SURRENDER
LOOKING FOR DEFINITIONS
I do want to write about ‘surrender’. I do have problems to define the kind of ‘surrender’ I am interested in writing about in this essay.
surrender:
1. to declare to an opponent that he or she has won and that fighting can cease I am not interested in who is the winner or the loser, or in conquests or combats… I did not surrender to your victory, I did not capitulate, you did not invade me, you did not occupy me. No opponents, no fight. My surrender is not coming out of a war, and iwithin it I am not losing my power, my place, my autonomy. An agreement. My choice. It is a playful choice. You did not propose me to do it; you did not fight or ask me to stop, to hold, to give out or to give in. I was not defeated, we were not in a battle but exchanging positions and responsibilities towards my existence and presence, we enjoyed overcoming roles.
2.to relinquish possession or control of something because of coercion or force You are strong and fast that is why I choose you, your arms can hold me tight, your legs can carry me further, you can throw me away, you could break me in five, you are faster, that is why I choose you…you could follow my instructions, you can interpret my needs, you question my petitions, you complicate the theories of my body, you can redefine my definitions, that is why I choose you…but, you did not force me, you did not force me, you did not force me…otherwise I would have never been able to surrender…
3. to give somebody a seat, position, or office as a courtesy or as a gesture of goodwill I trusted you my body, I offered you the possibility to take my choices, and I would also be myself while reacting and becoming affected by your decisions. Accepting conditions, training the flexibility of my statements, softening the strength of my muscles to be molded. Am I afraid to get lost? I trust you my body, please break my rib only if it is totally necessary…
4.to give up or abandon something such as an idea or intention I am not only who I construct in front of the mirror, I am not the only one who decides from where I would start my movement, I am not just who you read behind all my characteristics…I am trying to release my power, or this kind of power that get established by ‘musculating’ statements. I am trying to release the weight of the meanings, trying to erase dead memories, old memories…not giving anything for granted, just happening in present continuity, updating my curiosity, not holding the image of my self, not choosing how I would like to be seen or read, no time to be established, insisting in my formation but never repeating…I am available and able to be redefined… I would have never been able to swim in your deepest holes if I would have been still attached to my memories of what “being close to your vagina” means…now you could have a barbecue in between my legs without provoking a fountain because together we realized we can be something other than what we are supposed to be…I have discovered we can be more than ‘the other’ might merely read.
5.to yield to a strong emotion, influence, or temptation. Still wondering…
6.an act of willing submission to authorities. No victims, no master…
POWER AND RESISTANCE.
Last year, if I would have been asked (after having talked and agreed with some people who know or have seen my work and way of working) I would have asserted that one of the main themes or repeated elements in my pieces and my way of working would be “Power relations”. “Aitana is a “pusher”, she is a workaholic, and she is demanding a lot, she needs to have control over everything”… But now, Aitana, (wondering about what power means) says: “…never imposing, always proposing, as a seducer, as a trigger, as a creator of conditions, negotiating, observing, in an horizontal relation…”
Lately I have started to be more and more uncomfortable with these definitions, about power either in my work or in my research processes.
As Foucault said Power is not an act but a “practice”, an exercise, and it is expressed in all relations not only through repression but through affection. In that sense I would say that, as in every place where two forces, energies or individuals meet, as a maker, I also have to deal with power issues. It is a negotiation between my desire to bring my performers to the places where I want them to be and their ways of dealing with those desires, by resisting them or following them, by understanding them or questioning them. And for that, to get “ what I want” I have to try to use different strategies to convince them and to seduce them.
For Foucault ”Power is what creates subjects with its potential to affect, what makes them signify, what proposes the conditions and the mechanisms under which ones they will be configured”.
Maria Ines Garcia Canal in her essay about Foucault’s work “ La resistencia y el arte de existir” (“The resistance and the Art to exist”) explained that for Foucault, Power Relations, through the obvious and the repetitive, inside of our daily life, have established our way of thinking, have conditioned our bodies, rhythms and gestures, our feelings and sensations. She also affirms that Foucault’s main research and reflection is dominated by the question: who are we? how have we been created inside of our society? his attempt to answer tended to reject “this kind of individuality which have been imposed to us for ages”. Departing from this statement Maria Ines focuses her essay in the “Resistance”, the resistance as the response of the subjects to this Power who act over their bodies and over their actions. “The resistance as the art of existence, the resistance as a freedom exercise, the resistance as a will to persist.”
AN ALTERNATIVE TO RESISTANCE. A DIFERENT WAY TO SUBVERS, TO QUESTION OR TO OVERCOME POWER.
In the last year an important change has happened in my work, or at least an important change has occurred in my own way to perceive my work. Two new elements have appeared. Firstly, my three last projects seem to be based on a common research whose main elements I discovered some weeks ago. A new concept that is nourishing my latest questions and physical researches seem to be ‘Surrender’ .Secondly, in the last period, my interests toward the act of performing myself have increased and I have felt the need to be physically involved, also as a performer, in my own work. I do not think it is a coincidence that these events have cross faded, myself wanting to perform and the word “surrender” appearing, suddenly, in my vocabulary.
SURRENDER
I would like to go through the concepts and formats of my last works and to expose more clearly whose these common points are what have pushed me to be talking about ‘surrender’.
