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Words by Noel Bonilla-Chongo for the presentation of the book Boán, la Danza,
authored by Alejandro Aguilar and published by Ediciones Alarcos,
2016 (ISBN: 978-959-305-081-4)
Havana International Book Fair, Friday, February 9, 2018.
Boán, the Dance: of its reasonable manias to live-think-create*
Yes, I insist: even today I still have no doubts; It is from the body where all writings are born and from where all readings are made. Meanwhile, the writing of dance cannot detach itself from the dancing body, from that Lezamian “piece of elapsed flesh.” Passed by longings, happiness, desires, pain, joy, frustration, stillness, evil, goodbyes and also sweet welcomes, prophecies of magical stories. Now, this, my writing, does not detach itself from my body either. It is born from the vital rhythm, from impulses that generate tensions that make me dance, perhaps writing?
Yes, even today, the finite condition of dance threatens its transcendence. The brief stage action is usually taken as the beginning and end point of the act of dancing, frequently ignoring the history that gives it references and the ideological and aesthetic postulates that support it. Even so, assuming dance in its theoretical dimension entails an exercise full of responsibilities, demands, and misunderstandings. Addressing it from a historical perspective implies rigor and irreducible attachment to the truth. Treating it from the perspective of critical appreciation leads to the development of a new aesthetic discourse based on the creative act that gave rise to it.
Therefore, given the good voyeur maneuver that reading and consulting Boán, the Dance has provoked in me; I feel like remembering that subtle butchering method that Omar used when he presented the first issue of the magazine Tablas in his directorial debut..., but the fine workmanship, exquisite polygraphy and content of this holistic notebook would not allow me to do so. He records, like a catalog raisonné, the itineraries of one of the most “language” and timely creators in Cuban performing art.
Boán, the Dance, is articulated from the careful intertextual and contextual collage where the life and work of Marianela Boán in these first forty-five years of her life, conveys a very particular narrative discourse. Without resorting to the most common methodologies of constructing a current biography, Alejandro Aguilar (poet, narrator, compiler, and Boán's husband) knew how to discern among so much accumulated INFO to arrive at that sum of identity that, like a patent of marque, he extracts in synthesis his presentation of Made in Boán production.
And the fact is that, for those of us who had the experience of being its regular spectators or of sharing as professional colleagues or simple admirers since the movement generated in the Cuban scene of the second half of the eighties, whether we like it or not, with Boán, la Danza, our nostalgia quiets (or, perhaps, we are reminded). Well, her ways of making the polis dance from the polyphony of the word and the meaning of the gesture, distinguish the elegance in the Cuban dance of those who, even from a distance, assure that all purity is sterile. She, like few others, knew how to put her finger on the sore spot to tell us how dangerous the area of effectively theatricalizing (or, better, dancing) “the Cuban thing” is.
Today, we would all say that the Cuadernos Tablas collection dresses up in luxury, dressed in its best clothes... In the more than two hundred pages of Boán, la Danza, the textual is returned to us as a kind of transmedia narrative (even without physically annexing the record in video of the choreographic production of Marianela), but the delicate work of the designers Yudarkis Veloz and Annelis Noriega based on the selection of documents, refine the commitment and demanding way that Boán and Aguilar chose to conceive the presentation of their “Reasons ”.
As I said, if for those of us who accompany the choreographic work of Marianela Boán and her most fruitful creation: the founding of the DanzAbierta company thirty years ago (with which she produced the most memorable pieces of Cuban contemporary dance, The fish from the tower swims in the asphalt or Chorus Perpetuus), this book is a reciprocal gift in return; For those who came later, Boán, la Danza, would be understood as a real and imaginative expansion of a feature film that will incorporate in progress new amplifications and readings, since without a doubt, its publication and putting into circulation by Tablas-Alarcos is a coherent and well-deserved reverence for Marianela's creative work. The main pivot in the multiple transitions experienced in search of other levels of understanding about the artistic expressions of dance and, what I believe is fundamental, having promoted the creation of a critical consciousness in Cuban dance.
She, a faithful devotee of the teachings of maestro Ramiro Guerra, like him, knows that choreographic art (like all good art) must deal with the singular, with the
Words by Noel Bonilla-Chongo for the presentation of the book Boán, la Danza,
authored by Alejandro Aguilar and published by Ediciones Alarcos,
2016 (ISBN: 978-959-305-081-4)
Havana International Book Fair, Friday, February 9, 2018.
