Interview with Trafó blog

[Interview with Kollár Bálint. Originally published in Hungarian on March 23, 2017 on kapcsolj.be]

Tell us about the history of AVOEC! How did you both end up in Budapest and how did you meet each other?

We met in Budapest through mutual friends at the end of 2013. We were both finishing our studies at that point, and we were looking for alternatives to the institutional education we had had. We quickly realized that we could work together and launched a project called Still Untitled, which is a horizontal performance research platform that has been on and off since the beginning of 2014. We wanted to find ways to learn from each other and to work with teaching as an artistic process.

We also started to see common interests emerging, and the next step was to work on a performance together. We started a project called Bestiario; we were interested in seeing what comes from a longer creative process. This project is still going on today, in a collaboration with photographer Isabel Val.

Luiza, when I talked with another Brasilian dancer, Marcio Canabarro, he told me about the importance of Porto Alegre's Experimental Dance Group and Pina Bausch. Were these references important to you too?

Porto Alegre's Experimental Dance Group was certainly a very important influence in my formation. Márcio and I were part of the first group, back in 2006. It was for me the first time that I had access to daily classes, with a team of teachers that was amazing. I was also studying dance at UERGS, which had a dance program that was extremely rich and pertinent. Some of the teachers were involved with both institutions. And through those teachers, other references came. If I had to pick just one from the dance world, I think it would be Trisha Brown. I was much more into that Post-modern dance scene, and some of my most influential teachers had also had experience coming from there.

Luiza is from Brazil and Lori is from the United States. Did you experience cultural difficulties during your collaborative work and did it have an effect on your work?

We experience differences much more in terms of our artistic background and formation. Luiza comes from a Contemporary Dance background with some incursions into Visual Arts and History. Lori comes more from a Theater and Performance Studies field. That means that we approach the work with a different set of references, which brings up challenges but also makes the process much richer. In a sense, it’s part of being in a collaboration. It demands that you clarify your references, where you are coming from. You need to find ways to communicate how you’re thinking and create a shared space that nurtures each person’s process instead of constantly pulling in different directions. We share less assumptions about what a performance should be like, what the process entails, and we’re constantly learning from each other. The question of cultural differences becomes irrelevant in this setting. It’s more about welcoming differences as part of being in a collaboration to begin with. We wouldn’t work with others if we were not looking for something that’s different from our habit.

One of the main topics of Raising My Queer Self is the experience of growing up in a community that does not accept non-hetero identity. Were these experiences different in Brazil than in Hungary?

That’s a really difficult comparison to make. Something really important for us in the piece is that we depart from our specific experiences, and don’t want to pretend to speak for anyone else. Of course, we hope that people can relate to the work and that it speaks to their experience, that it connects somehow. So we don’t really know how queers experience growing up in Hungary; we are interested in offering our own process as a space that can be supportive of other people’s specific processes.

The first question in creating this piece was: What does it mean to raise your queer self? And what makes sense to us is that it means opening possibilities, supporting and validating one’s own experience. Growing up in a normative environment anywhere is an imagination killer. You are presented with a limited number of possibilities as far as how you’re supposed to build relationships. Maybe only one possibility, really. And you’re not encouraged to question that at all. It just creates a narrative that doesn’t allow space for anything that doesn’t correspond to that model. It stops exploration, questioning, creativity.

For us raising a queer self isn’t really a finished result, it’s more an open-ended process that operates through certain principles. It’s questioning assumptions, not clinging to a stable identity, acknowledging what is there in the present moment. In a sense, that’s what the piece is. We had no interest in making a performance about something. We were more interested in transforming the way we were thinking about the theme into guiding principles to create and revisit the piece each time we perform it.

Do you identify yourselves as queers? What does the term mean to you?

It means a considerable shift in perspective. When your sexuality doesn’t match the expectations of the established narratives, lots of questions start to appear. From questioning norms that you once took as natural, you become more aware of power structures and that there are more questionable expectations out there. It is a process. You start to assume less and ask yourself more questions.

In terms of identity, an important aspect is connecting to a community that supports the processes that you are going through. A community that is open enough to affirm a broad spectrum of experiences regarding gender and sexuality, but not only. It’s about intimacy and connection, being genuinely invested in understanding what exists in an encounter and allowing possibilities that exist outside the norm. It’s a very creative community, that engages with life and relationships from a creative stance. That’s why it’s such a rich area to explore, and in a way that really meets performance.

It’s important to say here that we’re talking from a very privileged point of view. It’s not necessarily an easy process, and there’s a lot that comes with it. Depending on your environment and how much support you can find, it can expose you to different degrees of violence and it’s a really serious matter. We are in a privileged position of being able to explore our questions in our performance work. It is certainly not the case for everybody.

AVOEC is non-judgemental, non-hierarchical, and focuses on topics like gender or failure. Do you think that you could change thinking with your performances?

Rather than changing thinking specifically, it makes more sense for us to think of promoting transformation. In all of the work that we do, a common thread is being curious and questioning how we engage with people, how we build relationships. In teaching classes, workshops, performing or organizing events, we are interested in creating a space in which the encounter can be transformative. For all of us, hopefully. This idea of a transformative encounter, of connecting somehow, seems to be integral part of performance work.

It’s not our goal for anyone to leave the performance space thinking the way that we do. We hope people ask their own questions and that they are touched, inspired. We hope they have an interesting conversation afterwards and decide what to do with that.

It's not the first time that you perform Raising My Queer Self. How did the piece evolve with each performance? The piece has had many different phases and contexts. It has changed a lot through the act of collaborating and gradually refining what was actually there. We had to look a little deeper beneath the surface to find a structure that kept the work interesting.

It's a piece that is interested in transformation, essentially. It is never the same. It responds actively to the space, to the context, and we work with the challenge of being rooted in the present moment. We have really looked for the main principles we were interested in, and built a very economic structure based on them. This way of working offers us a lot of space to create from inside each time we perform it.

Apart from your stage work, you also organise classes in contemporary dance, improvisation and/or movement. How did this idea come? What are the biggest problems or challenges you have to face in these classes?

Teaching and performing really come together for us. They complement and nourish each other, and we approach teaching as a creative activity too. The time we spend with our students really feeds our practice and presents us with new questions, new perspectives. It’s also a space for building meaningful connections. It’s the theme of community coming back again. We just start to share certain values and ways of working with people, and the whole thing makes sense.

Judging from these classes and from your work, what would you say: is there something specific about Hungarian dancers or the local scene?

One thing that really stands out in the local dance scene is that there seems to be a lot of space for young creators. It’s not like that everywhere.

Future plans? We’d like to continue to perform RMQS, both in Budapest and elsewhere. The exciting thing about this work is how it continues to evolve with each performance, audience, and space. We’re currently looking for residencies for Bestiario and traveling with a workshop called Radical Sloth. We’re part of the team that organizes SLANT, a party and artistic event here in Budapest. Lori is traveling with some of her solo work, Luiza is taking a Feldenkrais training, we’re collaborating with other artists in Budapest and abroad...Lots.