MARTIN HARGREAVES: Maybe we can start with your discovery that the Portuguese word to process a film is ‘reveal’ whereas in English it is ‘develop’. And that difference matters.

BIBI DORIA: ‘Reveal’ is so much more interesting! It’s the same word as showing up, as something that appears as if by magic. And ‘development’… I think it's used because it's a chemical reaction, but I have this weird feeling that ‘develop’ is something that speaks about the process, but ‘reveal’ is giving the image more agency to appear.

M: It has an event-ness to it, a kind of theatricality,

B: So I might keep saying ‘reveal’ and I like also that we're saying that there's a moment of revealing.

M: Should we reveal how you’re thinking about the space between cinema and choreography?

B: That's a great way to begin, even though what I'm trying to do is move in this space in a very practical way it's, at the same time, what I am thinking about now. It's how I can also conceptually organise my choreographic practice. I think in a certain way that both languages mix, and they collide, and they get blended, right? But, okay, so going more into it, I think there's a few processes from the cinema practices that, for me, they translate in a specific way, how I also address the choreographic practices. Towards revealing. The idea of making images appear, but with an understanding of the idea that the image has an autonomy, has an agency. And I also see gesture and the choreographic as also having agency.

There's another thing that also connects to cinematography processes which is the editing and making, frame by frame, maybe understanding how this sequencing of images on film is like the sequencing of images in movement. This idea of cinema that it is built from one photograph to another, that it's really lots of photographs that are fast and collided and placed together so they move. This is really exciting for me, and I like to understand this also in my in relation to the choreographic because when I'm thinking about dramaturgy, and when I'm thinking about the building of a choreographic sequence in a way, that can be gesture, it can be the place, can be the situation, can be the moments of an object, or moments of a piece, or moments in time. Then it comes back to me as a sequence, and then the experience as a whole. But then I think that when it comes to the choreographic, there's this interesting thing where the time isn’t linear. It’s not one photograph after another. I think that when the choreographic arrives, it gives me the chance to experience non-linear sequencing, and the time as expanded. I understand this exercise of working on building the time and working on the sequence, on one hand, but, on the other, also allowing for the time to be completely misunderstood, or to feel the non-linearity of it, or to feel the expansion of it.

M: I think there's something about this notion of agency and linking it to time, because when you're speaking about it being nonlinear, you're also kind of suggesting that it's both in the analogue materiality, either of the physical gesture, or the physical materiality of the film. But it's also about a history of a repertoire of images. So, the agency doesn't emerge only from within itself. It's always referring backwards and forwards. I think for me, I'm also thinking about your donation to the glossary of spiralling time

. So that when a film is revealed, or a gesture is revealed, it's not only revealing itself, it's revealing something of a history that is not only in the present moment.

B: Yes, it's thinking around multiple histories, multiple times simultaneously, definitely, and then for me, when I found out Leda's notion of spiralling time

, which relates to her research into Afro-Brazilian culture. The Western linearity of time and the linearity of the narrative is only one way of looking at something. The past, present and future are offered to you as this one line, and that's how the story goes. But there's also the possibility of multiple understandings not only of time, but also of the narrative. The figure of the spiral gives me the possibility of finding different ways of looking at it depending on where you're placed in this spiral. The thing is, it's not that I'm necessarily interested in unmaking the line, but more about how this line can be expanded, or it can be spiralling, or it can be twisted. There's something in the materiality of the analogue roll of film, for example, running one direction through the projector that is inevitably a line. But then, how can I go deep into the linear and find ways to spiral it from inside?

M: I think this idea of agency as a moment of reveal is taking account of all of the conditions that allow for or permit that reveal. And they extend beyond that moment, they extend beyond the line. They extend beyond the unfurling.

B: Yes, the material is also revealing their agency. I think there's something in, not only in Copacabana Mon Amour, but in all of this cinema movement that I’m researching, Brazilian Marginal Cinema related with the idea of the margin, of the periphery from the commercial cinema movement, because they were working with what they had, they were doing what they could at that time in terms of the materials, cameras or films. They also recorded voiceovers rather than on the film, and it's super interesting, because it already gives you the feeling that there's simultaneity of elements, and times. There is more than one thing happening at the same time. And this also connects to my practice in the way that if I'm thinking about cinema, if I'm thinking about choreography, I'm thinking about dance, they are all at the same time in simultaneous layers. They are not one by one, or just combined together, they act like it's one simultaneously, not a plurality but rather a hybrid. 

