Why do you dance, Diego Chamy ?

If I take this question literally, I couldn’t answer it, since I no longer dance — at least not in the way I did between 2006 and 2008, when these performances were filmed. If I think about the reasons that I had back then, the question remains tricky — it is easy now to look for reasons for an event that happened in the past, but it is never clear if such reasons were there so clearly at that moment.

I remember I started to dance at home, with my ex-girlfriend, who was a dancer (Macarena Cifuentes). When we were together we constantly made weird movements in front of each other, without any specific meaning or reason — movements that came out of happiness of being together. Then we incorporated these movements — and some poems — in our performances (back then I was playing percussion). Slowly, these movements and texts became more important than the music I was playing. I found myself dancing as an effect of pure happiness, holding also a secret hope to inspire happiness in others. That’s a positive reason, but I guess there were negative ones too. For example, as a musician, I worked a lot with dancers and I was most of the times disappointed by their work. That was quite frustrating for me, so when I started to dance I developed all the movements and actions that I would have liked to see in professional dancers but hardly found in them. Sometimes they were not even reified as movements — it was more about a way of moving, a specific tone or quality — a manner. The dance had to be violently playful, unpretentious, light, and not uptight or pompous in any way. The movements had to come from an untrained body, which qualities are more subtle and difficult to recognize than what a dancers’ disciplined body is normally able to express. And besides such expressive aspects, I wanted to pay special attention, when improvising, to formal aspects — something rare in dancers (and musicians) devoted to improvisation.

Another reason for dancing was that I wanted to try doing something more codified or formalized than the music I was playing. Although improvised music is already partially codified, working with body movements and spoken words put myself in a much more codified or recognizable universe. This had two immediate advantages for me: first, it brought me closer to the non-specialized audience, because they recognized my gestures easier than the sounds I was making, which can be quite alienating; and second, I felt that I could find more freedom and inspiration within a universe of recognizable gestures. This might sound paradoxical, but the practice has proved that it is so — at least for me. When I deal with codified or recognizable gestures I feel very amused by all the things that such codes imply. I can play with such implications, decide to respect them or not and abuse them to reach my own purposes. I learnt that, within these strong codes that immediately and involuntarily appear when one sees a body moving or listen to someone speaking, I can easier develop my own problems or tackle the subjects I’m interested in (like stupidity, repetitions, interruptions, free love, vulnerability, confusion, things taken out of context, etc.). In short, I danced because at that moment it was the most practical thing I could do.

Diego Chamy, September 28, 2011