INTERVIEWS, SCENERIES, POINT OF VIEWS AND DOTS
GABRIELA ALDANA-KEKONI is a choreographer, dancer, healer and tradition bearer, with deep and versatile knowledge and know-how on the expressive human. Gabriela was born in Chile where she lived her childhood under the dictatorship of Pinochet. Living in a violent and restrictive society made her question the nature of humanism from an early age. Gabriela is a trained ballet and contemporary dancer, dance teacher and body therapeutist and before fully entering the professional dance career she also studied psychology in the university for five years. She has worked as a professional dancer in Chile and in Brussels and since 1998 she has lived in Finland working as a choreographer and performer and deepening her practice as a tradition bearer and healer.
How did you become an artist? GABRIELA: Well, I don’t necessarily consider myself as an artist but rather as skilled, someone who has the know-how. What is it then that you know how to do? GABRIELA: I can think of many things but very few words come to mind...Definitely dance is one of the things that I am skilled at. But it might be that my interest in dance is slightly different or slightly vaster than what one would normally think when talking about dance as an art form. I don’t want to call myself a dance artist, because in my mind artist is someone who relates to different art institutions. It feels like dance artist is someone deeply dependent on resources and funds and all the ideas are left on a hold in hope for bigger (or any) grants. Artistry has a somewhat negative undertone to me because of my personal history and all the financial difficulties that come with it. But when I think of myself as someone who possesses know-how and whiz, I feel completely free to do whatever I want and I feel determined to follow through with it. I know it’s just a matter of words but words relate to and partially remake the experiences and emotions. For myself I have decided to step out of the artworld. I do still apply for grants but in a much more relaxed manner: I simply gather my thoughts on a paper without any additional stress. And I always follow through with my plans. I always realize my art and ideas because I know how to do it. It is my way of life. I have to do it. It is completely independent in relation to artistic institutions. You have a vast and varied knowledge and know-how in several different areas of life and also diverse perspective from several different cultural contexts. You have studied in depth psychology and dance and performed all over Europe. In which ways do you see the art of healer and the art of dancer/choreographer intertwining and coming together? GABRIELA: It all comes together and connects in something that I call the wisdom of nature. Everything starts from nature. And I am not simply talking about spending more time outdoors. Any situation that one finds oneself in is born out of and supported by the nature: The body is the nature. I am not a different person when performing as a choreographer than when performing as a healer. All the roles that I play out have their origin in the nature, in my body and in my connectivity with (my) nature. It is ALL pure life. I am constantly aware of different natural cyclic periods in my life and in the world. This makes all my work really grounded and connected. It doesn’t mean that I would be just drifting as part of the natural flow of things: I also actively dive into the flow of nature to look for answers. I also had a period in my life where I studied in the university and seeked for answers from the outside. It is a very important role and phase in the life, this role of a student. When embodying this role you think that all that you are looking for is somehow outside of yourself. At the same time you learn to think and understand and listen. But at some point there came a phase when I realised, that even though I found everything extremely interesting, the answers never seemed to satisfy me. I was always left feeling hungry. It wasn’t until I learned how to connect with my own nature and through my nature to other people and to all the things that are alive around me, that I started to experience satisfaction. There are a lot of prejudices concerning this wisdom of nature: It is seen as something pagan or ancient or even as some kind of a cult. And that’s fine by me. For me honesty and sincerity have always been things that I have searched for. I have to be honest in order to continue. Honesty is in the root of humanity. As a child, living in Chile under the dictatorship of Pinochet, I didn’t experience living in a world where this humanity would be present. I would come home from school wondering why there were three dead men laying by the lake shore. When asking about it at home, the nurse would just hush and whisper that I shouldn’t be asking that kinds of questions. Nobody was allowed to speak about the fact that people were being killed under the dictatorship. I became a very thoughtful and pondering child. Thinking about the questions of humanity saved me from becoming too fearful or even mad. I needed to understand WHY. Why people were doing what they were doing. Where is the human? What is humanism? That has always been one of my main questions. The other important quest has been the longing for freedom, the longing to experience freedom of expression and freedom of being. As growing up in Chile you weren’t allowed to express yourself or trust anyone. People were living their lives almost as if they were imprisoned with strict curfews. Embodying this distrust on a daily basis created an enormous longing and desire to experience a feeling of freedom. When I was 4 years old I decided that I was going to be a dancer. In movement I found the freedom that I was looking for and I realised that this movement didn’t only affect me but also all the people around me. Also the traditions of natural wisdoms were present already in my childhood home and culture, but I experienced this wisdom then as being dangerous in that political situation. The understanding of dance culture in my family back then was not too diverse, so without thinking about it too much, I was put into a ballet class. Even if ballet as a dance style is quite structured and stiff and even distinctively masculine in its sharp linear expressive quality, I could reach the feeling of freedom simply when being able to open my arms wide or lift my leg high. Who would you consider being the biggest influences to you? GABRIELA: Artistically Carmen Beuchat is probably one of the biggest influences to me. She is a Chilean dancer who during her early career studied with such as Pina Bausch in Germany and later on moved to New York where she made a career as an artist and performer presenting work for example in the Judson Church and dancing in the first company of Trisha Brown. After New