M: There is something interesting in terms of the archival impulse to preserve which is distinct to your interest in memory, because to preserve suggests that there was some singular stable object to save and to fix within the time and space that allowed for its emergence. But you seem to frame preservation as both a necessity and a fantasy? Material conditions have changed, and are always in a state of change, and if we follow through the idea of spiralling time then our positions, and the position of the film shift and alter how an encounter is enabled. There’s an of idea within your practice of a material reveal that reveals material – so we are watching ourselves watching and to some degree perceiving all of the conditions that facilitate that spectatorship. The desire to save a film seems to be to be different from your desire to remember a film and this seems linked to what performance can do?

B: Yes, definitely, there's this central idea of capture, and one argument is that the film is this thing that can capture, and dance is something that is non-capturable, even through notation. But for me it's quite connected to an understanding of the materiality, about not viewing the film as a stable, passive thing. This thing has agency and interacts with fungus, or fire, or political censorship. The appearance of the film is a collaboration with all kinds of other agencies and materialities. How can I try to look at the fire? Because I was trying to save from the fire in the beginning. I was like, okay, Cinematheque is on fire, and I must help to protect our memory, so I'll be memorising one movie. I'll try to save one in my memory, as this idea of a saviour. And this was the very beginning of the process, and part of my process of understanding how I could do something in response to this situation while being far away from Brazil. Then I understood that the problem wasn't the fire and it wasn't about looking at the fire as the villain, as the bad thing. The fire actually connected me to the celluloid, and then to the glow of cinema, and then to the chemistry of film development, and then all of these other connections. I like to think that the materials have their own autonomy, and the work can emerge when we place them in relation. When we can establish a dialogue between them.

M: Is there something in the way that you work within choreography that that explicitly addresses memory?

B: I’m working on understanding the movement of memory, how memory is coming and how memories are going, and what this does to the body. I work on experiences where I try to offer the possibility to look at someone remembering. The gesture of memorising is a potential choreography itself, for instance the way my eyes look up if I'm trying to recall a memory, if I place my gaze somewhere, or if my hands start to move in order that I can begin a sentence. The memory is working through my body, but it is not yet clear in my mind. So, all these little differences, the shifts, they are for me choreographic. There's a strength in the way a gesture is placed. Even if the memory it’s not loyal you will have a different experience if I perform memorizing or if I actually try to tell you all the film, scene-by-scene, by heart. You will watch the film from my head, eyes, and my whole body, through the way I proceed, through the gestures of memory. This is where the choreographies of memory come together with your agency as a viewer. There’s also the fiction in your own memory, or in the way you perceive, or in the way things matter to you. They're all connected.

I've been really interested in the blank. I gave myself this exercise of memorising a movie because I knew it was impossible to be perfect, because I knew I wasn't a recording machine. There’s often this moment where my mind goes blank, because I'm passing the images in my mind and my memory fails. There's not a text that I have memorised - I'm passing the images in front of me and I watch the film in my head in real time. So, I go from one shot to another, and then it depends on what I am experiencing, it changes the way I describe it. Sometimes I describe the music of the scene, sometimes I describe the colour, sometimes I describe what the characters are saying. It’s impossible to describe everything. Sometimes this weird thing happens in that I just lose the film, and I'm there sitting looking at nothing, and my head goes completely blank. I don't remember anything and then I just have to trust it will come back, I just have to wait. And then, eventually, the image will reappear in my mind and I can go back to my task. It is not that I aim to perform the memory loss, or to perform getting my memory back, but that's something that I cannot control and the gestures of my body that are part of memorising really come forward and assert themselves, choreographically.

There’s also this thing that I found out during my previous research on the dictatorship in Brazil, that when they had to censor a part of a text they would write ‘blank’, in English, on top of the text, just to make it clear that that wasn't actually a blank page, that wasn't a blank space of the page. It had been blanked out by censorship. So there is a poetics and a power relation within forgetting, and there is something beautiful in placing that choreography on stage.

M: Is there a tension here with your dance training? A lot of dance training is actually spent training your bodily memory. Studying dances, watching something to understand what it means to do it, repeating it, putting it into your body so you can have an easy recall of it. Rehearsals are aimed as smoothing over this recall and, of course, a blank in a conventional dance performance would be horrifying and possibly dangerous? 

B: It's a nightmare! Basically, I have nightmares about that!

