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ONE SIDE HAS MANY SIDES – AN INTERVIEW WITH DAVID ZAMBRANO
By Helmut Ploebst
corpus: What would you say is the most important information that you want to give to dancers today?
Zambrano: At this period of my life - because it changes every 10 years - one thing that I find very very important is to train a dancer how to make the room move through the body. For me today it is more important to see the environment move through the body than just seeing a body move. I want to communicate how the body can become a better medium of information. With media I mean all the information passing through our body. How we take it in and how can we project it back.
corpus: Do you mean you work with the imagination of the room moving through the dancer?
Zambrano: Yes, I work definitely with imagination. The imagination opens a great playfulness. It is also a good way to exercise to continue with something longer than we are usually accustomed to it. I work for instance with the question: how can we imagine that, as soon as you pass the door into the studio - it does not matter if it is research or technique class - you immediately become part of the environment? That means you believe it or not at that moment. I provide specific exercises for this question. In the Flying Low Technique we play a lot with gathering and sending information with our bodies. We do this with physical exercises. We play with it and discover possibilities.
I have a papa head and a mama body. The arms and legs are like babies. The arms and legs always bring what papa head and mama body need to go on walking or to move through the room. This is one important thing to exercise. I like to think that mama body always wants to go and do different things and papa head is always judging: yes, no, yes, no. Another image is that the arms and legs help papa head and mama body to pass through each other. So we play a lot with infinitive possibilities.
corpus: When you say papa head and mama body and the arms and legs are the children, how did you come to this comparison? Do you imagine the body as a family?
Zambrano: I got these comparisons through live experience and from questions by the students. It happened just one day as an expression during class. I liked it and then I started to use it more. It often happens that way: A question of a student leads to a spontaneous answer and then I write it down or remember it or it comes back. This one I like very much and I always use it. I like to work with people from different cultures and I have experienced there are cultures with more mama body and some cultures are more papa head.
corpus: And mama head and papa body is also possible?
Zambrano: Yes, of course! At the end you become one, you don't know where it comes from. It is the same if you like to say "the future is ahead of my front". But if you are playing with spirals, you don't know anymore where the future is.
corpus: Is there a change if the reflection center becomes female?
Zambrano: I don't think that way. For me male and female are always passing through each other. In fact I don't play with those roles: man or woman. I don't play with those roles at all. I play with energy entities. You are that energy and that energy is positive or negative or male or female or intellectual or too much dance steps or too much leader or too much follower. And then we play with this and we try to balance it, we let this and that pass through each other.
Flying Low, a structure with many different doors
corpus: What is the position of Flying Low, the technique you have developed and are famous for, in your teaching? Is it just one element which is very important, or would you say: this is my system, this is all?
Zambrano: No, this is not my system and this is not all. This is just one chapter of my dance book. There are much more possibilities. This is something I learned from my teachers. Not just dance teachers but other kinds of teacher, too. My first profession was computer science and I had very good teachers in that period. They did the first software programs, so the thing was that there were always much more possibilities. This was in the 1970s, a very long time ago - I don't know anything about computers now. But still I use the logic of measuring in the doing, that still is happening. I never went out and thought I'll make a technique for teaching. It happened from injuries. When I started to dance professionally, I had an injury and could not walk anymore. I started rolling on the floor from one side to another, and my friends asked me if I could teach them these things because they liked it. It started to spread more and more and through this I developed a specific technique.
Through all these years in teaching Flying Low I have learned to go inside and outside this structure through different doors, to connect it to other chapters. Or allow other chapters in my research to influence the Flying Low Technique so it grows richer and richer. It is not a book from which I have to learn this part and then that part. It is always moving. And depending on the group we start from the top or the bottom or the middle. It is a living thing.
corpus: You said the measuring is something which comes from your teaching mathematics? Measuring the intensity and manifestation of energy?
