The body movement of a frustrated post-internet generation

2023-06-13 22:32:12

The light goes out. Someone arrives in the center of the room and begins to speak in a high-pitched, unintelligible voice, short, fast. Behind him, two screens project into a text the interpretation of his language, a language that is not understood but which, nevertheless, is too close to everyone. It is reminiscent of a video game, a robot, or hypersaturated audio. It is the language of the digital age. When he speaks, he does so with a jerky and repetitive movement that makes him wave his very long hair as if it were part of a previous audiovisual design. As if seen through a screen. But it’s there. Of flesh and bone. And in the middle of the Black Room of the Teatros del Canal in Madrid, the character warns that a computer programming process will start shortly; since then, a multitude of figures invade the land who run, jump, twist, drop to the ground, look, open their mouths, close it, touch their faces, their bodies, move away, turn around, keep running. And one begins to think of oneself.

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Further

“There is something in virtuality that for me is not exotic. It is something that already goes with me ”, he says Guillem Jimenezdancer, choreographer and director of the piece ACLUCALLS which was presented in the capital at the end of May within the 38th Madrid Dance Festival but that it is designed to continue programming “in the different places” that welcome the proposal, he announces. In a conversation with this newspaper, he tells that the name of laSADCUMthe dance company that he created in Barcelona four years ago, which he prefers to call a ‘project’, was born when a friend told him that on his 18th birthday “he had only had one sad cum, a sad run, an unsatisfactory masturbation”. It seemed to him a concept “too representative of an entire generation”, to which Jiménez belongs and about which he was already inevitably beginning to investigate. in his first artistic works.

The artist thinks that “we behave like avatars” because “intuitively we repeat everything we consume and make it a source of inspiration”. ACLUCALLS, in fact, it is also made up of constant audiovisual references that are directly related to the movements of the artists on stage. “Behaving like an avatar that does the same thing that it consumes is not emulating technology, it is what we already have inside”, explains Guillem. “Something that we have worked on a lot in the piece is try to generate very virtual bodies, but due to the duration and the type of rhythm we have, they become something organic ”, he points out. And that meaning embraces everything. A cast of twelve interpreters —Alexa Moya, Carla Moll, Javi Valls, Juan Galo, Judit Amengual, Laia Camps, Marina Olivares, Meritxell de Soto, Ona Cros, Stefano de Luca, Vera Palomino and Guillem Jiménez himself— who on the ground they drag, they overturn, they are crushed. They allow themselves to be invaded by a violent force. That of his own identity.

Behaving like an avatar that repeats what it consumes is not emulating technology, it is what we already have inside

Guillem Jimenez
— Dancer and choreographer

If he has to call it something, Guillem points out, the term is “contemporary dance”, but in reality he firmly believes that what he explores is “the same” as with his life, he says: “A collage, a patch, a juxtaposition of things that have to do with the body, video or music”, for example. “I have learned a lot of dance online. Watching videos, trailers of pieces or posts on Instagram. I think that we are all that we have done, so at SADCUM we like to work on dance as something much more general”, she emphasizes.

I have learned a lot of dance online, so I explore a ‘collage’ of things that have to do with the body, video or music

Guillem Jimenez
— Dancer and choreographer

“Three or four years ago, when I began to devise the project, I was reading many theoretical discourses about the next generation and technological immersion, but they were all from a point that was very external to the collective experience”, he explains. “They were philosophers talking about bodies and generations that I was already living. Pornography, computer saturation or exposure on networks were not foreign things to me, but something very experiential that made me think that I do not behave like that because I want to, but because I don’t know how to do it any other way”, thinks the Barcelona dancer .

That’s why ACLUCALLS —which is the Catalan term for the blinders that are put on the horses so that they only see the straight path, avoiding any distraction from the sides— is “a grotesque self-portrait of society and of the post-internet generation” that is built from starting from three key concepts: computer programming —which can be understood “from the choreography, from the programming of our bodies,” says the director—; the screen, and the workout, a term that refers to the work or exercise of the body and that Guillem uses to talk about a contemporary insistence on “programming the body, sculpting it, going for a goal, that of capitalizing on your own body”. These are some of the traumas that the artist identifies as common in the decade of overexposure, hypersexualization, precariousness, and self-realization. And the work delves into all of them.