M: Your practice as a dancer is to have a very strong memory, and for that memory to be fully embodied and to be both a memory of your own movements and memories of spatial temporal patterns and orientation, together with lots of other kind of proprioceptive memories. But the way you enjoy working with cinema is addressing a different kind of memory? One where forgetting isn’t a nightmare!

B: Yes, and for me, memory and imagination go together.I'm trying to work with this idea in the project of memorised cinema, where I would like to offer the audience description and movement from my memory as a possibility for them to travel through their own imagination. 

I think this also takes us back to the non-loyalty of memory. It’s not a lie but it is also not a complete picture. And if we are not talking about being loyal to reality or to the present, then we can ask who is imagining or remembering who? Maybe the film is remembering me? Or there are parallel directions of memory and we really travel beyond the present moment and beyond any idea of a fixed past. Here, imagination and memory walk side by side and, in a way, it's something close to dreaming.

Dreaming is becoming an important idea for me now. Coming back to agency, I've been really interested in the Yanomami point of view about dreams. For instance, in their perception that when dreaming about someone, it is not the dreamer who is desiring the encounter with the person dreamt of, but it is rather this person’s desire to visit the dreamer.

M: You’re working on reperforming a previous duet that you co-created with Bruno Brandolino. Can you speak about how you worked with these ideas when you went back into the studio to remember it?

B: Well, to come back to this notion of revealing we really worked to reveal the work, rather than reproduce an image of the work. We don’t look at a video of the performance, me and Bruno, we place our bodies in the first position, and then we let the work arrive. We know that if we begin here then choreography follows. Since the beginning we considered the choreography of La Burla as an instrument that allowed us to remember the archive while at the same time the archive could be remembering or visiting us. In this work, the choreography isn’t just the sequence of movements or imagens in linear time but also the experience of coexistence and collision between the body and the archive.

M: It sounds like you are describing memory not as a recovering of a lost past, but memory as being a means of traveling within the present. Again, it’s not a linear notion of time but about being within the spiral?

B: Definitely, memory is also a way to look again and to embrace the fictions that you have already, because memory will never be the same twice without even trying to be different. We can try our best to capture and reproduce but for me it's this idea that if we look at it, already understanding that it's fiction, or it's something that is relative, it's not the truth, because there's not only one truth. It’s not about being a machine that pretends to prove a past existed and to give an exact reproduction of what the material was. This connects to my preference to photograph with analogue film, because I'm not 100% sure how the image will turn out, and I need to work on letting go of my desire to capture. And with digital cameras I can guarantee I will capture everything. I have, like one terabyte of iCloud so I can guarantee the memory will be stored and I won't lose anything. But then this is really contradictory, because actually what I like is the experience of receiving the reveal of the image and understanding what changed, if for example there was a flare of light that entered and ‘ruined’ it. The ruin is where the beauty is. I like to understand this in the choreographic as well. How can I understand the event that I cannot control? How can I anticipate it? What happens if I set the conditions, but I cannot guarantee that it will be perfect?

M: I'm interested in how you’re working with references that are both explicit citations and somehow implicit, because they are there in how your body constructs memory, remembers itself. You're suggesting that the moment of engagement isn't self-contained? There is always another time and place that is gestured towards, or many times and places that exceed the event. Is making references, or citing, including citations, something that you've been busy with for a long time?

B: I’ve been interested for a long time in an idea of copying, of getting something that is not mine and then trying to place it in my memory, or in my memory/body. I also believe this idea that the act of copying is also an act of transforming. I will try to copy but from the beginning I accept that it's not possible, and then the reference will collide with me. I'm not only looking for my own production of images. I like to understand how I can build something that is connected through things that were there already in the world. And then I try to understandhow I can place them in a sequence or in an order where things can be seen differently.

M: Does that work with when you're working in something that we would call dance? In film, even if it's artificial, we can say that that work exists separately here, and this work exists here in relation, we can see both the original and the copy. We can project them side by side. Whereas in dance, it's difficult to see original and copy as distinct, because of the time in which we supposedly perceive dance is only the present. I know everything we've been saying disturbs that notion of presence, and your attraction to spiralling time refuses that definitely, but I'm interested how you work around these times and spaces of the archive choreographically.

B: When me and Bruno Brandolino worked on the creation of La Burla, we were not only relating to the archive as memory, as a collective imaginary, but as a strategy for embodiment. We were literally looking at pictures and images from art history, and positioning ourselves in those figures, embodying those archives. We were trying to understand how, by the act of placing the images in our bodies, we could spiral together the layers of images, narratives, history and fictions.