York Beuchat returned to Chile to give workshops and to make performances. The performances most often happened in the streets or in public spaces, away from the traditional theater contexts. It was very postmodern :) Beuchat worked with different kinds of structures which performers learned and worked on in changing circumstances, sometimes dancing upside down, sometimes changing the sequential order just before entering the stage, sometimes playing with the qualities of movement, or dancing on rooftops of high buildings. What Beuchat was most interested in was mistakes. She was always looking for the mistakes and embracing them. Valuing mistakes as something beautiful is something so profoundly humain. After all, it is only humans that make mistakes! I entered the Beauchat’s work as a classically trained dancer with high expectations for delivering every performance as perfectly as possible. But it was simply impossible to deliver Beuchat’s structures perfectly: Sometimes in the large productions, where the scores of the dancers were in a constant movement, people would just bump into each other or forget to catch someone jumping towards them. From the outside it must have looked like a punch of totally crazy people. The feeling performing inside of this structure was a feeling of complete surrendering. Crazy surrendering and enormous trust. So genuine and so beautiful. I remember once having a retreat kind of a rehearsal with Beauchat where we went through one structure for 35 times so that all the 35 performers would be able to once step out of the structure and see the performance. It went on over 24 hours. The energy that was created in that group during those hours was amazing. After this experience I could trust everyone, completely. All the disagreements just melted away and made no difference anymore. It was a genuine spirit and feeling of a community. This is something that I look for in my own work also. These mistakes and discontinuities and moments where people see each other as fellow humans. It is something completely other than working with a thoroughly fixed composition. How would you compare the dancing scenes between for example Chile and Finland? GABRIELA: In Chile there are no resources for dance. All the professionals there are people with whiz and profound determination. In Santiago there are at least five dance festivals a year and the small artist fees are covered via different kinds of sponsors. The biggest dance festivals nowadays involve and incorporate also regional restaurants and hotels to be part of the festivals and the city theater gives space for the performances for free. Almost all the performances are free for the audiences. What are your professional dreams now? GABRIELA: I would continue with the same things that I am doing now, but in my dreams I would pay the professionals better. I have been lucky to have excellent performers willing to participate and create work with me, even though I haven’t been able to pay affluent fees every time. If I was suddenly awarded with abundant grants I would definitely hire as many professional performers as possible and create events that would form and constitute an artistic human network. I would send the artists to different locations and surroundings to establish dancing estates in different kinds of places, partly hidden, partly unexpected and make audience encounter dance as part of life. Maybe I am more interested in performance art rather than pure dance. Something communal somehow. I want to create art that is profoundly human and also environmentally conscious. I am also interested in looking deep into the reasons behind different desires that people have. Behind the desire there is a need and maybe even behind the need there is something that one can become conscious of. I always try to make my art through making this kind of a journey. When I am directing people I am directing them to take this diving journey and realising the performance through the things that arise through this kind of looking and diving behind desires and needs. I believe that performing through this kind of a process also influences the communication between the performer and audience. It is a different kind of a situation where the roles of performer and audience disappear and in the end there are only two people meeting each other. I work through these kinds of action guiding bridges, but never direct people to perform something specific in advance. I do make the performers practice but I never set any specific expectations in relation to the final performative product. Most of the time it is impossible to explain in words what one finds behind the need. But it always expresses itself through the body. When this happens I am of course no longer there in a role of a choreographer but rather as a supporter or one could say a guide and guardian in a ritual. Someone who creates a safe space for the performer to live through the ritual. The performative context or the amount of performers can vary a lot in this kind of way of performing. I find it also essential to sometimes return to old performative scores and perform them through even by myself, alone in the forest. According to the shamanic tradition the time is non-linear, so whatever I may live in those solitary performances are similarly part of the performative event. Maybe it is a way of re-understanding. I am a caretaker. I worry for the human kind and our survival. I would love the beauty of nature to continue on. Human has drifted far away from the body and from the nature, or is not conscious of the connections which interconnect us all to one another. In buddhist terms we are living in an illusion of disconnection and regulations, orders of conduct. There is so much habitual illusory behaviour and conduct and thousands of unnecessary regulations, such as “Don’t cry”, “Don’t shout”, “Don’t be angry”...Regulations that restrain the self-expression. And when one is unable to express oneself, one has no knowledge of self. Nobody knows who they are anymore! This has for long been a way to control people, to hinder them from knowing who they are. Now people are paying for different kinds of classes and workshops hoping to find their own strength. Ofcourse the strength is always there, even in the most ordinary daily errands, but since the self-expression is being hindered, people are unable to reach it by themselves. Everyone, regardless of being an artist or school teacher or buss driver, should have a moment every day, when they can just simply express themselves freely. It is profoundly important. It is a basic need. It is not true that you shouldn’t cry. it is not true that you shouldn’t be angry. It is not true that you shouldn’t love madly. It is not true that you shouldn’t rage furiously. True freedom is unlimited. https://juurakonvoima.com/
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