Interview with Ismael Ivo
Biennale Danza - Venezia 2006
Illuminata
Ismael Ivo is the Brasilian Choreographer and Dancer that directs, since the last year, the Contemporary Dance Festival of La Biennale. His work is focused on body investigation and phisicality and he has put this topic as the very central element of the Festival.
He also presented the première of his own new coreography, named Illuminata, a piece talking about death experience.
Illuminata is a performance inspired by a personal experience, but you worked on it together with the music composer: how was this experience?
My personal experience is the basis for this performance: I wanted to talk about the moment when I nearly died, that has been the turning point of my life.
I think about that as a scream that came out when I watched death in the eyes.
Even though this is the first performance I make about that, I can see in my own work that it’s changed a lot after that moment.
This is why I selected this topic for my Underskin choreography: it’s an investigation about the real power of body, not just about its beauty or harmony, but about the impulse that moves it, what’s deep inside.
I asked myself: Why dancing? What a choreographer has to say with dance? I want the dancers to be able to transmit an idea, dance has to be a mirror of the time, the body has to be a document of time. In this piece I wanted to investigate death: Francis Bacon once said: when you are born you start to die. Death as a theme: I started to research, and it was very interesting, that 90% of people that had a heart attack describe it as a tunnel and saw light at the end of it when they’re saved by the doctor. That reminded me a lot of Orpheo that walks through the black tunnel to meet Euridice.
So working on the performance I didn’t concentrate only on my own experience, but I also tried to make the dancers investigate their own deep physicality: that happens to me when they push their heart to the maximum and then bring it closer to the people and make them feel it.
For me, an important element was putting a mirror on the stage, because it makes the audience more than a spectator, it makes them participate. The people end up watching the dance and themselves.
For this I got the inspiration from a film of Jean Cocteau of 1940 that’s about Orpheus, in which he communicates to the death’sworld through a mirror, he enters in the mirror to meet Euridice. The black to me means ash in contact with body that one day is going to be finished: after that all the dancers’ steps become writing on the stage.
For me sharing this type of experience with Arnaldo De Felice was very beautiful: he was composing the news according to the images I was giving him, so the piece was built step by step.
Also the stage setting helps in giving the sense of physicality: the bed of ice, the round rain… Do you think that playing with more theatrical elements helps in this piece comunicate the whole body investigation?
I think so because the scenography, which was made by Michel Casq.., express some images that I had really clear in my mind since the beginning: I haven’t been suggested but I recreated the environment that I had in my mind.
I worked with doctors who assist terminally ill patients: they gave me a description of different deaths. Some people are really calm when they die, others fight trying to stay alive and some have a special expression in their face, like they’re looking at the film of their own lives. I was inspired from this suggestion to choreograph and I tried to express the three of those feelings. Also, I felt like I need a voice, and to me it was female: she is Illuminata, the one that guide through the passage.
Do you think that mixing up with more theatrical elements, interaction, monologue gives more thickness to the dancing body?
I think that dance has to find its new vocabulary and a new form of communicating, I think this is something that divides the old and the new forms of communication: it’s really important to be able to mix different aspects…
Speaking about the whole festival, that you directed: which is the difference between this year’s theme and the last one, called “Body Attack”? Do you think body is still a taboo in our culture?
Of course they are very connected to each other: to me this is a “Biennale del corpo”, a space to look at body not only in an aesthetic way: I’m talking about the total body. Body is a document of the times: last year I wanted to see it as a weapon, as something entering the social scene; this year I want to see Underskin, trying to investigate the biological body, the metaphysical body.
The body is still a taboo in our society because it’s never been investigated as soemthing complex: we use our body as an object, we can add new parts to it, we can change our organs as well as our face. Dance has to find out the answer to the important question of the global body: we’re entering in the era of “nouveux provocateurs”, people act in a shocking way, like burning a car in the street, to find themselves, to define their identities. Times are changing, people are trying to make love through the internet because we don’t have time anymore, and the body screams, trying to get back to the origins.
That’s what happens with tattoos and piercing: they are a primitive way of expression for young people: from time to time individuals try to find the way to comunicate with their body, to express with them. This type of festival is more about language and expression that about the specific performance.
So here we are at our path: we had the body attack and now we’re talking about underskin. The next step is talking about emotion: that’s what I’ll do next year. It’s important to give importance to the emotional body, to feelings, because they’re what make us different from androids, we’re not far from them, blade runner is here.