Review of the book: "Building a Dance: An Approach Based on Intertextuality and Real-time Composition" by Ernesto Ortíz (Ecuadorian Choreographer), 2018 (original) (raw)

2020, Acta Ethnographica Hungaricum

The final version of this paper has been officially included in the Volume 65 (2020): Issue 1 of the Journal “Acta Ethnographica Hungarica” (Jun 2020). https://doi.org/10.1556/022.2020.00012 Extract: In the framework of the cross-disciplinary project “Aesthetic machinations, symbolic machinations” (2016), Ecuadorian artists from different fields found a common space for creativity. The performances “Alina.06” and “La Señorita Wang soy yo” were the two resulting experiences that merged the work of dancers and musicians while allowing them to become more aware of the way in which they assume their own disciplines. This contrasting collaboration is significant in a country whose crossbred heritage constantly requires creators to find new ways to position themselves regarding their own art. The reason for this is a postcolonial discernment which always remains in the background, suggesting destabilization and a certain disobedience, not to foreign knowledge itself, but to practices and methods that are not put to the test in the space and material context of practitioners. It is in this sense, and not necessarily through a geopolitical lens, that suspicion arises in the eyes of Ernesto Ortíz (dancer, choreographer and director) against the given knowledge, as long as it remains disembodied. To parallelize with folk dance, wherein movement and its cultural context are interwoven, the author proposes a dialogue between his own ideas and those by Le Breton. The resulting conversation revolves around contemporary performing arts (dance, theatre and performance art) and the effort to emancipate themselves from ideological alignments, but more fundamentally, from the task of producing any explanation or clear fable for the audience. Hence, the spirit of contemporary praxis in art encourages subjectivity and, at the same time, offers ambiguous discourses to an also dissimilar and diverse audience, who end up with a certain possibility to come up with their own little version of the play as curators of their own experience.