For instance, we start the piece with a Pieta, but the Pieta that we start with is naked, and after a while we start hearing a noise coming from a non-visible source, that distorts the experience and the most obvious narrative of this image. We work producing sound with our bodies and this sound doesn't always match the most immediate idea you would have of the image. Maybe, if you looked only at the sequence of images, you could see what references we pass through, but for experiencing the piece we propose a different journey, in which the choreography is instead seen as the collision of the figures, the sound, our bodies and the historical archive. In which a third autonomous element (that could also be called the piece) is produced and that differs and distances itself from the original archive of images.

M: I think this idea of the collective imaginary sounds to me quite similar to how you're explaining how people see film also? Although there is an image there in front of us, in both instances of dance and film, we're using memory in the moment of perception. There is no perception without memory. We're always bringing in, sometimes consciously, sometimes not, repertoires of previously experienced bodies. When we look at a body, in an art archive, on stage, on film, we never just see it, we're never just given direct access to it. The material of that body, that materiality of that body, is actually contingent upon a history and a repertoire and an imaginary?

B: Yes,we had many people comment that when watching La Burla they had this experience of relating to images that they have seen before, not literally but in their imagination, or better, in the imaginary. I have also experienced this when I watched Copacabana for the first time, I had this feeling that I'd seen this. I hadn't, but this feeling was because I'd heard about it, I’d read about it, I remembered my grandmother talking about how life was in the ‘70s, how it was to experience the dictatorship…There’s also something about the colours of the film that triggered a memory, but it's a memory of something that I've never lived. That where this idea of memory comes in as a collective imaginary, of a repertoire of things, maybe smells, colours, shapes, forms. These are shared somehow in our bodies even if we weren’t there, didn’t experience them first-hand. The first time and the recall in memory are both mysteries – when did they really happen and was it really me who experienced them?

M: I'm seeing an interesting link here between why we go and watch cinema, why we go and watch dance. They're both very strange phenomena - why do we want to sit and watch other bodies move? Because we've already done this. This is a memory of how we live in the world. It might not be my memory but somehow it enters my body. 

B: Yes, and I'm also interested in what it is to listen to someone telling you how the film or the dance was. Hearing what this person experienced watching this dance, or what they remember from watching a movie. What then happens, which for me is amazing, is that hearing this experience from someone may be even more interesting than going and watching it myself. This is another way to think about the power of the blank, right? My imagination starts to remember the experience, without ever having been there, I get so drunk on the fiction of it that it becomes my memory.

M: There's a strong sense of the ethics of memory coming through here. You're not disregarding the need for shared memory, and you're not disregarding a certain politics of a need for stories to be told. But I think it's precisely that you're insisting on the telling of those stories rather than the fixing of those stories. So, I think in relation to your use of spiralling time, you’re not saying we can disregard Afro-Brazilian histories, Indigenous histories, or even choreographic histories. You’re arguing that we need to take care of them, but the way we take care of them is not through a politics of conservation, because conservation expects that there is a single moment in time where they came into being, when they were fully revealed, and they came into their full presence and that's what we need to fix. Whereas it seems like what you're attending to is precisely this moment of the reveal as an event. It's an ongoing event, and it has all kinds of material conditions that allow for it but also disrupt it or remove its possibility?

B: Yes, I like to see the revealing as a possibility of embracing the subjectivity of memory, or the subjectivity in the act of someone attempting to understand. It’s not embracing fiction as a way to change reality but more about asking how a story is told. The differences, the different ways of understanding and the different ways of perceiving history and perceiving time. This is where, for me, it opens up how to understand the document as not synonymous with loyalty, but as a way to understand a point of view. To make a mark, where the mark itself is a way of revealing how marks are made and they invite you to look at it but also understand the possibility of difference.

I think disloyalty is interesting, in terms of Copacabana, but also in more than that, by being disloyal in one way, by not showing the film, by remembering it, by going blank, there is the possibility of enacting a different kind of loyalty. Asking what happened, what necessities there were that created the grounds for this film to grow in the first place, and how do we think through those in the present moment? We don't fetishize that moment as a frozen past, but we understand how it has implications for how we live in the present.

References:

Copacabana Mon Amour (1970) http://copacabanamonamour.com/index_b_en.html