Zambrano: Well, I did not realize it until many years later. People like you were asking me, what I am doing and I was thinking: "Actually I am really measuring the doing." I am always measuring the intensity and manifestation of energy. For instance, if there is a window with a big glass and you run towards that glass, you know you need to arrête before you hit the glass. There is an instinct that you know from your life experience, from information which passed through us from mama and papa - we know that if we pass through that window, we will break the window, and maybe we'll cut ourself and maybe we'll die. So we have to just stop and we stop. How can you use that in any situation? How can you use that in dance? If you want to go in and out of the floor, you know you have to measure all your energy, your softness, so that you can go softly in and out of the floor. If you see somebody running very fast, then you can come and catch him with the right muscle tension and hold him. That is what I call measuring.
The more professional you become, the more you can play. Just then things can start to go through each other. Otherwise you still don't know how to measure your full energy. Otherwise you always hold back your energy or you are always kicking or you still don't know where you go. These are obstacles and you have to dissolve them, pass through them.
corpus: Going back to your example: Running to the big glass. You say that one stops automatically. Do the students learn to control their automatical reactions?
Zambrano: I would rather say they get to know these reactions through doing it. I say again, it is a practice, it is not just an idea in the head which does not move. That's what I mean, it is not just papa head. You have to move it and therefore you have to practise. To really bring all your cells, your whole body to do that and this you need to practise. So you need to practise all the time how to get softer into the wall, how to get softer into the floor, how to get harder into something soft. Another Image which I like to work with a lot is to see the dance floor as the ocean. That you can come into the floor and out from the floor constantly. It is not anymore a hard surface. Then students come and say: "But David, it is a hard surface!" And I say: "Yes, it will always be a hard floor, a hard table, a hard surface, but you can transform that by your doing. It is just a fact and if you practise it becomes." It is like achieving your dreams. But you have to practise and be fully involved with your whole live experience. It is a limited environment but the possibilities are infinite. Then you play and you can play forever.
corpus: Do the students develop these images you propose further or combine them in different ways?
Zambrano: When I give workshops it is mostly one or two weeks. This is still very short. I don't know what the students do with that information after I go. But during the course it has to be manifested physically. That is my thing. If it is not physically, it is not so interesting for me. Then you are going to write or to paint or to do something else. If you transform all your body as a medium for information from your voice and everything that comes out from yourself, then I want to see it. It has to be physically manifested. And when I see it, I say okay, lets go to the other part.
Dancing Book
corpus: You said Flying Low is one chapter of your book of dancing. Can we touch some other chapters of your dancing book?
Zambrano: (laughs) You mean my dance book, which I have not written yet?
corpus: Yes. Which other chapters would you like to talk about?
Zambrano: I just want to make clear: I don't have a trademark and I definitely don't think I will write a book. - One chapter is couple dancing. This is an old chapter. I learned it since I was six. I started off from Salsa and all different kinds of social dancing. This means dancing in couples with physical touch. And from there I did this project which was called "Ballroom". You improvise to any kind of music with specific rules and through the whole room, but always with very eloquent hands and feet. You bring your papa body and mama head through the room and become one with another person. That was one chapter, and I learned a lot. I did this with Thomas Hauert and my partner Mat Voorter. Ákos Hargitay was also part of it.
Another research I did a lot was with folk dances I learned in Venezuela. This was a project about rhythm. How can we make rhythms at any time that we want? At a certain moment we arrived nearly into something which you could call tap dancing; but it was not tap, because I never studied tap dancing.
One of the most recent projects was the Soul Project. How to evoke your images as strong as a soul singer. We work very intensively with twelve people from different cultures and different dance backgrounds. In that research I found a very strong connection between the sole of your feet and your soul: If your feet are well planted and you have the earth underneath and you are in reaction with each other, then your sole is very happy. Otherwise it is bullshit, your soul is hanging around somewhere. So we practise a lot with our feet very well planted for one hour, two hours, one day, one week. One person doing, the others watching. The others are observing you as you are doing it. In all these chapters, there are very specific rules, so you know exactly how to go from one place to another.
