By Sophia Rodríguez
The BIO or the be a ho
Sofried,
Soup, Sofa, Stone-deaf, Solfea,
Sophisticated, Zoophilia, Zoological,
Sophism/sofisma[1]
To look back, to wake up the volcano that has been sleeping for millenniums by opening the peephole to the center of earth, waking up the sleeping dust and the bones of the man who already died, like in an open-heart surgery. I am avoiding falling into wild romanticism or spilling my blood over those who follow my shadow and not my body. I am just as yours as my back is mine, even though my eyes have never seen it. With a vertical motion flames are emerging from the ground, entering my feet, trespassing, mapping the sacred: from the Sacrum bone until the Atlas, the spiritual and social structures touch each other, like in an Erasmus[1], the cultural exchange explodes, in an idea, the neurons decide: Where are we going?
I have decided to call myself Miss Sofiself of Distraction, by chance. At the age of 15, I began the program of physical theatre with the “Compañía Nacional de Teatro de Venezuela”. I had never done theatre before. In fact, just one week before the audition I had just seen my first play, and it was as if I could visualize my whole future in an instant. I was watching “Woyzeck”, and on the chair my body was already moving and jumping; it was so exiting to feel that being off stage you could be on stage. Fifteen years old and such an orgasmic experience, I helplessly fell in love with the Captain, one of the main characters in the play.
In that same week, the Captain “gave me my virginity”[2] and the script of a monologue which I had to prepare for the audition at the academic program. Ariadna was the script’s character. Hoping for the return of Teseo, she weaves from one end of a ball of thread, having given the other end to Teseo so that he may scape the labyrinth after killing the Minotaur.
Ariadna not only auditioned with me, she stayed at home for quite a while. The tale of my love stories fitted perfectly in her labyrinth and the Teseos in my life were getting away from me by a long thread. I had sex with thousands and thousands of Teseos while holding in my hand the threads of the others. There was Teseo #two and Teseo #one at the same time; I rather begin with the second. The Captain, went to a drug rehabilitation center. I wrote him erotic letters with milk so that the center’s control officials could not read them. When he returned, our love had faded. Ariadna could not live with her Teseo far away and inside the labyrinth.
Among 240 people I was one of the 20 selected in that audition. After my first class, I told myself: I am going to do this all my life. While I write this there is a sensation of freshness in my past, like nothing fades, my body arouses and asks for more. Amy Winehouse is dead and now she sings, her loss is beating to revive the living. Is this art?
At the same time I was attending the theatre school, I was going through a stage of youth rebellion. I was in search of my identity and fascinated by the theatre where I found a space that freed me from the family restrictions. I was devoted to collecting a wardrobe and the majority of clothes came from my grandmothers, aunts and uncles, from their times of wealth and travelling. When I turned 15 it was the perfect moment to clean out my family closets and walls from the museum of past. This gave me the raw materials to create, day after day, a new identity.
I had only one idea in my head: if every day was a new day, I also had to become someone new. So every day I went out to the street as a new character. I went from evangelical to post-rock-star, from a cricket to a hammer, from semi-naked to a long skirt and hat. To the point where people couldn’t recognize me and could never guess my age.
Yet... How much do I resemble all that I identify with? How much do we really need to create a fixed identity? If I become the double of someone else, Michael Jackson for example, may I say that my identity is that of Michael Jackson? What do we call identical?
Hypothetically there can’t be anything identical to anything, for even the most similar is violated by the factor of time. Then, is that which we call identity simply a brain collage of characteristics, which in the end may no longer be identified with where they came from? Or on the contrary are we so faithful to that to which we identify with – thing, object, person, past, matter - that we represent it? For how long do we want to keep ourselves representing patterns? And how permeable are we to represent ourselves?
That was an extremist time in my life. The fascination with theatre that was boiling in my veins focused on the following belief: I may be a fantasy of myself. All that I wish to touch, through that which I am not, has a devastating and yet revealing strength. Ariadna had done it. After several years of loving Teseos from a distance, the attachment to the first Teseo of my life revealed itself: my father, who had abandoned me when I was one years old, and whom through time I kept calling Dad. Then did the reality of “the absent father” become that which I identify with? For how long may the bond to our own history persist - that with which we identify through time - to the point of demanding the replay? Like a character that arrives to my life by chance, may Ariadna provide context to a real fact in a fantastic space?
Everything I did or lived had a flame that was fired with plenitude and devotion towards discovering new ways to explore society, and in an exhausting search for the expropriation or questioning of all that was related to my upbringing. The actual shape of my body: its weight, the curves of the spine, the way I set my feet on the ground, and the behavioral patterns I had acquired.
I decided to transform my social patterns by leaving the social context where I had learned them, amidst the strength of human history strongly tightening the leash. How much am I a work of the past and how may I become something new?
If we understand the cyclic concept of the history of societies and how facts repeat themselves, almost as if they were somehow unscrewing the time factor from the social reality, revealing a timeless reality in the history of humanity. Wars, political and religious confrontations, sexual, gender and racial conflicts, continue to be fed by the same emotional matrixes: fears, absences, ambition for truth, ego gluttony, among others and they repeat along the years just changing faces, partners and sides. Sometimes I have the feeling that all that has changed in history is technology, as if we were only capable of changing ourselves on the fantastic world of plasmas and megabytes.
