A rhythmic solo for exercising desire

In conversation with MARLENE MONTEIRO FREITAS, choreographer, performer of Guintche. Conducted by Anita van Dolen, curator dance of the festival

What does Guintche means?

Guintche is a word from the Cape Verdean Creole language. It stands for a bird, a prostitute or an attitude. There is a fish-eating bird named Guintche; prostitutes are usually called Guintche; and as to the attitude, it refers to making choices as opportunities present themselves rather than being particularly driven by a need or desire for coherence. The common dominator of the 3, for me, is movement.

In Guintche you present us a choreography for the face / upperbody while from the hips your body moves in another rhythm. How did you create this layered choreography in where you separate the body?

The opposition between upper and lower body in Guintche could be analogous to music, sculpture or drawing. For instance, a stable and a regular rhythm from which different melodies arise and rest upon; a wax sculpture melting and solidifying, changing its form while the wax remains the same; or a drawing line defining and blurring forms, allowing different images to emerge and/or disappear while the line remains the same. This was a way to deepen an important and transversal aspect of the work, hybridism - the coexistence of disparate or contradictory elements.

What is the function of music in this piece?

Music and choreography are intertwined, they inform, support or cancel each other, they allow tension to arise and to be released, intensifying the experience of the piece; From this relation a wide range of figures emerge: a bird-puppet, a bird-clown, a bird-robot, a bird-gymnast, and many others that might be in the interstices of these. 

Musicians constantly see me and I constantly hear them. For many years, I performed Guintche with recorded music but since I do it with Cookie and Simon, two very talented musicians, the dialogue between dance and music has been intensified. 

If you weren’t a choreographer, you would be a psychiatrist, you’ve once said. How do you reflect on human behavior in your pieces?

I embody gestures, attitudes and I incarnate figures, behaviors. While some are very familiar others are foreign to me. The movement towards what is strange or unknown and the cohabitation of both, foreign and familiar, allows a process of translation and, therefore, a deeper understanding of things. From project to project I’ve been practicing the encounter between disparate elements which in other contexts, outside the theatre for instance, would have great difficulties occurring. In my opinion these encounters and combinations are infinite. Practicing them may develop, stretch, nourish a certain type of muscles such as the muscle of displacement, the muscle of curiosity or the muscle of empathy. 

Elements of Carnival and cartoons together with eccentric costumes and heavenly make-up are present in all your works. What is the reason for this visibility?

Costumes and make-up are worked specifically for each project. The choreography is a fictional world we build in which lights, sound, set, costumes, make-up, choreography play a part as much as the cartoonish, the carnivalesque, the dreams play another. As to Cartoons, ideas usually taken for granted such as gravity, life/ death, sequence of events are often challenged; As to Carnival, ideas on order and social status are constantly put at stake; as to dreams, the correlation between situations and emotions are frequently not very aligned with the rules of our waking mind. These are spaces where fiction challenges reality as we know it, giving rise to new possibilities. For me, theatre is just one more of these spaces.

What would you like the audience to feel and think after experiencing your performances?

Some feel highly energetic, others exhausted. Some feel like dancing, others as if they’ve been dancing for hours. Some are disturbed or sad and others feel freer, joyful, motivated. People respond in various ways, sometimes even in opposite ways. The work is meant to convey neither a specific message nor a single meaning, it is open to multiple interpretations.

It really matters to me, when people express what they felt or saw in the work even if these opinions are far away from what I thought while choreographing or performing it. For me, shows are usually happening in what I call a “third space”: where what is being projected from the stage and what is brought into the room by the audience freely clashes, meets, shocks, liberating energy. Between stage and audience is an unknown couple dance that takes place each show. Theatres are spaces where we get the chance to collectively exorcise fear and collectively exercise desire, and this is a chance I grasp with bird claws.