Dancing my epilepsy
Rita Marcalo is a dance and live artmaker. She also leads her own company Instant Dissidence and runs the Dissident Space in Bradford
She is researching a number of project ideas at the moment working in dance with mobile technology and dance that looks at her experience of epilepsy.
Rita give talks about her work, here and abroad. She talks to us now.
Influencing and leadership
When you think about ‘influencing’ or shaping someone’s thinking or action, it feels quite a strong thing to do.
Yet it’s what artists do - change how we all think about things.
As part of my time with Sync, I have been thinking around the idea about how my work influences people, and whether I am leading through my work.
Whose body is it?
I have been looking at how I change people’s thinking and change my own thinking too in dance work that looks at epilepsy.
The first time I did this was through the first of three works called Involuntary Dances which looked at medication – the drugs I and others take for epilepsy and how that controls what happens. I showed the audience my body dancing ‘convulsions’.
The second time was through a work I called She’s Lost Control.
The audience waited with me to see if I had a fit.
The third work is going to look at ‘giving away’ my epileptic body, so it no longer belongs to me but becomes everybody else’s body’.
It’s a very edgy and difficult work and people think very differently about what I’m trying to do through my art.
Power as dance
I’ve always done work like this.
In When Night Falls for instance, I perform a one-on-one piece where I present the spectator with a naked version of me, and the possibility of an intimate moment.
In the darkened room, I play with ideas of power. People having power over me.
As a woman, a lesbian and a disabled person I am interested in dancing power and through movement exploring how I give my power away and how people, my audience, might take the power from me.
So what am I trying to say ......
I’ve been talking to a number of different people: artists and scientists about my work.
Some people think the work makes disabled people look powerless with the power being with the carer, the medical profession or the disability charity.
Using dance, I look at this power game as a moving thing.
I think sometimes you get power from giving it away and letting other people be in control. .
I am not sure
I am not sure of so many things.
I am not completely sure what my work is saying: I need to move away from it sometimes to understand it better.
I am not sure who and in what ways I am influencing: can you tell me?
I am not even sure that I am influencing: who cares?
I am not sure I am a leader: there are so many people I follow.
I am sure, however, that at this point in time I need to make my work about this.
In doing the work, I hope to find out more about myself, others, and how the world works.
So I will.
Rita Marcalo, February 2012