The story of my father and I kept itself in a timeless space paralyzing and conditioning my social relationships. If history is a way of registering facts, while staying in a timeless space depending on the emotional matrixes that move or paralyze us, then, who is the center of the history of society? And how much happened to me in order to confirm my ability to interact regarding the facts? Am I the epicenter of the past and the future? How aware am I about a behavioral pattern, which operates by acting from the subconscious and limits my transformation ability? How many patterns are operating within me, in an anarchic manner waiting for a moment of distraction to act?
To make love, is what we say when we are going to penetrate each other. To make love is what we say when we penetrate and get penetrated at the same time. Whether I am the piercing member or the pierced hole, both actions apply forces requesting delivery and receipt of matter or energy in order to grow together in the search for mutual pleasure. This is the most primitive and basic reason why we need to find and relate to each other, and where we conceive new lives, feed back our relationships, fade tensions, heal and get healed or where we otherwise conceive treason, hate, envy, jealousy, frustration, idolatry, among others.
All of these seeds grow amongst the instinct to devour, and the pleasure of sharing. All this universe is based upon an experience registered in our body, incorporating all of its physical abilities where senses negotiate with emotions and instinct gallops in search of the summit.
Nobody taught me how to kiss except for the kiss itself, nor to burst in an orgasm except for the experience of being penetrated in many ways, positions, by different widths, sizes, colors and textures. Every time I have the opportunity to get to know about the mechanisms and patterns that pull and push my instincts towards the mass of pleasure while going through other being, I am making love.
We all have the instincts to conceive and to be conceived by another. Then, what is it that we look for in others? Making love may be like a tunnel where conscious and subconscious together select, decide and trigger encounters, revealing to ourselves how we manifest our social patterns and how we repeat them on different levels of consciousness? If war or conflicts are the fertile soil that makes us strong in our own convictions, then may love be the space to get naked, both physically and mentally, of behavior patterns, which tighten us to unproductiveness and therefore, to the repetition of history.
Through the window there is an airplane falling. From my perspective, it flies towards earth. It is true that years ago Christopher Columbus realized the earth was round. Nevertheless, I don’t empathize with either Christopher nor his theory nor with the likelihood that this plane wont crash. This is an airplane going down, pointing to death or maybe emptiness or the infinite. People and places that have penetrated me, which have shaped my story, have entered my body, trespassed and transformed it, have also been known to leave, first giving, conceiving something new, to later clean, regenerate and take off, just as the moon cycle does in women every month. So did Ariadna. Now the airplane in its deep inclination towards descent, buries in the infinite and I look from the window, as it disappears from my site with free will.
Theatre: an initiation tool
The spectacle should have been an act of collective introspective, an act intended to tear off the daily mask and place the spectator in front of those daily situations that constitute the essence of the individual and collective experience. In these spectacles, the actor had to be a shaman, he had to reveal to the spectator the relationship between the individual experience and the collective archetypes contained within the text, he had to be able to become scene in front of the audience, focusing until the point of trance. 1.Egenio Barba describes a text of Grotovsky. (p52. Selected Works-.1 BARBA, Eugenio).
At the theatre school, I was acquainted with the legacy of Jerzy Grotovzky and Eugenio Barba, as my physical Theatre professor Diana Peñalver had been their longtime student. In one of his books, Eugenio Barba describes theatre as a space to “learn to learn”; each actor must form his own way of reeducating, both physically and mentally, his personal patterns and behaviors, during his education as an actor. (Barba pg.)
At the physical theatre school, there was extreme discipline. During the first six months, we were not allowed to speak in the classroom, except when working on an acting dialogue. We dedicated ourselves to the practice of individual movements of individual body parts: hands, feet, head, and thorax. We also studied the positions and movements of several theatre tendencies and cultures, such as the Japanese Nô theatre and the Afro-Venezuelan drum dances.
We worked with a methodological sequence of breathing exercises intended to make us go back to inhaling from the abdomen, as we do when we are children, to make breathing an act of complete control. It was hard work which required both physical and respiratory consciousness; each inhalation and exhalation involved an internal mechanism which had to be adjusted: expand the floating ribs, retain one, two, three, four, during exhalation, walk and let go the air while slowly saying “i”, one, two, three… thirty inhales. Our mind focused on practicing that which our immediate reflexes normally do without even thinking about it. Not even in the class of voice and diction did we ever say a word for many months, only pure sounds.
During all of that scholastic hermeticism –completely cured of the colloquial bacteria within the idioms of personality or seduction- there are three experiences in this process of “learn to learn” that made the art of the actor an initiation act in which I would become my own saint, priest and pilgrim. If until that moment, the game of creating identities and going from one place to the other, renewing the classic environment of the personal with the ludic act of interpreting my imaginary friends, had created a surface that remained open to an exchange with the surroundings, to the discovery of my seduction abilities and to trespass contexts without borders; inside our classroom, in our hermetic cage, there were physical experiences which got me closer to inexplicable and unknown matters.
History is written in our body
One day we improvised with the subject of war. We had looked for images and stories from different wars that attracted us. After choosing the character from a picture and reproducing it, we were able to build the actions occurring before and after the picture. The exercise lasted around 45 minutes. As always, you could not speak; everything had to be expressed through physical actions. When an image is able to go through me completely, without disregarding even a shred of my physical whole, it becomes a real fact, and I reincarnate: I was a Jewish commander guiding a group of women to escape from a concentration camp.
