on collectivity as practice and form

The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd. Here we have made use of everything that came within range, what was closest as well as farthest away. We have assigned clever pseudonyms to prevent recognition. Why have we kept our own names? Out of habit, purely out of habit. To make ourselves unrecognizable in turn. To render imperceptible, not ourselves, but what makes us act, feel, and think. (…) To reach, not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I. We are no longer ourselves. Each will know his own. We have been aided, inspired, multiplied.(1)

It’s always with renewed admiration that I read the first paragraph of A Thousand Plateaus by Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze. I am first surprised how they could write together, then I wonder how they did it, how they rewrote each other’s phrases and edited their thoughts. Did Guattari start and Deleuze continue as an exquisite corpse? Would Deleuze recite to Guattari? What things would they say differently if they wrote individually?

I was given the chance to write this text with others, but this time I chose to start from my solitude. I realize I spend a lot of time alone, although I work most of the time in collaboration. I make choreography collectively. I run a space collectively. I am part of an artists’ association. I co-edit a journal. I co-curate and research. And I write texts collectively. While I am saying “I”, I wonder if I’d rather be saying “we.” At many times I thought I wanted to be in a collective because I did not want to be alone and many times I have been in a collective and I realized I wanted to be alone. Other times I have been in a collective because I didn’t know what to do by myself. I needed to exchange ideas in order to get the work somewhere. Sometimes I have been in a collective because others had no ideas of what to do and needed my help.

When I was working on the re-performance of Continuous Project Altered Daily (1970) by Yvonne Rainer, back in 2011, I had to self-reflect on the modes in which dancers and choreographers gather and work together.(2) While Rainer’s practice focuses on the politics of group dynamics, decision making, authorship, group choreography modalities (unison, task oriented, improvising, etc.), I realized that one of the things that was put “on stage” was the practice of how we come into dance and into making dances. 

Gil Mendo used to say that in the 1990s, one of the key principles of changing tradition brought in by the Portuguese New Dance movement was that dancers became co-creators and collaborators, rather than mere executors, interpreters, or performers.(3) It was a shift in the understanding of what a dancer is. This was a point of no return that was foundational to an ethic of working together — of opening the process, of exchanging knowledge and working something out in a dialogue. Ideologically it seems less oppressive and productivity-oriented rather than the prevailing models in repertory companies. 

When I started working in the field of contemporary dance, I realized that collaboration was a key element of the artistic process, yet often went unrecognized or was deprioritized for the sake of authorship. Choreographers tend to extract energy, creative and conceptual intelligence from dancers, and many times the only thing given in return is poor payment without artistic credit. They say they collaborate but, in the end, they present the work as if it was done alone.

In my experience, one of the key elements of making a successful work in the freelance community is that everyone on the team is happy and able to engage in the work through believing it, trusting it, making sense of it, and being a part of it. Otherwise it becomes like any other job. As artists, we don’t want our work to be just a job, we want to make new worlds. Collaboration is essential in the well-being of the people and the work, however it continues to originate power conflicts inherited from liberal society. In an article called “Collectivity? You mean collaboration?” Bojana Cvejić argues that contrary to the dominant discourse in freelance dance, artists are often scared of collectives because they are afraid that their individual voice will be undermined in the process.(4)

More than half of the works I have made were co-authored by other artists and the ones I call "mine” were made in collaboration with temporary collectives. Sometimes being the author means that one initiates a project, gathers the means to put it together, chooses the team and manages the administration. It is “my” project because I have arranged the production, while the work in the studio and the ideas come from a combination of different contributions, discussions, and negotiations. Often different modalities of work become fluid in terms of power dynamics and authority. Collectivity is a dramaturgy in and of itself. The following three projects demonstrate some of my evolving thoughts on collectivity as practice and form.

continued project

In 2014, I invited five dancers and choreographers — Ana Rita Teodoro, Clarissa Sacchelli, Daniel Pizamiglio, Filipe Pereira, and Sabine Macher — to collaborate on a work that would depart from my aforementioned experience with Continuous Project Altered Daily. I was interested in continuing the questions, problems, and proposals I encountered in the original Rainer work, which I understood as a group exercising collectivity as a choreographic apparatus. These ideas were provocative to me and seemed absent in most of the work I saw at the time: solo pieces of emergent artists. For this reason, I called the work Continued Project. 

In dance performances, a solo is often about identity, a duet is a relationship, and a group work is related to the collective. Dance is a prominent activity for “being together,” as dancing is something one traditionally does with others. I wanted to depart from this understanding and rearticulate the question to ask: Could dance and choreography be tools to think about collectivity and reshape modes of togetherness? During the process I proposed bringing different historical choreographies to analyze them; both in our bodies and discursively. I was interested in the relationship between choreographic aesthetics and political ideology, that is, between an ideal of the body and an ethical ideal of being in the world. The work was built on ideas of “practicing” and “exercising” choreography together. We would learn dances and scores whose sensations and effects on our bodies we would later discuss. For example, we performed the repetition of a choreography by Isadora Duncan eight times, followed by a questionnaire about the experience of that dance; or we practiced different modern choreographies while being interviewed about them. 

