DANCE CAN BE SEEN AND TOUCHED

How much can experience bring in the creative ideation of an artist? How much of that expertise would transform the original idea under other events, associations, updates and possible poetic cravings? You can take a lot from the idea and the experience when it comes to mobilize scenic devices.

Now, it is true that the only viable way to reach the emotion is that of action; yes, that of the transformative, generating, emancipated action of universes that performers and spectators share.

Everyone knows that the advent of modernity introduced decisive changes regarding the condition of the subject, the relationship of individuals with the environment, vision and understanding of the world and the traditional assumption of the existence of a universe and objective reality. It also generated new questions about the foundation of science, the recognition of the need to overcome the orthodox dogma and to interconnect the various disciplines.

Transition from disciplinary to interdisciplinary has been an intrinsic and perpetual condition in spectacular scenic practice. From the early twentieth century other theories that have in common skepticism about the ideas that marked deeply the Western science and culture began to emerge from different fields of knowledge. Questions about truth, reality, reason and knowledge are positioned as the center of the debate between rationalism and relativism. Various theories waive the specificity of their discipline to gradually approach the notion of interaction, complicity, complexity, transdisciplinarity, etc.

In the performance practice, this relativism manifests itself in different ways: in the experientialization as an essential part of the procedural and declarative of the work; in the radical changes regarding the reception of the work itself and the place of the reader-viewer; the tendency to make connections, links, reciprocity, transactions or   collusion between different fields and artistic practices, evident in the intermediate creations or mixed media, interventional, interdisciplinary and " indiscipline " - and on enhancing the links between art, science and technology, a fact that makes a statement of performance practices today.

The body as a technological notion that, since the figuration of its presence seeks to establish new connections and alliances: from the silence to the televisual imagery, from the invulnerable body to the multimedia physicality, from the physical space to cyberspace as presentational support. The dancing body as a vehicle of communication, exhibition and performance is increasingly expanding its expressive and associative possibilities.

And the twelfth Havana Biennial has served as confirmation that dance can be seen and touched beyond the stale consensus that legitimate academic and decadent sense of "being in dance." To rethink the term dance from the configurations that the current artistic practice wields is a need to link the theoretical and conceptual keys that haunt the study and creation of contemporary dance, while updated argument to a simultaneous field of questioning.

On the agenda of the Biennale, the Havana presentations of the proposals of the Uruguayan Tamara Cubas, the Spanish Cuqui and Maria Jerez, the exhibition materials by Esperanza Collado and having awaited the visit of the legendary La Ribot with her distinguished piece Más distinguidas, say the dance as a scenic practice has expanded its borders, has ceased to be a distinct stage demonstration, to become expansion of the hybridization processes of a spectacular new discursive sensitivity.

Havana during the Biennial has opened its doors and spaces to corroborate that in the current contemporary dance semantic plural confluence of its various discursive vocabularies and grammars live, gravitate, are generated, systematized and undergo. To violate the comfortable armchair of the viewer will remain notion of order in the realignment of its active "mission" to become critical and emancipating.

To travel between the idea and the experience goes beyond a reviewing provocation of what has been achieved and contributed to the art; it goes beyond that hoary idea of identifying dance with the continuous movement and even the possession of a physically “suitable” body. Dance in the Biennial, as conceived and hatched obsession, well planned and fearless, thoughtful and refracted of its principal consultant, the researcher and professor Jose Antonio Sanchez Spanish. The curatorial committee of the Biennial knew taking the risk for showing that dance goes beyond physicality dynamics that experiences time and space through the intensity, the stillness, the game, the demand and listening.

While the agenda of the Twelfth Biennial of Havana became questioner combination of the 'scattered' that produces sense in its imagination-action links, actor-spectator-action movement, rhythm-harmony, body-thinking, center-periphery, thought-experience, the forthcoming proposals to our notions of ' the dance, the theatrical, the scenic "became language of a new lingua franca that explored the communality of bodies culturally mid before the irresolution of a possible global model. Given the unfortunate and alleged miracle recipe normalizing the ontology aged of the corporal, visual, sound and technical language. Well, if we talk about dance, it is appropriate to note that it can also be seen and touched as elusive shifting in the watching spectators, now emancipated.