a we – CROWD

A blog post from Amparo González Sola’s first residency at Dansverkstaedid, Reykjavik, Iceland.

We are in Reykjavik
We, right now, are Ásrún, Amparo, Ólöf, and Tinna.
We are a temporary we, a constantly changing one.
We don’t know exactly what we will do together.
We delay the moment of making statements.
We decide to think of this encounter as a creative process.
We decide to trust on the fact that the encounter, in itself, will give us clues about how to continue.
We are not expecting big things, we trust on the fact that small movements can produce huge transformations.
We talk about how our practices began.
We realize that there is always a previous moment, a previous encounter.
We do a kind of archaeology of our practices.
We realize the amount of people and places that hold us, that hold our trajectories.
We thanks them.
We talk about the politics of quoting, about the politics of acknowledgment.
We talk about voices and which persons we name when talking of what we do.
We immerse in the pool. Under the water everything resonates, under the water the words touch us and each sound is perceived through the skin.
We talk about what things we notice and what things we don’t, about what becomes visible or invisible to us.
We talk about being able to perceive what seems to be invisible and to give attention to what we don’t use to see.
We decide to make a list of things we notice these days together.
We do a collective list.
in the list we write places, persons, concepts, gestures, actions.
We make also a list of questions
We don’t pretend to answer the questions right now, we want to stay a bit with them, letting them complexify our discussions.
We walk. Walking the thoughts moves differently.
We walk against the wind, we can’t talk, the wind makes the words fly in the air.
We stay in silence.
We listen
We discuss about what a “community engaged dance” would be.
We ask each other: How do you relate with this concept?
We realize that a lot of prejudices are contained there.
We decide to let the discussion opened.
We cook.
We share food.
We meet Vala and Lovisa.
We listen to their stories.
We share memories of the things we had done in the past.
We share our screens.
We find things in common.
We find things different.
We talk about “context”, about the relevance of giving context, and at the same time the importance of avoiding putting labels or fixed categories to things.
We talk about our own contexts, and backgrounds.
We talk about how to avoid patronizing others, about how to break down prejudices.
We talk about community and inclusivity, about how some words become a kind of empty box.
We share some strategies we had used in our works.
We don’t know many things.
But we also know many things.
We go to swim, under the water we can feel the movement of others, under the water we can feel how our movement affects others and the environment.
Under the water we can feel how the others’ movement moves us.
We hung out in the pool.
We take breaks.
We feel that the breaks are very important moments.
We read a Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui
We talk about curiosity, about trusting in the process, about being patient.
We talk about how to create a collective patient.
about how to create a collective trust.
We wonder how an “extensive process” would be.
We meet Sara.
We visit an independent theater in the city, we talk about the need of creating community to produce social changes.
We walk.
We touch the lava with our hands, it is still warm.
And on the nights the earth trembles
We feel the earthquakes, a lot of earthquakes.
We have fear.
We are excited.
We think about all the processes that are going on on earth beyond our will, things that are happening, most of the time invisibly and silently to us, to think in this geological scale it is a kind of breath.

We decide to write something to share with you
We create a temporary we, a we that is not homogeneous, a we that is full of contradiction.

This is an I, writing in we.
This is a fabulative practice.
A we as a fiction, a temporary one.
We think of this encounter as a creative process.