HARM-ONY by Marcela Levi and Lucía Russo [2019]
"HARM-ONY is an opening project: we have been working for 10 years, continuously/insistently in Rio de Janeiro - with the support of the Choreographic Center and the Consulate of Argentina in Brazil - under the name of Improvável Produções. “Improvável” because working with art in Rio de Janeiro, especially nowadays, is something that is not supposed to happen, is it?
This project foresees the participation of local artists. In each montage, the piece receives a different cast, that is, different strengths, moods, intensities and vibrations. The first production, made possible with the co-production of the Iberescena Artes Escénicas Iberoamericanas/Funarte fund and the NAVE center, took place in Santiago, Chile. At one point, during the rehearsals, a Chilean artist - Jesenia Oblitas - said: “even if we don't speak the same language, it's still possible to build something together.” That's what HARM-ONY is all about, articulating difference, at a distance.
This curious combination of the words "harmony" and "harm" rocks and instigates this dance that turns itself inside out to shake the "well-intentioned" desire for consensus of the "good people". Is an egalitarian society one in which everyone speaks the same language? Is consensus ultimately an authoritarian act?
The damage embedded in harmony invites us to think that we need difference, friction, strangers, disharmony, "idiots", those we don't understand. We need Others, that is, those who make it difficult for us to quickly reach a conclusion of what would or would not be good for everyone.
According to the Belgian philosopher Isabelle Stengers, the conceptual figure of the “idiot”, proposed by Deleuze, makes us slow down, opens up a space for hesitation in the face of the assumption of knowing what we know. Stengers invites us to think of equality not as equivalence, reciprocity, representation, but as a guarantee of the presence of heterogeneous languages/bodies. Moving away from the "good intentions" that support the desire for a "common good", it invites us to listen to the murmur of the idiot who says "There is something more important" and urges us to think about the possibility of sharing a constituted "not known" by the multiple, by the divergent positions of the world that could eventually be articulated.
There are people who rise above their heads, others who walk slowly and whisper "party!" and other people's bodies, those that bump, those that arch, those that dance cheek to cheek and those that would prefer not to. Welcome to HARM-ONY."
TECHNICAL AND ARTISTIC DATA SHEET
Conception, creation and direction: Marcela Levi & Lucía Russo
Performance and co-creation: Ícaro Gaya, Tamires Costa and Lucas Fonseca
Collaboration in the creation process: Taís Almeida and Victor Oliveira
Performance: Caroline Antônio, Fernando Vitor, Franco Maldonado, Gabriel Villas Boas, Isis Andreatta, José Urrea, Luisa Coser, Manfrin Manfrin, Martim Gueller, Monique Ottati, Thais Elvira, Tomás Braune and Yasmin Berzin
Light design: Johnatan Inostroza and Daniel Uryon
Sound and Costumes: Levi & Russo
Photography and video: Mila Ercoli and Isabel Ortiz
Drawings: Lucía Russo
Executive production and assistance: Gunnar Borges
Production Management: Carla Mullulo
Artistic Residencies / Support: Choreographic Center of the City of Rio de Janeiro / Municipal Secretariat of Culture, Consulate of Argentina in Rio de Janeiro, Cultural Space Sítio Canto da Sabiá, NAVE (Chile), Pact Zollverrein
Co-production: NAVE and Iberescena / Funarte
International broadcast: Something Great (Berlin – DE)
Production and artistic achievement: Improbable Productions
This project was awarded by the Fund Iberescena / Funarte for the Co-production of Iberoamerican creations 2018 and received funding from the Ministry of Culture of Chile.