Another chapter is the dance web. I started it in Paris as a research with the dancers there. Then I did workshops here in the Pro Series under different names. We worked with the imagination that the room is filled with invisible pathways and these pathways go whereever you want to go. They are infinite and within, I say it again, very specific rules; so the structure is how to play with infinite ways inside a defined place. When you are going in with the body you become a pathway, so I can follow you or you can follow me. With the front and back and up and down. And by doing it you realize that you have to use the spirals.
corpus: So the path becomes the body and this embodied path becomes part of the space.
Zambrano: Yes. The spirals are going inwards and outwards. They are going through, so you hardly ever collide - and if you collide you just continue with the spiral. We practised that for a long time and we were under over and around each other all the time. We were a group of seventeen people and worked for two months, so it was very intense.
Actually what I also like to do very much is that you are from the very beginning, no matter what you do, a performer. So whatever we do, whatever is happening, is possible to use on stage later. But you need to be really aware and ready for it, so that is what we have to exercise. It is not like "oh what am I going to do now..." It is: everybody is watching you and you are doing it, even if you don't know. It is also not: you are doing it later on stage. No, you are doing it now.
Passing through Fire
corpus: Which differences could you observe from the beginning till the end? Could they go deeper into their bodies because of the duration of time?
Zambrano: There you touch another thing: whoever is going to work with me will have to go deep. So deep that we arrive on the other side. And there are many sides. We will go so deep that we will pass through fire, through whatever we call the passion for our things. You go and you get burnt and then you arrive on the other side, there is air. Just imagine going through the whole earth. From here you would go to New Zealand. So there are many possibilities on the other side, there are many sides to one side. It is a global thing. Sometimes people suffer because of that. Because of frustration etc., crying etc., broken bones and noses. Yes, it is part of the process. It is the same like learning to ride a bicycle. You will fall a lot of times before you manage. You have to practise.
For me in every process there will a bit of sacrifice. If not, I would say it is so easy that it is not interesting for me. If it is an established thing it is not interesting. But if you go through darkness and you arrive in the light, that is fantastic. You go: "Ah wow!" That is understanding.
corpus: As a teacher you realize when people are in the dark or get burnt. How is it for you when they want to sneak around the problem?
Zambrano: That depends on the situation. In a festival like this one, when in every room United Nations is happening because of all these different cultures, I challenge the people even more than when I go to teach a workshop in a certain country. It depends on the situation. But I love to challenge and I still have to master to make sure it is a good challenge. Sometimes I see the stress and then I know it is too much. But sometimes I say: "I know you're gonna cry, but I want you to do it again. I am very sorry that you had to cry a lot, but I want you to try again." But if it is a broken nose I say, now we have to stop. You cannot continue, it is just pain. You have to respect that. Otherwise it cannot heal. If it is just emotional it is a bit easier. But if it is a broken bone or organ we have to respect it because it is our tool.
corpus: When you think about your research, your teaching, what would you like to achieve next?
Zambrano: That's the question that Chris Haring asked me! It must be in the air! You must have been talking together! What I answered him: I would love to arrive to move like the air or the water. Sometimes very soft, sometimes strong, sometimes hard, sometimes destroying, sometimes constructing. That is one thing. The other one which I have been exercising since a few years is how I can become more eloquent with the projection of images. I mean beyond words, so it becomes a full image. Canon, the big photo company, they have this advertisement where they say "the image talks for itself" and then you see just a photo. I feel related to that. The image goes further than the words, the playfulness of sound and waves. Movement and sound go through each other. I would love to arrive, to master that. To play as far as I can with whatever I call my body expression. I can go to China and I don't speak Chinese, but I also want to be able to transmit my information to them. If I go to a tribe to Africa, I should be able, too, to go beyond: "You cannot speak English, we cannot talk." - Yes, we cannot talk in words, but we can talk body talk. This I want for the future.
http://www.davidzambrano.org
Transcription by Sabina Holzer
(July 26, 2008)
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