To remember is like caressing ourselves by taking us towards a state of relaxation and focus on the image and composition of our body.
We worked for two and a half hours to get our minds to stay focused on this alone, without interference of other images or thoughts. I broke the laws of temporal order and travelled in my own space-time. It was not a memory, like the one you feel when an image from the past is built between your eyes or in your chest, no, it was not that. There was no effort in building or assembling. Everything was already present, and I just travelled through myself as the bridge between emptiness and the walker. I relived: the womb, the liquid and the way out.
It is possible to levitate; the only thing stopping me from doing so is the fear of loosing paradise.
During its exchange with matter air dissolves body stress. Like a shovel in spiral, it penetrates, with its different components, transforming in order to reach all centers of the corporeal matter. Its trip massages and opens. We work for two and a half hours on breathing consciousness and its coordination with movements. All joints had to collect energy during exhalation, flexing in tandem and approaching the center of the body. Later, during inhalation the joints would send energy, thus stretching; the arms, forming a first position primer port de bras[3], or circle, travelling from the bellybutton towards the chest and knees carrying out the same trip, all during the inhalation.
I was able to effortlessly lift all my body mass during inhalation; my body was a ball of air that I could control through my emotions. When I reached the tip of my toes, at the edge of gravity, at the borderline between here and there, between earthly and ethereal, between real and supernatural, a great emotion of fear strongly pushed me back to earth. My body was nothing more than a channel looking time and time again to loose the fear and fly. Fly, fly, fly, nearly on my feet, nearly in my hands, nearly in history, nearly, just nearly. Like natural birth. After feeling that you are on the verge of death, the act has finished, the child comes out, you rise from bed and life goes on the same, only now there are two of us. In a second all concentration has disappeared and the weight of that which was an act of initiation in the use of my concentration, falls over me like a sand mountain, I being my own desert.
Half way through my studies at the “monastery” school, as they used to call it, the professors held a big discussion over whether or not it had been a good idea having accepted me at the age of fifteen. All my classmates were between twenty six and thirty years old; I was the only teenager in the group. They asked each other: How would the acting education they had given me interfere with my social interaction abilities? How would playing to transform the fantastic life of theatre characters affect my future in real life? Would the radicalism I had taken on in my vision of theatre lead me to become a person reactive to society’s protocols, unable to dialogue up to the point of frustration? Or on the contrary, would it set in me the ability to surpass the limits of fantasy and reality, developing in me a personality of strong convictions able to confront life paradigms and instigate my own vision?
I was full of frustrations and denials about myself. All of that which was being transformed and revealed brought along sort of a revolt, a fight filled with contradictions and radicalisms, which exploded in several acts of rebellion against family and school. I lived in a public park (with other artists?), famous for rapes and robbery, in the setting of an old circus tent, of which only the air extractors and circular cement floor remained. It was a fenced area, with a living room, three walls, a bedroom and a bathroom. A metallic fence separated the police station from it. Policemen played cards with their guns on the table while we swung over each other. We communicated with them through the fence sharing jokes and riddles. On the other side of the old circus tent was the police cavalry. Each morning we entertained ourselves watching the horses gallop.
She is far, seated at the Rajatablas bar. Like a magnet I walk towards her, and when I reach her I tell her: I don’t know who you are. The only thing I can remember is looking at you from head to toe, as big as a statue, holding a guitar, while singing children’s songs. “Yes, that's me! We met when you were three years old, my name is Diana.” Diana the Greek goddess? Diana mother of Earth? Or a revelation of memory? Are you the holder of the catharsis and will you tell me how the gods already lived my own history?
One week later I found out that the woman I had met in the bar was my cousin’s best friend, and would be my professor on the theatre formation program for the next three years.
I had started the theatre school before finishing high school. At which point I wrote a letter to the Principal at Rondalera high school explaining her that I was sure I would do theatre for the rest of my life and that I had just received the opportunity of becoming part of the best theatre school in Caracas. The principal accepted my request and allowed me to leave my high school an hour and a half and even three hours earlier.
I never took fifth year Chemistry, as it was only available on the afternoons. Ms. Rosalinda wrote me a beautiful letter saying: “Because I believe in your conviction, here is your 10.” This was the grade required to pass the subject, and I had not even attended one class. Ms. Castellano accepted all my grade bulletins from the theatre school, and gave me a 15, accompanied with an equally beautiful letter in which she wrote: “What you write is a total orthographic mess, yet the poetry and intrigue has obliged me to read all your writings. Thank you”.
My mother was my history teacher and at the same time she was my basic opponent in all this fiction. The beating womb still joined us and I ruthlessly cut our relationship with burning knives.
A few months before starting the theatre school I had been in a relationship with a boy named Rodry, half the name of my father Rodrigo and half my last name Rodríguez. He was young, yet a few years older than me. We spent a month together, kissing, touching each other with no penetration other than with our hands. Hiking in mountains and talking about his repeated ten stories about Japan and masons. After a month Rodry had told me ten times his ten stories. He had to travel to Germany, thus it was the perfect moment to, once again, leave him on his own within his ten-wall labyrinth.
