Cartography of a secret city

Cartographies for a Secret City

Cartography means drawing a map and choreography means writing with the body. In this residency, we internalize cartography as a practice in which these two meanings converge. It is mapping with the body in space in a situated way. For Idio Chichava, cartographies are a way of “putting the body in its present and interacting with space in an instantaneous way”. As a choreographic strategy, cartography is “a powerful way of questioning and revaluing certain spaces in the city, the neighborhood, and everywhere else”. Space takes on a new value through the mapping of the body.  

In cartographies, there is an exchange of sensations and memories. Each territory has its history, which emerges in a particular way through the body, creating “new narratives for the space”. From there, something stays in the body. “[Cartography] creates new narratives for space, and thus new imaginaries for the body.”(2)

A Secret City is one that emerges after cartography, in the interaction between body and space. The more confident the body is; the more possibilities we have to create these new places we call secrets. Each space confronts us with itself. To access the secret, we need to consider what is separating us from space and negotiate. This means getting physically involved with the place, with other bodies, and with the temporalities that are awakened there. These factors will be called “frontiers” because they are powerful universes that “are not barriers, they are possibilities of dragging us towards a certain place.”(3) 

A cartography is a sensitive procedure that sets in motion a liminal body, as Ileana Diéguez describes it: “a power that always expresses a relational situation, a tissue of links with others, with presences and absences, with materialities and spectralities, with affections that mobilize us and bring us closer.”(4)

Which Dance for which space?

The practice that Idio Chichava shares with us offers a certain dance that decentralizes the European academy inscribed in most of our bodies. But not in an expected way. Instead, by “giving more value to what I had already learned, and making what I had already learned make sense and add value to Western techniques”(5). This way of thinking turns out into a procedure that forms one of the basis of his particular technique, in which a present body converges with the immanence of the future dances.

“My experience with dance began in Mozambique, where it was a natural part of life. The people, their games, and the rhythm of the land all contributed to the dance being an integral part of our culture. We would play in our neighborhood, competing in dances and songs. This was an important part of my childhood, and I learned to dance through it. I learned to dance in a familiar, communal, and relaxed sense of living it.”(6)

Latin American dances are the result of a process of cultural syncretism that involves African, European, and local influences. All of the many different dances that take place in this continent have been reformulated for over five centuries, since the Spanish invasion. In Buenos Aires, despite our African roots, dance is not practiced as spontaneously as Idio tells us. The significance that he gives to dancing goes beyond a mere scenic exercise or the projection of a national identity. It is an integral part of everyday life, just as Ileana Diéguez explained above when she refers to liminal body.

A dance is not just a technique; it also produces a body. All training paradigms produce corporealities that respond to certain ideologies. These symbolic terms build the identity of a body, which is why we coexist in diversity.

The Ecuadorian dancer Fabián Barba will say: “An education in dance is a way of inscribing oneself within a specific dance culture.(7)” This is why the exchange between Maputo and Buenos Aires goes beyond the teaching of a dance technique or a form of training. It constitutes an epistemology—that is to say, a way of knowing and accessing knowledge- which in this case is made through dance. Dance is not just a performing art, it is also a way of relating to our bodies, our mobility, and the space we inhabit. And this residency has been living proof of this idea. 

There is a diversity of ways in which people relate to dance all over the world that has to do with the proper history of each territory. Today, we can acknowledge that history is no longer a universal story. This South-South residency has been an opportunity to understand who we are in this scenery. To discover what emerges from our bodies and our dances when the universal voice that has occupied that place for so long is removed from the center. From this, the first and most spontaneous conclusion is that this experience must be only the beginning.

Buenos Aires, june 2024.