Poetics of Precariousness: the work of Argentine choreographer Fabian Gandini

VALLEJOS, JUAN IGNACIO

San Pablo

Congreso; 2017 Conference of the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR); 2017

International Federation for Theatre Research

During 2015, I collaborated with the Argentine choreographer Fabian Gandini in the production of his last work ?En la boca de la tormenta [In the mouth of the storm]?. Gandini is among the first artists to develop the ?non-dance? choreographic movement in Buenos Aires, the city where he has lived and worked since 2004. My purpose in this paper will be to describe and analyze Gandini?s artistic practice in terms of a ?Poetics of Precariousness? linked not only to an aesthetical singularity but also to a critic of local dance productive practices. By using the temporal perception and the stilling of movement as dramaturgical resources, Gandini tends to subvert a strong legacy of expressionism in Argentina. I would like to argue that his choreographic work embodies a political statement in the institutional context of Buenos Aires? contemporary dance by exposing a specific form of ?performative fragility? that establishes itself at the frontier of theatrical fiction. Precariousness has become a current concept in the art world vis-à-vis the rise of immaterial labour and the global precariat (Maroja et al., 2014:XX) but institutional precariousness also tends to make invisible the specificity of Latin-American artistic practices, which are usually incorporated to hegemonic art narratives. In response to this, my presentation will be based in my own experience as Gandini?s collaborator and in a historical and theoretical research that will relate his work to Argentine dance history and to contemporary literature on dance and politics.