When he returned he called me. After the first thirty seconds I told him I did not want to keep on with this relationship and he told me that it was ok, yet he asked me if he could talk to my mother. We had planned a trip together with the entire family, my mother, my brother and this new member, who for the very first time in my whole love history, had been accepted and introduced to all my big family: my mother’s eight sisters, her only brother and the children of the children of the children. When he finished speaking to my mother, she gave me the phone back for he wanted to ask me something. “Sophia, if you agree I would still want to go to the trip we had planned.” “Of course, no problem,” I said, “you just need to understand that I have no interest what so ever in resuming our relationship.”
The SUV was unable to go up the mountain; through long spasms the forces of gravity sucked our setback. The over one thousand meter cliff space-vacío-cliff and the lack of autonomy of an engine with no power to withstand the excess weight, made me jump out and walk beside the passengers.
We arrived to Lila’s house in the mountain. She had lived her entire life in a house in front of the sea, neighboring Reveron’s own place. There we were only my family and the new member. I read “The Little Prince” while they had fun along with casually provoked circumstances. Transforming- Being transformed-transformándose I felt transformed since the encounter between The Little Prince and the Rose. That day, I travelled at the sun’s speed during/AROUND? the whole 360 degrees of Earth’s rotation. With the arrival of the night in my bedroom, a new novel on a contemporary tragedy began through my window.
Like a saber-sable, (saber-toothed-tiger? Or just tiger?) I watched the hunt of two animals that, thirsty for a new moon, searched for complete darkness. My mother and Rodry disappeared in the forest’s darkness. That night he and I shared a bed, as he was my “friend,” an absurd decision by my mother.
We went back home where the hunter continued to make the same absurd decision. He visited us day and night, yet he slept in my bedroom out of decency. There were no words to describe this. No habían palabras. A month and a half of a silent ongoing romance between them had gone by, like those who fear what they do.
During the first month of visits by the new member, the Captain arrived, allowing the other “good friends” to share the same bed, as the discovery of love-making had entered my bedroom.
She was my history teacher, the same who had given birth to me, who now slept with my former boyfriend. A woman in search of her youth. At seventeen years old she had succumbed to the dream of having a family, by marrying and assuming the responsibilities of having a son.
At forty-two years old, she studied at the Universidad Central de Venezuela; my twenty-one year old brother received his driving license, while I, at an early maturity of fourteen years old, was in a relationship with a twenty-six year old man.
Her total dedication to her two children summarized her youth in a big battle for survival, having to portray alone all the roles of a family. During that same time, at 42 years old, the new novel of a contemporary tragedy opened. In a silent act of rebellion, in an attitude lightly injected by love, my mother woke up the dormant time.
I was experiencing treason. A Greek tragedy was destined to occur: either the death of one of the parties involved or suicide. I fought against the forces of pessimism through the total disappearance of Sophía. I hid amongst the hallucinogenic walls of the cannabis sativa and the initial-iniciático initiatory? (or: initial….maybe, but it means “first” and I don’t think that’s what you mean) strength of the theatre, escaping from tragedy and in rejection of the new member. I searched for emptiness, that common space between everything and nothing.
One day I invited my mother to tell me what was obvious, for through the walls I could hear the sounds of love. A part of me was happy for her happiness, yet other suffered a great injury. As if the loss of my mother had come along with the announcement of the obvious. As if at that moment the umbilical cord had totally vanished from whatever place on Earth where the waste from the clinic where I was borne ended up at.
My history teacher also gave me a grade with which I passed the subject. With the passing of time I did not want to recognize her hierarchy, nor attend her classes. I did not spend the nights at home and avoided attending school when she went. Even though we had not agreed on a separation pact, I tried to extinguish any trace of attachment. I was firm regarding the establishment of my own independence, by working and living alone.
Idolatrous altars or wild romanticism
I was totally in love of all the women who taught me. I idolized them in such manner that verbal communication was almost impossible. I was unable to traverse the bubble that kept them untouchable. Idolatry was a disruptive shock within my game of multiple identities and the continuous rise of my idols towards an untouchable ever.
Juanita, Karla, Kalinka, Diana, Inés, Luz, and Mirjan, were stars in my suffering. I had the strong conviction that some day I would be like them. I observed them carefully, their speech eloquence, their relationship with art and their transparency. If yet on one hand I was working on the deconstruction of patterns, on the other I was building a fantastic idea of the women who surrounded me. They were super heroes who saved me from the weight of eternity and the constipation of the facts that hurt me.
All of these noble breasts were nursing me by condensing a delicious substance of Yopo and honey they dripped, and while sucking, I surrendered to the matriarchy. Each drop went through me, undoing the nuts between belief and reason, fertilizing wombs of absolute trust in that coincidence by which said breasts had approached me between slaps and caresses to shape the traces lost since my mother’s banishment from matriarchy.
Juanita smiled at me from the coffin when I was six years old, while everybody cried for the death of my grandmother, I laughed and told them: don't worry she is happy, she just told me so.
Karla was the sun of profanity, raging light and shade, human, really human, when I was four years old she fulfilled an initial role regarding the philosophy of the (extravagant is fine -->) extravagant: Walk, cross the wall, are you afraid? Don’t look down, (6 meters high and sometimes 10). You must focus in two things, breathing and reaching the end, it is possible that many times you may feel like turning back but that will only make you fall, walk, firm, look at the end and breath. An almost imperceptible voice responded: yes.
Kalinka looked at me through the Sirio star, her light felt like a hug in the darkness. In those moments of great loneliness and incomprehension in my life, her light dazzled me and made me laugh. Our constellation/ CONNECTION? was so strong, that one night while in Peru, I dreamed that I was tightening my mouth strongly to keep my teeth from falling out, as they felt like they were dancing eager to leave my mouth. I woke up abruptly and cried screaming: Kalinka! That same night she had suffered a brain stroke and was at the brink of death.
