Beto Firmino, Candida Botelho, Claudio Bueno, Christine Greiner, Dalva Garcia, Daniel Lins, Danielle Farnezi, Debora Tabacof, Edith Derdyk, Elielson Pacheco, Fernando Huszar, Francisca Rocha, Gabriela Gonçalves, Graciane Diniz, Gustavo Garcetti, Isadora Greiner, Jaqueline Vasconcellos, José Carlos Catão, Leonardo Almeida, Luanna Jimenez, Lucio Agra, Luís Ferron, Marcella Haddad, Marcelo Burgos, Marcos Moraes, Marcus Moreno, Mauro Martorelli, Mauro Sanches, Natalia Barros, Osmar Zampieri, Osvaldo Gabrieli, Rosa Hercoles, Sheila Ribeiro, Silvia Helena Moraes, Talma Salem, Tom Monteiro, Valdemir Leite, Yuri Pinheiro, Zé Labille Favero Júnior.

Translation BTS Business Translation Services Pictures

Additional Credits (year 2014) Curatorship of Performing Dinners

Video Osmar Zampieri

Transcription of Interview Diego Marques

Ana Teixeira and Marcos Moraes Production Jaqueline Vasconcellos (Conexão ZAT) Camera Assistance Daniel Lins Graphic Design, Photography and Blog Design Yuri Pinheiro

Edith Derdyk Pages. 2-3, 4-5, 42, 43, 82, 88-89, 92-93, 94, 95, 100-101, 103, 104-105, 106, 107, 108-109, 110, 112-113, 114, 115.

Texts Marcos Moraes Rosa HErcoles Christine Greiner Cláudio Bueno Lucio Agra Dalva Garcia Natalia Barros Sheila Ribeiro Jaqueline Vasconcellos Edith Derdyk Ana Teixeira

Photography Marcella Haddad

Graphic Design Ruth Alvarez

Press Leonardo Almeida

Digital Book Development Tatá Muniz

Production Assistance Talma Salem and Luanah Cruz (Conexão ZAT)

Photography Edith Derdyk Jaqueline Vasconcellos Marcella Haddad Yuri Pinheiro

Jaqueline Vasconcellos Pages. 96-97 Marcella Haddad Pages. 1, 6, 8, 11, 12-13, 14-15, 17, 19, 21, 22, 28, 30, 48, 51, 54, 60, 64-65, 66, 68, 72, 77, 80, 84-85, 102, 111, 121.

Yuri Pinheiro Pages. 7, 9, 10, 23, 24-25, 26-27, 35, 44-45, 46, 48, 52-53, 55, 56, 57, 59, 61, 62, 63, 65, 66, 67, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 77, 78, 79, 81, 83, 84, 87, 90-91, 107, 116-117, 118, 119, 120, 122, 123 124-125

All reference images were extracted from sites or by pictures taken of the books GINOT, Isabelle, MICHEL, Marcelle. La danse au XXe siècle. Postface d’Hubert Godard. Paris: Larousse, 2002. Pgs. 31, 32, 33. Gordon Matta-Clark. IVAM Instituto Valencianoi de Arte Moderno, 1992 Pgs. 38, 39, 40, 41. Pig Roast: site “Collecting” (http://www.ft.com/). Matéria: Frieze Projects: Why 1970s FOOD is back on the menu. Pgs. 36-37 Comidas Criollas: site “Art Nerd New York” (http://art-nerd.com/) matéria: Matta-Clark’s Food 1971/2013 @Friezenewyork Pgs. 40-41 Site do “moma” http://www.moma.org/ Pg. 40 Site “Station to Station” http://stationtostation.com/gordonmatta-clarks-food/ Pg. 41

Proofreading Juliana Miasso ‘The Performing Kitchen Project is collaborative made. All its participants took part creatively in it. We are deeply thankful to them.’

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www.acozinhaperformatica.com.br

This project has the support of the São Paulo Dance Development Grant Program

Dados Internacionais de Catalogação na Publicação (CIP) (Câmara Brasileira do Livro, SP, Brasil) Moraes, Marcos The performing kitchen [digital book] / Marcos Moraes ; [translation BTS Business Translation Services]. -- 1. ed. -- São Paulo : Árvore da Terra, 2015. 63 Mb ; EXE e APP.

Apoio

Vários colaboradores. ISBN 978-85-85136-41-3 (EXE) ISBN 978-85-85136-43-7 APP) 1. Arte 2. Arte e dança 3. Dança 4. Expressão corporal 5. Projeto A Cozinha Performática I. Título. 15-06414

CDD-792.8

São Paulo 2015

Índices para catálogo sistemático: 1. Dança : Artes : Ensaios 792.8

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