The process started to take shape as a platform of shared practices, mediated by me, in which we created time and space for discussion. It felt like a group of people listening to each other more than a procedure for making a piece. I didn’t know what the work would ultimately look like and so the form remained as open as possible. Without knowing, the piece started to compose itself during the first open studio we had after a two-week residency in Montpellier. On the day of the presentation someone suggested that we could present what we did during each day of the residency. We would build an archeology of the process that would condense the two weeks of work into several scenes. Ana Rita proposed that instead of showcasing all we did, we would do everything we had talked about but did not do. We thus presented most of the work we had randomly discussed but had collectively deemed bad or too idealistic for the piece. Little by little we started to realize that the piece was not a monolith we were going to construct, but an ever-evolving presentation of the collective work we were doing each day in the studio. It was a multitude of practices and experiences sutured together in a collage. It was a record of how the performance of something informs and inscribes on the body and not something that disappears after its execution.

company

Two years later, in 2017, we continued to work together on a new project. The work was called Company, as in dance company, but also understood literally as making company or being in company. In the initial research, I proposed we deal with the relationship between dance and labor. We started with the case study of Rudolf von Laban’s systematization of the movement of factory workers in relation to machines, from which emerged a concept of choreography as technology or as prosthesis.(5) We talked about how certain dance aesthetics, with libertarian and democratic ambitions, are involved in the reduction of stress points in the body and in ideas of efficiency in the performance of a gesture. I was concerned with work and well-being by considering the way in which dance — as a production canon of pleasure, and thus difficult to identify socially as labor — interacts with its methods of doing. 

One of the first practices proposed was that each of us would establish and lead a “warm-up” that could be understood as a “technique.” Instead of appropriating choreographies from the past, we were trying to make up our own dance with our own ideals. Everyday one of us would give a warm-up that had to include a consistent preparation for the body and serve as an aesthetic experience. At the same time, we were reading Karl Marx’s Das Kapital out loud, trying to understand how we give value to work and goods, discussing what it means to be paid by hours of work, by effort; and activating ideas of care in choreography.

Although the work was led collectively, there was a lot of creative individual participation as everyone was meant to propose and share their own practice with the group. The collective was being understood as a modality of individual co-dependence. After a few weeks I came up with an idea to organize the performance as an assisted choreography that required collaboration to be concluded. This involved a protocol of building six autonomous choreographies that would be performed at the same time in space. Each of these choreographies could only be performed with the help and assistance of others. This idea appeared as an epiphany after trying to conceptualize the series of Dance Constructions by Simone Forti, and soon became a source of dispute and discomfort for the group. The work required everyone to be independent in the making yet depended in the execution. What I understood as an arrival point to the form of the work in the way it could express our mode of being together was also understood as the “end” of the process of “not knowing together” and transformed the rehearsals into a “choreography factory.”

If, in Continued Project, I felt that we arrived at something together (although I was the one initiating it) here I think I arrived at something — nonetheless with the collaboration of the group — through each individual performer's contribution. While I was interested in the tension that would arrive from inhabiting a space with different autonomous choreographies that would weave together, the process of arriving to it created resistance in the social dynamics of the work. In the end, it was an aesthetic ideal that perhaps missed the collaboration we had built as a group.

Cooperative

We understood that if we were to make another work together, it would have to be a collective project from the start, conceptualized, funded, produced, and administered by the collective as a whole. Of course this is not linear and we understand we are not all serving the same roles in the group; rather, as a collective, we acknowledge our differences and we realize how these skills can best contribute to it. Some of us are more gifted in organization and committed to schedules, others are free-willers and gifted in poetry. As we go on, we keep learning about each other and understanding one another’s work through doing. What creates distress and interrupts the process are protocols. 

As we try to recalibrate our collective dynamic, the group will, in 2025, make a new work we named Cooperative. While continuing to invest in this relationship between choreography and being together, we wish to create a more egalitarian basis of collaboration; a framework for collectivity without central leadership, authorship, and management. Now we face other questions that arise. Is it possible to make collective work without feeling the imbalance of working positions and their relationship to equal distribution of money? How does this affect the process? How do we establish commitment bound by trust and not by financial contract? What is the model for this if we all are dependent on a certain amount of money to live? Not only are we confronted with these group difficulties, but we are also beset by external problems. For example, institutions tend not to recognize a group, they want a spokesperson, contracts must be signed by one person, funding is standardized for individual artists. 

If in the 1960s the utopianism of collectives was about erasing boundaries, I feel today that collectivization is about finding new modes of living and existing in the artistic community and within contemporary societies. The poet Adília Lopes writes: “It’s over/ the age/ of ruptures// I want/ to be/ repairer/ of breaches.”(6) As more art schools open and programs are organized to accredit artists and put them out into the market, how can we make our existing and living more sustainable for the present and future? How can we afford ever more artists when governments everywhere are cutting funding? If dance companies became artistically obsolete and financially impractical, how are we going to organize ourselves on a less precarious basis and without deepening exclusion? Collectivization, cooperativism, and association are an opportunity to continue to reconfigure dance practice from within its modes of production that may also be a mode of survival in an evermore violent, individualistic world that continues to pursue war and colonialism as means for growth, development, and ultimate self-defense.