Like domino pieces falling one after another since the day we are borne, life’s experiences generate a wave that echoes eternally, crossing, interconnecting, bouncing and travelling amongst other pieces of our own game, and that of others. How much do I believe in the impossible? And is it the fact of believing what allows me to fantasize? Is it possible to transform without traversing the impossible? What is the distance between what I believe in and what I do not believe in?
All of these women initiated me by means of their enteógena word; they interconnected me with other stages regarding the perception of reality. Questioning it while transforming it in a sort of a movie I could only traverse by means of my imagination. Some people call illness the inability to differentiate the imaginary world from the real world.
Reverón, the master of light, lived in a castle he had built with his own hands, inside it he had a telephone to call the stars, a gun to shoot nightmares, a cage with paper birds, a group of female models made with fabric, thread and needle. He lived alone, isolated from the world, painting light in its purest state, for which he used a belt. After he exhaled all the air from his body, he tightened his belt strongly. He said that in order to paint the light, he had to separate the mundane part of his body, the genitals and legs from his spiritual part, torso and hands so while he was able to hold his breath, he painted. Only two visitors were welcomed in a regular basis at his home, a monkey and Juanita, his partner.
Some journalists and artists were able to approach him, some of his conversations have been transcribed, and when reading them you perceive a mix of shamanism and hallucinating poetry.
Reverón was not interested in the outer world. Nevertheless, curators were eager to sell his paintings and sent him to the asylum, where he was forbidden to paint. After three months of complete creative abstinence he died. Maybe and in accordance with the old popular say: the cure was worse than the disease.
Like many treatments imposed or suggested due to external needs wisdom starts to die. Intelligence isolates itself in scientific knowledge trying to prove by any means its radical strength over nature and individual experiences start to weaken in oblivion, when confronted to knowledge as an external power. Judgment becomes the existential leader, sentencing the bad and the good, classifying and discriminating experiences until separating them from reality. How good may something be without it resulting in negative consequences and vice versa? How much may we stretch the good from the bad in order to kill contradictions? How much space do we give to pain resulting from contradiction, in order to observe it, and see how it rises from the depth of surface, until disappearing? If contradiction is the inner force of creation, how may we negotiate with it to develop our wisdom in an act of alchemy between what we live and what we know?
The physical area was full of contradictions that fought among the idolatrous characters whom lead the goodness in me, as well as the radical need I had to live by means of my free will and against everyone, in sort of a subversive manner, many times even against myself. I was going through an educational process, in which I only allowed myself to use the theatrical tools as a therapeutic space where I could reconcile my own contradictions.
After finishing the Educational Program at the “Compañía Nacional de Teatro de Venezuela”, I was not totally sure if I wanted to enter in yet another educational process, for I wanted to create, I wanted to work; at the theatre school I had been invited to join in different experiences on stage, nevertheless there was no theatre company offering me a job. The way I thought others saw me, was not how I felt: professional, with a strong ego and eager to burst on stage; maybe too adorned with my own fantasies, for when I imagined what others were thinking when they looked at me, I pictured an ant arising from the center of the earth-ground.
1st creation
I practiced yoga every morning at “Piso Rojo” (Red Floor), the dance school of the “Universidad Central de Venezuela” (Central University of Venezuela). Elio Martinez, the artistic director at the time, suggested that we performed a duet. We worked for 6 months on the creation of the project; in sort of an ascending spiral, tranquility opened the sky and as a descending one, drops of certainty and achievements fell to irrigate the composition. The restult of our creation was a drama with acrobatics and masks, titled “On The Other Side There Are No Eyes … Only Reflections.” The first phrase before the suspension points were the words of a our friend the poet Guido, who used to say such words to bring to reality any attempt to explain the thoughts of others.
In a mirror the ant discovered that its reflection was not the same it reflected and vice versa, thus it began to draw its face over and over, one by one falling like leaves from a tree during a “special time,” or well amid its cycle of the call of death: Autumn. Looking at the ground, it finds out that there is no one drawing similar to the other. If Amy Winehouse’s death was caused by her withdrawal from drugs, this ant was digging the blindness caused by a creative withdrawal. Looking up and down among – within? its naïve ability to recreate itself and its objective statement on the present reflection, it revealed that art could be written in purple and black, dirty green or jam red, yet for sure its lines should heal the misunderstandings of the mirror.
Elio was the first person to talk to me about Vipassana meditation and was also my first attempt to join in one room love and artistic creation, letting live that idolatry illusion borne between two people who understand each other. “On The Other Side There Are No Eyes … Only Reflections” was accepted in the IX Festival of Young Choreographers, in Caracas and in two other festivals held at the Universidad Central de Venezuela.
The same day we performed the last duet show, I ended the romantic relationship. I was ever more interested in my personal construction than in growing together from the spontaneously unknown. Or else I was interested in growing from the spontaneously unknown only in regards to my creation. This first experience as creating interpreter unleashed a certainty: keeping a creative process was fundamental in order to feed back my own perspective of the world and thus state through an act its own transformation.
