Art can die; what matters is that it should have sown seeds on the earth… A picture must be fertile. It must give birth to a world.

Joan Miró

There is no way to say this, so I’m just going to say it: I fell out of love with dance. This is that. Thank God, being in love and loving it, are very different things.

As I read an article this morning by Claire Armitstead about Miriam Elia, an english artist, who stopped making  radio comedy as she “fell out of love with comedy” but still keeps the sarcasm on her books and illustrations about the contemporary art, I felt relieved.  The kind of relief that one feels when sees or reads something that translates a sort of anguish that one could not quite identify or understand, but someone finally said something, showed the way, and there was light, the skies opened, the  angels sang.

I love Dance. I think it is an universal  privilege, moving is good for the body and mind and everybody should do it. A dear friend, who is a musician told me once that, although he is not playing or composing anymore, he understood that everything he does in life, is music. He makes the most amazing and original printed fabrics designs I’ve ever seen – he is making his music.

I  felt relieved to understand the kind of nausea I feel when I see some performances: my stomach is the first thing in my body to signal when something is not digesting properly. I understand that my eyes are contaminated by by own background and biases and, to keep things into perspective – hard – I ask Mike, what he thinks, how he sees it. Mike is an engineer, he is the common audience at the theatre, who paid the ticket to enjoy a show on a Saturday evening. He is not an intelectual writing to impress his peers, or a visual artist who hungs the rotten meat at the exhibition to shock people, or the dancer in the audience salivating poison as he observes how fat the other one looks on stage; or the actress, who realises from the audience, the blank stare as her colleague forgets the script and improvises on the spot to make the show go on; or even the maestro who sees that the Étoile is coming down on the diagonal, speeding up the déboulers and he now has to accelerate the orchestra to keep up with her.

Mike often helps me with honest impressions and makes things clearer for me. One of the directors with whom I worked in Brazil used to say that, a work in progress should be showed to your grandma, to your aunt’s friend, or the maid, to see if your piece is communicating, if there is any noise. If so, the work must be revisited, as if does not communicate, it does not reach out, doesn’t sow the seed, does not make a difference.

The only way I can understand the world is through difference. We are not all equals, will never be. When an good idea becomes a vocabulary to be decoded, learned and repeated, we lose the fertility of the seed. Life becomes a marketing, as I quoted here before, “that turns creators into Pavlovian creatures hooked on constant and immediate positive reinforcement via “likes” and “shares,” [Maria Popova]

A profoundly individual gesture is anonymous. Being anonymous, it allows the universal to be attained… The more local anything is, the more universal.

Joan Miró

Foto Tati Vice©