Page 170 - Únete. Join us (Bienal de Venecia, 57 edición)

27 Andrew Hewitt,
Social Choreography: Ideology as Performance in Dance and Everyday Movement, Durham: Duke University Press, 2005, p. 28.
170 ¡ÚNETE! JOIN US! JORDI COLOMER
local: the Bollywood gesticulation, estranged and wrested from its context, becomes a celebratory contrivance, regulated yet festive. Just as in the sequence shot depicting the Nashville country band, the ceremonial here generates a range of variations between the polarities of spontaneous action and cinematic convention: When the choreography ends, the camera movement following Anita down the street literally replicates the way the camera chases after female protagonists in Bollywood cinema. This super-textuality is echoed in the terraced seats: In the installation at the exhibition room, the Indian dance tutorial can be watched from a similar device, as we are beckoned to join the movement as a musical genre. The display’s factual function matches the containers, the colours of the uniforms... The guided, controlled motions turn the characters into obsessive subjects, locked onto actions at specific spots, stubborn like objects. Semes are distributed across these actions as a kind of embodiment of this indefinable movement, following a symbolic economy of belonging beyond the economic regimes the city incarnates within society.
Comparative Literature theorist Andrew Hewitt defines social choreography as the “cultural trading post where aesthetic norms [...] are tried out for the social formations they might produce, and at which new types of social interaction are forged into new artistic forms.”27 In Colomer’s work these social formations are a recognizable, paradigmatic contribution, generated by means of ludic forms of an ethical and epic type, through which individual gestures have an impact on collective symbolic production, and each piece is part of a joint polyphony distributed throughout the pavilion. The social choreography conducted by a woman who represents a new citizenry is an infectiously molecular matter of sovereignty: the everyday imagination of the directional vectors of a citizenry yet to come.