Then that at a certain point became unknown. While in the studio we spontaneously played to unveil what linked us and what made us perform in a duet, beyond an aesthetic attraction. The more time that went by, fluctuating from the animal and primal, up to an aesthetic projection of our invisibility condensing in conversations that appeared on the open spaces of the studio, after the body had stamped its abstraction in time, the easier it was to understand what we had to give to each other.
At age 18, I entered the Dance University “IUDANZA”, where the idolatrous altars vanished within practical exercises, lacking of any character that would scent – EXCITE? my impersonation soul.
Quite the contrary: the period I spent at the dance school became to me a time to set aside the idolatry for professors, allowing me to strengthen my autonomy to discover what I liked and disliked.
The space held little inspiration, and the work methodology was completely contrasting with the monastery. I was amazed by the lack of mystery, by the use of the body as a mechanical object that we should assemble correctly; they only talked about arms, legs, stretch, resist, correct, incorrect, calculations, precision, overweight, more overweight, weight, very heavy. Imagination was used as a map where we could design our own bones and ligaments. A minutely calculated world completely different from the ludic game of interpretation. My mind had been filled with a whole work methodology that had yet to be proven, inherited from the academic curriculum and a physical training, which required the use of fantasy and imagination.
Cuba and meditation
After my first year of college I fled to Cuba to study circus. One day I read a book that touched me deeply, The Funambulist by Jean Jenet. His way of describing the art of walking on a tightrope made me think that balancing all the body tensions on an axel was practical philosophy.
In my head, a box seat in tension on a long wire and the bodies of funambulists walking naked, one by one until falling into the abysm: a mattress seen by the spectators, where the bodies fell one over the other, slowly forming a tower that moved sexually in search of an orgy yet at the same time it seemed like a pile of dead bodies from world war II. These were the images, which kept me standing at the ballet bar during the time at the dance school.
Cuba was a fantasy in crystal and modeling dough. I may say it was one of the most fulfilling experiences I have had, at the same time, it became my first encounter with characters who interchanged masks faster than the performers at the Chinese circus.
By chance, I got to live in the house of the ambassador of Venezuela in Cuba. I was a princess with a balcony, swimming pool, chauffeur, a cook, special diet, shooting lessons, a garden and a collection of experimental music from around the world. My needs were satisfied with such care and love that I took advantage of every day and night: at 6 in the morning I was having breakfast, while the chauffeur waited for me. The Circus school opened at 8:00 for the Cuban students and for the other Venezuelans who were there for the same season. I managed for them to open the school an hour earlier so I could practice on the wire, in absolute silence and solitude.
The training was full on, twice a day we did physical training “prepa”, and this included 45min. of push-ups and sit-ups, crunches and bar exercises, both at noon and in the afternoon. Lessons on acrobatics, pole, headstand, trampoline and of course tightrope walking, which was the technique I had chosen as my core subject.
The regular school closed at 5:00pm, yet a couple of friends and I stayed until 8:30p.m. or beyond. Then we went for a run at the athletic field and finally I returned home, where a plate of proteins and vegetables next to a story about the Cuban revolution were waiting for me.
After my daily bath in the swimming pool to relax the muscles and after completing some push-ups on the rod, it was time to relax at the music lounge, which was also the office of the Ambassador, he was rarely home during the week; half an hour of writing and off to sleep.
Around 1:30a.m my boyfriend used to call me and I would walk to his house, make love for a few hours, sleep maybe two or three more and then off to school again, with full energy and eager to learn.
I went to Cuba planning to stay for 3 months, and instead stayed for 9 months. While at the circus school I injured an internal ligament in my hip. I couldn’t spread my legs more than 40 degrees, and making love was painful. Essentially everything that meant spreading my legs was excruciating. I attended La Pedrera Rehabilitation center, where Maradona and hundreds of Venezuelans, as part of the Social-economical agreement between Cuba and Venezuela, have been healed.
I had finished my studies at the theatre school and I wanted to start working. At the Caracas Art-O Company, where several of my friends worked, they allowed me to enter and observe their creative processes as well as helping them back stage.
They had invited me to be part of two of their theatre performances for children. The majority of the cast working, besides me, had a high technical level in the circus arts. This encouraged me to improve, and search for a technique that would help me to create an act that would give me the possibility to work.
Cuba had centered all of my desires or frustrations regarding my life in Venezuela in a single injury. My legs closed to love and to the world, asking me to communicate with and to take care of my body.
I wondered: Why should I do performing arts? It was something that since I was a little girl had always been an affirmation determinant of my future, something that seemed for the first time a struggle against emptiness.
I spent three months living at the Rehabilitation Center, seeking to be healed and looking into the possibility of studying Medicine, Mylosophy, Psychology or Literature, until one day I rebelled, sick and tired of a routine that led nowhere. Almost like going religiously to a whorehouse in order to calm the pain of loneliness, everyday I visited the doctors and returned to my room at home to wait for the next day.
One morning at the time of my rehabilitation session, I went to Old Habana to drink a fruit juice in front of the museum of Guayasamin. From a museum window I spotted a hand that, as if in a dream, danced at a set pace. I rushed from my chair, entered the museum, and asked: “do they give dancing lessons here?”...a woman interrupted me, affirming that it was a private improvisation workshop for the Retazos company. “I am the Director of the company and of Festival Habana Ciudad en Movimiento” (the Habana City in Motion Festival).
