The saga of the feelings
I do not know how –exhausted- you can stay in the indifferent lake of your heart.
E. Montale
Emotion.
“A state of mental agitation or disturbance”.
A mental state that arises spontaneously rather than through conscious effort and is often accompanied by physiological changes”.
All this from a biologic and psychological point of view. Everything gets more complicated when we enter the complexity of human affects and we try to classify them
.
There are emotions that frighten, emotions that excite. There are emotions too strong to stand, others that you see growing step by step and that you feed not to let them die. It has always been like that, or at least we like to think that it is one of the few thinks that never change as time goes by and society changes. However it is not exactly like this. If feelings don’t change, the way we express them (or better, the socially and culturally accepted way to express them) does change.
Public/private, inside/outside, individual/community. The dichotomy that maybe better tells our contemporary time doesn’t only refer to the way we live the public space of our daily life (see “Time for festivals” in this issue) but also and foremost to the way we set social relationships and manifest our feelings.
During the XX century we attended many “revolutions” in the culture of emotions, in the way we publicly express them or in the conventions ruling social relationships.
As Eva Llouz states in her book “Intimidades congeladas, las emociones en el capitalism”(Frozen intimacies, emotions in the capitalism), the image of capitalism as cold, opposite to feelings and unfavorable to emotional relationships is a commonplace that doesn’t resist to a deeper analysis. Sure, it could seem cynical to talk about emotions in this way but it’s not totally groundless to say that capitalism has encouraged the development of a new culture of affects. Just see, the emotional and economic discourses seem to mutually configure one another: intimate relationships define themselves on the ground of economical and political negotiation patterns, as well as economic relations increasingly acquire a deeply emotional character. The dominant economical system seems to have turned emotions into goods and you can see it in many aspects of our social life, from self-aid literature to women magazines, from the new forms of socialization via Internet to the extreme limit of TV programs for broken hearts.
But the biggest revolution, the real “jump” involves another historical period, a period which set the bases for our sentimental education, which exalted the importance of passions, individuality and inner life: Romanticism.
Our time, this era called “of uncertainty”, has marked a break in the way we live and express our feelings. We got rid of the interiority places, the barriers between public and private faded off. The values that led us to have faith in love and high feelings are thinning down.
Juan Carlos García and Fernando Hurtado are talking about this in their last creation. Because De los afectos (interpreted by the companies Lanonima Imperial and Compañía Fernando Hurtado and expressly produced for the Barcelona Festival Grec’08) is “our way to bring on scene this sensation of loss, of inner desolation before a reality which appears like a huge TV screen, that leaves us with the sensation that banality is now the only possible place.
There is no doubt that dance as a modality of expression is one the most effective to talk about emotions, to make them nearly palpable and, at the same time, to provoke them. So De los afectos dances the loss –if not of feelings- of a way to live passions without compromise nor mediations, while “once dead the sentiment, what remains is sentimentalism: a sneaky romanticism, almost consumed and insubstantial, which survived inside a certain subculture, in the adolescent corners of our conscience, in the continuous pulsing of thousands of LEDs that light up and sparkle”.
With the dancers on the scene, emotions take life. People meet, love, cross each other, are forced to separate; they desperately embrace, hurt each other, get abandoned. On the background, dozens of TV screens, XIX century’s canvas that tear up and take fire before our eyes and thousands of LEDs.
Unceasing scanning of our time.
Lanonima Imperial (created in 1986 by Juan Carlos García) has been taking on from years an experimental work of investigation on the different forms of mise en scène. With a solid trajectory in Spain and abroad, Lanonima’s creations have travelled over more than 25 countries in the world and have been co-produced by prestigious international festivals.
The Compañía Fernando Hurtado born in Malaga in 2000 on the initiative of the dancer and choreographer Ferdinando Hurtado, who had already taken part in the creation of Lanonima Imperial. In all his original creations, Hurtado bets on diversity, from the revisiting of classical such as Oscar Wilde until the incorporation of live music on the stage, always cultivating the collaboration with other international companies.