In “Do you want to use me ” (project developed conceptually during the beginning of 2003 and still under construction) I looked for different makers and asked them to direct me and to create a solo for me following my previous instructions. In this project I was interested in “new ways of communication and relation between the figure of the “choreographer-maker-master” and the “performer-dancer-directed”. How was a constant collaboration based on exchanging roles possible? How to create a “match point” where interests and responsibilities would be in continuous transformation and shifting positions? I proposed a beginning and a theme and then, after, I totally surrendered and followed the conditions, ethics and aesthetics that the other person set for me. My main questions were: “What is it to negotiate, to accept, to trust, to surrender? What about the issue of ownership? What belonged to me, to the other person (maker), or to “US” in this project? My main needs: “ how to be affected, exposed and positively directed, how to bring myself to new points where I was never before, how to modify myself, how to be seen and presented from perspectives I did not know or could not anticipate… How to redefine my body, interests, habits and ways of working, NOT as an investment in my biography or a way of feeding my egocentrism, but as a research about the “process of creating identity”, the limits of ownership, the limits of perception and representation and the capacity of being affected and being able to affect”.
In Sex me not, piece made for 6 dancers and in which I am also performing, I wanted to apply sex languages (surrender, seduction, fitting together, penetration, desire, pleasure, coming.) to dance language and choreography to achieve a new physicality and performative state. I was interested in how to surrender to physicality and to intimacy by building confidence. How could I surrender to a body without hierarchies, to the moment, by stimulating and updating curiosity? How to surrender to ‘the Other’, to the ‘sharing’ and to the intensity, by negotiating with limits and desires and by erasing memories and reconstructing new references?
I have worked Sex me not twice, I create the piece and one year after I remake it for a new cast; in the first process I was directing from the outside, the second time I was also a performer in it. It is a heavy and highly demanding piece. The body is exposed to a trip where it has to be able to accept its visibility, even in moments related to surrender and intimacy (The body are naked for half of the piece, together with other naked bodies, which touch, smell, taste and ‘penetrate’ its positions. I wrote in my agenda after one of my last rehearsals:” I would have never been able to swim in your deepest holes if I would have been still attached to my memories of what “being close to your vagina” means…now you could have a barbecue in between my legs without provoking a fountain because together we realized we can be something other than what we are supposed to be…I have discovered we can be more than ‘the other’ might merely read.…I have discover my body can be just a skin extension, a continent”…
The body is also asked to attempt to surrender to a strong physicality, to be able to go beyond exhaustion, without thinking about the form or the images, not caring about the aesthetic consequence of its tiredness and confusion.
For “3Duets”, my last project, still under construction, I wrote:
_Manipulate me, Move me, Carry me, Play me… Make me meaningful and meaningless… Both now just happening Deal with my weight and my surrender Transform me Affect me Justify my need of moving with your strength and commitment Then I will give you the whole responsibility of my presence I will not move, not triggering you, not seducing you… I have just decided I will trust you I will not fight now Needing you… I will enjoy losing control this time Minimizing my reactions Redefining roles No victim no master Surviving to number 3_
In this piece 3 dancers, one after the other, move my body, repeating 3 times a duet format. My body remains motionless during the whole piece. The dancers, with the task to move me, are the total responsible for each duet (movement, meaning and timing). They are articulating my body, choosing my motion, my positions, my grade of exposure, and playing with the different ways how a body (my body) can be read. They (through their strength, curiosity and imagination) justify my need of movement and bring me to places I was never before. As preparation for this process I gave to each of them the same set of instructions, they all shared the same ‘script’ and the themes I wanted to deal with. After this first step I offered them my body and I totally surrendered to their interpretations and ‘manipulations’.
3Duets is the the most consequent step in this research. A research in which “surrender” and “how to achieve different ways to be affected” are the main focal points or questions.
Surrender but not capitulation, surrender without being occupied, without winner or losers, without victims or masters, surrender as an agreement, as a way to release my power and to empower my vulnerability. Surrender as a “relation of forces”, surrender to train the flexibility of my statements, updating myself, being available and able to be redefined and replaced. Surrendering to “forces that model flesh or shake it” in Deleuze’s words.
In a review of a Deleuze´s piece Francis Bacon: The logic of Sensation, Andrew Feldmar wrote: “ surrender means total experience: no defense, no critique, fully allowing oneself to be taken for a ride. Surrender and catch a sort of epistemology. Having giving myself over to a work of art letting it have its way with me, I come back to myself. Am I richer, am I poorer, is it as if nothing really happened a t all? The catch is the gift, the transformation, the altered state of consciousness I returned with from my surrender to the piece”.
Maria Ines Garcia Canal, nevertheless, in her essay on Foucault´s work “ La resistencia y el arte de existir” wrote “ The subject is born resisting and is, in this capacity to react, where he is constituted. He defends himself, reacting in a thousand ways, against the forces that go towards him. The resistance is the capacity of the subjects to react. (…) the resistance is the main technique to produce subjectivity”.
Could surrender also be a strategy to build subjectivity as well as a critical action and reaction that could question our patterns and ways to establish meanings? Could this achieve an alternative way to extend individuality through affection? Could this question what (or whom) holds the body property and interrogating what ( or whom) sustain a movement´s purpose”?
References:
1. Encarta® World English Dictionary © 1999 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Developed for Microsoft by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
2. “Foucault y el discurso del poder. La resistencia y el arte del existir”. Maria Ines Gacia Canal.Acción Educativa Revista Electrónica del Centro de Investigaciones y Servicios Educativos. Universidad Autónoma de Sinaloa. Volumen I, Número 1, Febrero del 2001. Culiacán, Sin. México. http://uas.uasnet.mx/cise/rev/Num1/
3. “El sujeto y el poder”. Michel Focault.
4. “Deleuze´s catch after his surrender to Bacon”. Review by Andrew Feldmar.
5.” Francis bacon: The logic of Sensation” by Gilles Deleuze.
6. “Exhausting Dance: Themes for a politics of Movement” by Andre Lepecki.