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SKIN VALPARAISO

skin-valparaiso

SKIN VALPARAISO

SKIN Valparaiso Piel Azul was realized with the support of the Consejo Regional de la Cultura in collaboration with Cultural Center Escenalborde and the Arts Festival at the Frigorifico Barón, in Valparaiso Chile on 28.-29.01.11.

Tools Ws took place during the morning full 7 days (24h). We shared the space with an audience of 150 people each performance. The 25 artists that joined the project came from different regions in Chile, Argentina and Uruguay.

Concept and realization
Eckhard Müller + Daniela Schwartz.

Dancers
Belen Abate Sanchez, Benjamín Ruíz, Camila Andrea Navarro Cancino, Carmen Alcalde Gordillo, Catalina Varela Retamales, Gabriel Aragú González, Gabriel Cunich Ansaldi, Javiera Isabel Sanhueza Espinosa, Juan Ignacio aravena Olivares, Juan Manuel Noblia, Julio Andrés, Cerda Puga, Karina Paz Espinoza del Canto, Lilian Reyes, María Daniela Villanueva Tolosa, María, Luisa Silva, María Soledad Medina Tapia, Patricio Antonio Chavez Gonzalez, Paulina Luciana González Oyarce, Rens Veninga Fergadiott, Rocío Fernanda Belmar Galván, Rocío Rivera Marchesvky, Valeska Alejandra Minchel Lisboa, Vesna Brzovic Gaete.

Musicians
David Leonardo Cortés Rodriguez, Miguel Eduardo Jáuregui Arévalo.

Video
Iván Sánchez Ramírez, Bárbara Daniela Trejo Cruz, Mar Elizabeth Kankurua.

Tools Workshop Photos

SKIN Performance by Iván Sánchez Ramírez

Artist’s testimonials

„Sincerely it is not easy to write of this experience, because I was afraid of not achieving to expose all my impressions, emotions and sensations that were produced in me. And at the same time I guess, because of all of the major moral and artistic proposals, this project encourages to do so.

Once, I decided to enter without prejudice. That is to say, without really knowing what I was exposing myself to, to believe in the literal words of that email and its call. Something I wasn’t used to do, professionally speaking.

The experience is one of the most important in my life until today. The most important on an artistic level until today too. To summarize: the capacity for empathy and care with myself, the happiness and the crisis, the emotion, the feelings generated by those times that the perception is open to what is around, the hunger for knowledge and experience, the desire and autonomy.

All these are things I felt at the same time this week we lived together. Also the possibility to respect each and every one before judging. This was a great attack to our souls. For me the beginning of feelings and politics, love and revolution.

As I said already to all I don’t remember well when, but I was already struggling quite a lot working for the political awakening in the arts with great nostalgia, thinking how difficult could it be to give a fight from this passive position. Questioning the transformative power of such a minimal act compared with the need of a world that falls a part day by day. Now, after the two performances something stays with me and remains and this is to have faith. Not only because of what each person said, but also because of what I lived. I have at the same time transformed and been transformed. My artistic ability was not the most important thing (or what and how I was moving). The best part of this act is that all together we have crossed a bridge to another world. I wish we could do again something of this nature“

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After resting and in a reflexive harvest I can say, that I went through many internal and external spaces participating in SKIN. An ever-changing scenery between emotions and the need to belong to, in order to be present and awake in the experience. At some point I had the anxiety of being in every place and every connection and because of this inner requirement, I’ve closed doors to the so important and necessary flexibility…
I consider, looking at it with more distance, that there were very beautiful moments which I’m only now in a position to assess, because at the time of the action the same manifestation was a journey through many forms and conceptions and because of the same anxiety of anticipation, of responsibility, of making and building something, also lead me to get lost.
The landscape that got drawn with so many people the day of the performance made a change of any feeling of security I’ve previously had and made me look at each movement as a unique experience, as were all experiences we had as a group during the previous days of work. Each manifestation hold its own and diverse universe.
Everything that surprised and amazed me the first performance, I did it again the second day, but I could abandon myself more to what happened and to the inner suggestions of to do or not do. I think I went through the same internal places as during the first performance, moments of not knowing what to do but releasing more towards that possibility. From this greater calmness I was able to see and to be. I think it was interesting to have two consecutive days of performance and see how everything changes and also what you don’t want to change, but that anyway gets transformed. I was very interested listening to the participants and audience opinions and their interest…
If I leave a word that summarizes all I was left with is TRANSFORMATION.

(ps: now, remembering the second day of performance a gentleman said he had an experience of life, passion and death … )“

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„My expectations of Tools Workshop were high, I remember the first day I felt disconnected and I was wondering what I was doing there and this is not a minor question because of my training. I am not used to interact in instances such as SKIN. I felt initially rejection of what I was experiencing (sensations) and by what I saw. The first day I sat in a corner of the room and observed, then the next day I could not attend the seminar and that has served me a lot to think about it, I started to discover things I had never noticed before.
The first game that we did to compose on a piece of paper, at that time I thought it was just nonsense; as the days went by I achieved to notice the real really powerful meaning! I remember that in the first group I always saw my composition and tried to impose my view, even sometimes up to returning the object to the place where I had placed when one of my fellow members have moved it; I do not blame myself, at the end, we all act as we are taught to act. And in that moment it made a lot of sense to realize it and to let go, trying to receive, what the other wanted to express or simply to place myself at the disposal of the creation of another; and that was SKIN during the two performances. All of us as group of people working collectively. I cannot deny that at times I could not avoid coming back to my solitary and authoritarian practice of a composer, but I feel that I was able to yield in many moments of our creation and I liked that.