I introduce myself, not mentioning my injury and as a dancer. “Do you think I may enter and watch the workshop?” She replied: “Do you speak French?” to which I replied, “Oui, un petit peu” (which was totally false) “and English even better.” “Because we need an interpreter for our professors, they are French and Italian, she said.” “Oh, yes I also speak a little Italian” (lie number two), “of course I can do it”.
Directly less than 3 minutes after having seen the hand passing through the window I was the official interpreter of the “Art-Mouve“ company at the dance festival Habana City in Motion.
That day I started dancing again, still bearing the pain of the injury yet fully enjoying the plenitude of my body. The festival was a total revelation for me. It reminded me of the possibility of confirming the full strength of my body and how dancing is by itself a healing power.
Sara Simeoni was an Italian, member of the “Art-mouve” company. We told each other where we came from and where we headed. She invited me to learn about the Soka Gakkai Buddhism; she talked about its healing potential and how she had saved her life through the practice of the Buddhist philosophy. In La Habana, we attended to a session together. After a whole protocol in Japanese, all of us who were in the room repeated for 45 minutes the phrase: “Nam-myoho-renge-kio”. It did not provide me with an immediate physical response, yet I was drawn by the idea of taking charge of my own healing process. For a few months I practiced Nam-myoho-renge-kio every day for 30 minutes, and after each session I wrote in a diary what I was living plus some 10 lines regarding dreams.
Everything that had been linked to a clinical process, with two medical versions: “You better look for a new career if you want to avoid surgery, your body structure is not built for dancing and the ligament is almost totally separated, so I recommend you to do something else, where resistance and physical ability are not the basis of your career.” Pathetic, pessimistic and raised in the traditional schools of Medicine and Classic Ballet in the Cuba of 1949 where girls dreamed of passing a first filter of physical conditions, which was based on the leg and arms measuring in comparison with the torso and body weight. I thought of all of this before replying: “Thank you, I don’t think I will be coming back to your practice” having said that, I turned and left.
The second doctor told me that the ligament had already separated, that he would not operate on that kind of injury, instead he rather advised me to learn to live with it, as there was very little that could be done. With a great mission ahead of me I said: “Thank you, thank you very much”.
After 9 months of self management or in a way my first experience as an individual making my own decisions in an independent manner, travelling freely along its own free will, as I had longed so much and with a new mission to change chapters, I returned to Caracas, to the “Instituto Universitario de Danza”, with a new personal objective: overcome my injury and learn to work in pain.
If in fact this was not something that produced a change in the first three months, this period helped my physical process to interact with my own academic process, placing the methodological conflict that had made me run away the previous year, within my own struggle. Allowing me to understand that the school was not the one that needed to change its teaching methodology (except for a couple of old school ballet professors, without entering in further details). On the contrary, it was I who needed to learn how to receive different types of information, seizing the opportunity to form and transform my own character, stripping myself of any preconception and looking at things the moment they presented themselves to see how they reflected on me at that precise moment, just the way I am, kind of like a momentary mirror.
Through this process of personal communication, I started to realize that no human social structure (educational, ego, or individual) was fixed and that even the most concrete of characters, or communication systems in particular, are an ephemeral construction, as there is no perspective capable of changing by sunset.
On my December vacations, after my first period of reintegration, I decided to attend the Vipassana meditation course. If well it’s true that for me the practice of the Nam-myoho-renge-kio was kind of a warm up of the physical positivism for the day. I remained distant from any collective sense of belonging towards the practice itself, merely using it in a practical manner. Yet I felt I had to go deeper, heal the injury and the mental conditioning, which was strongly linked to the pain I was still suffering. Ten days without talking, without looking at anybody in the eye, no dancing, no stretching or acrobatics, absolute silence and meditation practice. It is a self-visionary and revolutionary experience that I highly recommend for all of those who wish to really see themselves and transform from the root.
On the fourth day, we decided to stay still at least for an hour during meditation. The injury was a virus of pain that grew spreading throughout my body, burning me in an existential drama, which after 45 minutes of complete stillness I could not bear any longer. It was a fight that my pride wanted to win at any price. I raised myself and left the meditation room to cry until I fell asleep.
The following day I took a couple of minutes to speak with my teacher and tell her what I had gone through the previous day. Mirjan who had also been my dance teacher, now said: maybe you are fighting without accepting, you are focusing on observing your own struggle and not on observing your pain and accepting it.
The fifth day I worked on this, like in an act of magic (not yet from the perspective of the audience but from the eyes of the magician, the one who practices magic for years in order to fool reality) I felt in my inner clock that the same time as the previous day had passed, yet despite the fact that the pain was as strong as before, there was a distance between it and I, which was becoming ever more concrete, allowing me to explore it in a practical and syntactical manner. Suddenly in a peak or passage, just like the seconds before reaching the point that will lead us to an orgasm, a strong attachment to my own truth made me bear the last breath of pain, and in a complete earthly trip the pain transformed itself into bubbles that travelled through my body like a shooting star, causing both pleasure and freedom. Pain had disappeared. The injury had healed.
Injuries are edges that our body recognizes and that calling us by our names, they make clear what consciousness has not yet registered. An injury never disappears, and just how people who have lost a leg or a hand, can still feel the lost limb, in the same manner, injuries are capable of being healed in a first level, where they become gentle voices that in situations similar to those which produced them, they come to life, they beat, and in a each small beat we relive the how and the where. Almost in a silent scream that only we may listen to, they yell to us: where are you? Have you transformed something or do you want to undo the road you have walked on?
