-where were you born?
I was born in the corridor of a hospital in a small city in the countryside of Brazil. The place smelled like café com leite and social inequality. It received an indigenous name, Guaxupé. Most of us did not learn its meaning. When I was nine years old, someone told me that in Tupi-Guarani it meant ‘valley of the bees’. Strange. I do not recall many bees in my first home.
-where do you live?
I live by a mountain where, during summer, I always see bees. My apartment is small and it has big windows. It is perfect for me. I can see the sea, smell the rain, and be in the center of Bergen in 10 minutes by bike. During autumn, when the sun shines, I feels like I live inside a painting.
-what pronouns do you use?
She and her, most of the time.
Some days I wonder if they would be more appropriate. Inside me, there are so many fragments, so many versions waiting to become a part of the world.
– What makes you work with performance?
I like the smell of aliveness and the surprises that performance brings me. More than that, it is the closest I get to my own face.
In part, I like performance because there I can just become, without labels.
Once, I was knitting in front of a painting and letting my water dance with it. I took my time to contemplate. Some people stopped me to ask if that was a performance. I did not intend it to become one. But it was. Because the encounter between some of my pieces and some of the obsessions poured into that painting was witnessed by strangers.
Perhaps what I like the most about performance is that it creates sites for us to witness one another, without judgment. Other times, it becomes a playground or a place to heal, for a moment. Alone and together.
When I perform and I am really into it, when I reach what I like to call “a performative high,” my little pains, my marks, do not suppress me. Instead, I am present with what is. How wonderful it is when one feels the taste of the messiness that makes life roar.
– Do you have any rituals before performing?
Yes. I like to shake, shake, and shake. I put on some music and use a good hour to move my bones. I acknowledge my fears and choose not to let them eat my joy. I refuse to multitask. For that precious, limited amount of time, I allow myself to become the monster that lives in me.
– What was the best performance you have done so far? Why?
I don’t know. And I am not sure if it makes sense to give attention to this question.
What I hope is that each performance will become a place to encounter a stranger, for a moment. Sometimes that stranger might live in me, other times, in others.
If I think of “best” as the one when I fully fulfilled what was expected from me, then I would say my birth. I was born in a hospital corridor. The nurse was repeatedly telling my mother to shut up. She had enjoyed making me, now it was time for her to endure the consequences and do her job, push me out. I did my part and went through my mother’s vagina. I was told I came out full of shit and that I screamed very loudly in that nurse’s face. My mother felt a little bit better for a second. But fiction apart, we are just coadjuvants in our own births, aren’t we? I should not take credit for my mother’s work…
If I think of ‘best’ as the one who gave me the most intense feeling of aliveness, then I need to return to my initial answer. That feeling can not be measured. Perhaps it should not. As a performer, for me, a good performance is not one that someone else labels as such, but one where the sense of aliveness comes to me and to others. It is one where, at least for a moment, something unexpected happens. I hope that before I die, each one of my pieces can taste, smell, and touch aliveness, for an impossible second at a time.
– Are you currently working on any performance?
Yes. At the moment, I am working on a performative lecture which will be shared as part of BEK symposium next month. Like a lot of my current work, it is inspired by books, which I like to call my companions. This one is on Change, Time, and the Burnout Society. I am lucky, and the Brazilian composer Késia Decote will accompany me with some improvisations on her little piano.
At the same time, I am trying to find the steps for the work in progress I will share next January as part of Dans en fest. This time, I am playing with how to translate my latest book fragile certainties, into a performance.
– What advice would you give to someone who is interested in working with performance?
Do it!
Jump into it. Lick it. Dance with it. Write a silly text and say it out loud. Go out and start a conversation with a stranger to warm up. Whichever way works for you, dare to do it.
If you are shy, maybe you can find a beautiful soul and invite her to do something unusual with you.
Ps: When I read this question, I immediately remembered Mary Oliver’s last sentence of the poem Summer Day. "Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"
For me, performance is a reminder that one must dare to ask oneself this fundamental question, again and again. This fragment of a poem can remove you from survival mode and carry you back to the liminal spaces where aliveness knows how to flourish.
– Can you give us a few names of performance artists who inspire you?
There are so many, known and unknown. I will name the last two that touched me.
Last spring, my dear friend Rita María Muñoz Farías gave birth to a poetic and strange performance on memory and language that made me feel so many different things at the same time. It was pure gentleness supported by a very honest and vulnerable creative process.
A few weeks ago, I witnessed Version(s) by Dorothée Munyaneza in collaboration with Christian Nka and Ben LaMarGay, as part of the ongoing São Paulo Bienal. Again, a work that started with what is personal and left open, in front of my skin, pains that are children of injustices. I laughed, thought, and felt with it. It was beautiful and ugly. Relatable and so strange. It astonished me. It left me open, staring at some of my undigested preconceptions. Later, I noticed a little desire to start boxing growing in my left arm.