Regarding to the music itself, the phrase I’m going to write now, I’ve already shared it with you the last day, but I will do it here; Daniela on one occasion, she spoke with me and with M. and I remember that time she said to me „You are not here to show all what you think you know, you are here to explore, discover and put what you know to serve the collective creation“.
And it is true, that when I applied I had in mind making a powerful work, taking everything that is of electroacoustic music, make large masses of voices using the dancers and find the way to have a piano at my disposal among other things.

What is incredible for me, is that at the end, what was achieved in the two performances was super interesting and without any need for great sounds or great big ideas, was the exact music to what we needed at that time, I was lucky to be able to receive comments about the sounds and the balance was positive.

The last thing I want to share that does not have much to do with the very experience of SKIN is, that before this, I had been stuck for months, in blank, without being able to compose, because of thousands of problems I’ve experienced the year before; things that affected me enormously. For me it has been the most intense year I’ve lived, and SKIN has served me to connect again, to reflect a lot, to start analysis and now I feel very different, I have been composing all week fully and this makes me very very happy.“

Audience testimonials

„I think that the name of the performance is very good chosen because I got skinned or with thousands of very active sensors on the skin, with all the internal senses out in the air. I did not have words and I think I faded out or evaporated for a few hours. After SKIN I went to see another dance show and I found it so little honest, so conceited, so distant … and I think this is what you dared, to cross the thin line that separates human beings today; in this case the actor-spectator and other different practices that we engaged in, a few on stage, others in the academic life of the theories, others on sales, etc…In each of these activities, it is easy to feel safe and free because it is something that one „knows how to do “ something that one is an expert, whatever it may be. And that is why it is also easy to feel naked, when we moved out of our daily role … and in this case in particular the role of spectator …
I thought it was simple as it was shocking. I have seen stuff like this before but it felt violating because the performers were in charge of making me feel a guilty viewer; but you have used the invitation, such a calm invitation, that one deeply could decide freely, whether to participate in the game or not. And I found this wonderful! There was no guilt because it is no crime to „loose“ the time dancing or to use the body to dance … and there was no shame because each one went in or out when they needed it … there was no front, not a single beauty, infinite dances, infinite dancers, all the bodies after the contacts they look beautiful. And it seems to me that practicing contact I have come to appreciate the fragility of human relations, that is to say, the product of our mortality and the freedom is that the different relationships between the people start or end, as in the contact!
And perhaps this fragility is our greatest strength, the ability to begin something new!“

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„After more than 30 years of marriage, I have seen my wife today the first time“.

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„While we are waiting outside to enter the stage area, small gatherings and meetings provoke to open up the dialogue, people are expecting to live a performative experience that will transform them, some of us imagine, some believe but we all don’t know until we are taken by the hand. Here begins the path that breaks through with our chance to encounter.
The ex-refrigerator Baron is an industrial big and oxygenated building, in its spatial layout is hold by wide columns, the spacious windows that open up the view and its sea. The windows both are covered with white fabrics. They contain cuts, designed to open to the horizon and that can allow you to trespass this degree of the outside, and wonder into the sea breeze.
Personal items are removed from each person there is resistance around – as how to hand over all my holiday? Even just the action of waiting is a proof of faith, you must detach yourself from the material, and we have to start to get off the layers of the epidermis, which falls to be reborn.
This salt that draws the skin according to the distances that we have.
The people are entering and are accommodating according to where the artists place them. A clear point of reflection, a starting point, the fact of accommodating, composing the pieces in such a way, that makes us inhabit and give life.
The stillness brings more stillness, and then as we stayed and keep the silence, we hear what goes on around us, what happens to us inside when the other moves.
We listen steps, slow walks, glances of mistrust with what happens, but with certainty that something is happening.
We started to let go, to be modified, altered by auditory stimuli of color and form that each body emits.
There is bouncing, backward runs, turns, bottles and accessories, blows of accessories of the bottles and a flute that dances, in the rhythm.
Camera by camera, there are games of each camera among performers and the public. One films another, being born in the abyss.
The valorization of the image by its image. Its possible to see how the eyes encounter and look at each other. There are three cameras, that I watch as I describe what I am living. They are fragmented and they become general.
There are duets, trios, and groups of people, people on their own standing and people, who are sitting and gathering. There are beautiful bodies composing the space, there are beautiful spaces composing the bodies. Picture within picture. The walks become races.
There are hollow vibratory blows and the bones become present.
Entering and exiting the game and the body that moves with its impulses. As flocks, as attempts to belong to different tribes or just to listen to the one that is your own.
Bodies with different skins, with something blue, with walls that rub, with clothes of bare walls.
Children running around pointing out, jumping in front of their guide. Unifying what passes from one state to another, from a proposal to another, from a dance running out to be born in another.
The end is announced by the footsteps that make themselves deaf as they are becoming more. In a circle, a line of people of all ages is paused in time. In the middle the silence is danced, the walk slows down, becoming static. People with small movements are composing as a group, a unit. Composing a great group interactive performance.
There are dialogs with the neighbors, experiences of verbal exchange, sensations that the eyes are noticing in the image that is gathered, as water that incorporates, as air filling everything what is visible.

generated to the time that the perception is open to what is around them. The hunger for knowledge and experience. The desire and autonomy.
All these are things I felt at the same time this week to live together. Also the possibility of respect before any trial to each and every one. This was a great attack to our souls. For me the beginning of the feeling and the policy. Love and revolution.