The narrative of the work is zero empowered. I never wanted to represent it as something negative, but as a way of telling what happens to us, period.

Guillem Jiménez
— Dancer and choreographer

Dedicating himself to dance, explains the choreographer —who is also the brother of the dancer Paul Jimenez—, for him the bodies “already tell things” by themselves. He emphasizes that he likes to examine the way in which people show themselves in something as daily as a conversation, and there he observes that the youngest are “all the time looking at other places, the body is more restless”, while people who are from 30 or 40 years old “look directly into the eyes, the body is calmer,” he reflects. “These are things that are already there.” Like standing before a mirror.

From trauma to work

Making common malaise a focus of creation came almost by itself. The creator of him argues that for him “it is very important to generate contemporary narratives that are easily accessible”, and believes that this is one of them. “Any type of viewer, regardless of their generation, their trade, their tastes or whether they pay more attention to some things than others, can understand the journey. It is a journey in which you see characters that gradually become saturated ”, he advances. He insists that it is a way of being in the world. “The narrative of the work is zero empowered. I never wanted to represent it as something negative, but as a way of telling what happens to us, period”, emphasizes Guillem. “But I don’t know if it turned out very well. Clearly the piece is quite sad,” he clarifies.

Added to the insecurities of a precarious young society are the widespread trials of the so-called ‘glass generation’. But Guillem rebuts it by saying: “I can’t talk to you about other problems, I can talk to you about mine. And I want to do it honestly.” The choreographer recalls that, sometimes, a certain distance is generated in the general reaction of the piece: while the younger people “empathize a lot”, they have an influence, sometimes another older public “is very touched when they see the point of view that our generation has of itself”.

Until now, SADCUM has been present in institutions such as the CCCB —where the co-produced work premiered, together with the Dansa Metropolitana—, La Casa Encendida, Teatro El Musical, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, the MAC Festival or La Capella, among others. . His works have won various awards and have been hosted by artistic residences and other cultural spaces such as Graner, Fabra i Coats, Center Civic Barceloneta or La Caldera, and ACLUCALLS received the Injuve Creation grant. Next year it will open STATES, Jiménez advances to elDiario.es, a project that is born from his own experience with education in porn and that culminates in a social exploration that identifies sexuality as the central axis of identity.

“A few years ago I stopped being twink [término que define al prototipo de chico joven en el colectivo gay, normalmente marcado por rasgos comunes en la pubertad como la ausencia de vello corporal o la delgadez]and I had a very strange frustration because everything I had learned was through porn, I only consumed twinks con daddies”, reflects Guillem. “I thought a lot about Spring consecration by pina bausch, that moment of the arrival of the period, of fertility, of the moment of maximum sexualization. He wanted to address the issue of sexuality in any gender, but from that point where the body is not yet defined, where one is no longer young but not an adult either. It is the intermediate point in which I find myself, even in dance ”, he maintains. “It will be a musical ballet of twinkslolitas and folk assassins”, reveals the choreographer with a laugh.

A few hours after going out into the center of the theater and launching into a daring, faithful and mesmerizing portrait of what they are, Guillem Jiménez ends up talking about how the career of a young emerging artist is deeply marked by the same traumas that they are now exposing. “I’m starting and I don’t know myself. I notice that there is a kind of pressure to have to be very sure of many things, but I’m not”, reflects the dancer. “I will never say that my work always talks about technology, even if it does, because I don’t want to lock myself into anything”, he points out.

And although SADCUM starts “from a very intuitive place”, believes Guillem Jiménez, there is nothing more to stand up to Aclucalls to understand that many of the things that sometimes serve as an artistic axis already have a place, a time. And they are close at hand. “At a generational level there is a need to force oneself to mature, to assert oneself and to value what is not defined, to the things that we simply experience”, says the artist. “But the speeches and the policies are in the day to day”, he concludes.