Boán, the Dance: of its reasonable manias to live-think-create*
Yes, I insist: even today I still have no doubts; It is from the body where all writings are born and from where all readings are made. Meanwhile, the writing of dance cannot detach itself from the dancing body, from that Lezamian “piece of elapsed flesh.” Passed by longings, happiness, desires, pain, joy, frustration, stillness, evil, goodbyes and also sweet welcomes, prophecies of magical stories. Now, this, my writing, does not detach itself from my body either. It is born from the vital rhythm, from impulses that generate tensions that make me dance, perhaps writing?
Yes, even today, the finite condition of dance threatens its transcendence. The brief stage action is usually taken as the beginning and end point of the act of dancing, frequently ignoring the history that gives it references and the ideological and aesthetic postulates that support it. Even so, assuming dance in its theoretical dimension entails an exercise full of responsibilities, demands, and misunderstandings. Addressing it from a historical perspective implies rigor and irreducible attachment to the truth. Treating it from the perspective of critical appreciation leads to the development of a new aesthetic discourse based on the creative act that gave rise to it.
Therefore, given the good voyeur maneuver that reading and consulting Boán, the Dance has provoked in me; I feel like remembering that subtle butchering method that Omar used when he presented the first issue of the magazine Tablas in his directorial debut..., but the fine workmanship, exquisite polygraphy and content of this holistic notebook would not allow me to do so. He records, like a catalog raisonné, the itineraries of one of the most “language” and timely creators in Cuban performing art.
Boán, the Dance, is articulated from the careful intertextual and contextual collage where the life and work of Marianela Boán in these first forty-five years of her life, conveys a very particular narrative discourse. Without resorting to the most common methodologies of constructing a current biography, Alejandro Aguilar (poet, narrator, compiler, and Boán's husband) knew how to discern among so much accumulated INFO to arrive at that sum of identity that, like a patent of marque, he extracts in synthesis his presentation of Made in Boán production.
The fact is that, for those of us who had the experience of being its regular spectators or of sharing as professional colleagues or simple admirers since the movement generated in the Cuban scene of the second half of the eighties, whether we like it or not, with Boán, la Danza, our nostalgia quiets (or, perhaps, we are reminded). Well, her ways of making the polis dance from the polyphony of the word and the meaning of the gesture, distinguish the elegance in the Cuban dance of those who, even from a distance, assure that all purity is sterile. She, like few others, knew how to put her finger on the sore spot to tell us how dangerous the area of effectively theatricalizing (or, better, dancing) “the Cuban thing” is.
Today, we would all say that the Cuadernos Tablas collection dresses up in luxury, dressed in its best clothes... In the more than two hundred pages of Boán, la Danza, the textual is returned to us as a kind of transmedia narrative (even without physically annexing the record in the video of the choreographic production of Marianela), but the delicate work of the designers Yudarkis Veloz and Annelis Noriega based on the selection of documents, refine the commitment and demanding way that Boán and Aguilar chose to conceive the presentation of their “Reasons ”.
As I said, for those of us who accompany the choreographic work of Marianela Boán and her most fruitful creation: the founding of the DanzAbierta company thirty years ago (with which she produced the most memorable pieces of Cuban contemporary dance, The fish from the tower swims in the asphalt or Chorus Perpetuus), this book is a reciprocal gift in return; For those who came later, Boán, la Danza, would be understood as a real and imaginative expansion of a feature film that will incorporate in progress new amplifications and readings, since without a doubt, its publication and putting into circulation by Tablas-Alarcos is a coherent and well-deserved reverence for Marianela's creative work. The main pivot in the multiple transitions experienced in search of other levels of understanding about the artistic expressions of dance and, what I believe is fundamental, having promoted the creation of critical consciousness in Cuban dance.
She, a faithful devotee of the teachings of maestro Ramiro Guerra, like him, knows that choreographic art (like all good art) must deal with the singular, with the
lack, of the exception, not the rule. So in the face of so much fragmentation of the reader-spectator audiences, we want Boán, the Dance, to be part of that singularity that helps us in the contributing transformation of those of us who continue to believe in seeing dance as an area of knowledge and cognitive, epistemological, reflective, reviewer of the body and its corporality, whose specificity demands the structuring of its own theoretical-operational instrumentation, sufficiently extensive to imply the articulation of other knowledge and correlates, the only possible way to be able to encompass the complexity of dance itself, today more than ever. when the existence of life and its narrating bodies gravitate to so many threats in this world.
Congratulations to its author and to us, its readers, for these reasonable ways to live-think-create-in and through dance. Thank you so much!