The Vipassana experience was a propellant, a leap into the emptiness, a meeting among the parts of my inconsistency and my requests. Forming a great team, I set out to the arena full of convictions and eager to create.
I returned to the Instituto Universitario de Danza focused on creation. My relationship with the school was based on an exchange of knowledge and my need to fight against non-functional issues, which ended in the creation of the Student Council, together with Ivelice Brown and Ellavled Alcano. During my studies at IUDANZA the school offered a mixture of avant-garde and modernism, which created an interesting balance between shapes and ideas. Avant-garde professors such as Inés Rojas, who granted us a lot of creative freedom, reinvented the class on a daily basis by disregarding any repetitive pattern or formula, working through the observation of the students, with a high level of technical knowledge and intuition, which was eagerly used to inspire the creative and physical abilities of the dancers.
Two weeks after starting the classes I started to direct my first collective project “Full Stop” in which I invited a theatre lighting designer, a plastic artist, and Ivelice Brown. “Full Stop” was invited to the closure of the Fluxus Exhibit at the Alejandro Otero Museum, Caracas, Venezuela. This closing became an initiation ritual, as from this first project Ivelice, and I started to develop and create joint ideas as an inseparable creative duo for at least two years.
Nene named me Sofisma de distraccion
During my last period of studies at the IUDANZA I worked at a circus cabaret with the Art-o de Caracas company called El Divino Cabaret. Nene was one of the cabaret’s artists. The working hours were from six in the afternoon until one in the morning, and Nene and I decided to stretch the day, adding time for love. We started a work-love relationship always juggling between the two. For 4 years we carried out a formula of intense passion, artistic competition and mutual teaching. Together we came up with several creations such as Un Mal Encajado 1, Un Mal Encajado 2, un Mal Encajado 3[4], a play that we completely transformed every time we decided to present it at a festival or theatre. I don’t know if it was due to our eagerness to try different theatrical possibilities, or if it was the impossibility to develop the original idea further, instead of transforming it in something completely new.
Un Mal Encajado 1 was also my graduation act at IUDANZA. At least, I considered it so, as the institute just gave the possibility to present an act of less than five minutes, which after a five-year career seemed absurd to me. Therefore I decided to rent a theatre and present my 50 minute long play where I could show the different elements I had studied so far among the different schools in which I had been.
During our relationship, Nene and I created the Musakuminata company, were we collaborated with each other to carry out different improvisation works, both together and separately. One time we were invited to the City Circus Sample Festival (CO), to present Un Mal Encajado 3. Normally, this festival organizes two Cabarets divided by gender “Mens night for ladies” and “Ladies night for men”. At Ladies night for men, I prepared a solo. It had no name, it was just something new which I decided to try that night. I tiptoed on ballet shoes, with my knees bent and a hiper-lordosis that pointed to the sacrum in a horizontal position. Like an accordion that seeks to fold itself, the center of balance travelled transforming the equilibrium among the joints. A fixed point kept me standing: the look. I made individual bonds with each of the members of the audience, who tuned to a ludic fear, towards the new and unknown. A chorus of desire and apprehension, they silently counted the steps of each tiptoe, which advanced in a slow and constant pace, setting the crowds highest pitch in a laughter impregnated with uncertainty. The musical background was a Japanese praying monk. The first foot leaves the stage and directs itself towards one of the spectators. In sort of a party that everybody desires, like a drug that everybody wants and fears to try, like Jesus’ bread and wine or the Argentinian “mate”[5], I go from one person to the next. The close bond, both physical and emotional, transforms the scene in an orgy of laughter and crying, fun and fear. We scented each other, bit each other, crushed each other and in a necessary blackout I disappeared.
Nene only had one thing to say at the end of the performance: you are a Sofisma of distraction[6]. You show yourself as open and direct; you give yourself entirely, while violently attempting to cross the boundaries of the audience; you trespass and embrace with your charisma; you destroy intimacy or create a new kind; you strip them with your subtle sensuality. They remain there in a sort of uncertainty, either paralyzed or laughing to death, while you keep on moving towards the exit and leave.
When you give things a name they immediately form, their substance stops being part of the intangible world and fantasy interconnects with a formed identity. Sofiself of Distraction, that spontaneous name which went through my identity like a dagger and instead of taking my life it got stuck in my veins to extract the substance of my life experiences and transform them into total fantasy, releasing the poison of that which has been named, forming what has been defined or defining what has been formed.
The traumas of the paternal abandonment or the maternal betrayal or the repeated stories of sexual abuse – which had great importance in the process leading to the creation of I am your Eva[7] - or the repeated armed attacks or the near death events, were no longer the issues to get over with or to suffer from. Instead these became a solid platform of knowledge based on the dark, violent strength which is necessary to drive any creative process.
[1] Translation of Spanish Nicknames: Sautéed, Soup, Couch, Stone-deaf, Scale,
Sophisticated, Zoophilia, Zoological, Sophism
[1] Erasmus – Student exchange program between countires.
[2] A way of playing with the cultural perception of ”taking virginity” or breaking the hymen of a woman when she first has sex, rather seeing it as an act where the man gives the woman something.
[3] Classical Ballet teminology referring to the carriage of the arms.
[4] Translation of un mal encajado
[5] Define what this is
[6] Define Sofisma
[7] Thesis performance created for Switzerland Academy ------