Shiri Reznik: Do you consider the slow dance marathon to be a romantic project?

Christodoulos Panayiotou: I wouldn’t call it romantic. Some words sound so tired and at the same time giving this label to this performance limits my intentions to a single form, that of romantic representation. Together with installations Truly and Desire is irrelevant, and the performance Forever is gonna start tonight, Slow Dance Marathon is part of a cycle of works, which tend to decode and analyze what I call “the amorous dialectics”. The piece therefore could be understood as a work “on romanticism” yet not restricted to that alone. The performance functions on a double enunciation level; this is perhaps a source of confusion, as usually it is either understood from one or the other perspective. Nevertheless, I regard this ambivalent structure to be its most interesting aspect, since it serves as a schema or a metaphor for the analogous social structure.

S: Which are those two levels?

C: On a first level, Slow Dance Marathon seems to be very warm and welcoming; but simultaneously the actual experience of observing the continuous dancing results in a cruel spectacle. From that point of view, if you keep an intellectual distance, which is motivated by all the elements of the mise-en-scène, you immediately find yourself in a different position where you are left out.

S: Right… In what sense are you left out?

C: You are left out of the event, as you are not invited to slow dance and at the same time you are left out from what is socially constructed as love. Alongside the prescribed repetition of the same movement, this positioning directs you towards questioning this structure. The tension found in the performance is therefore located in this balance between surrendering or resisting to this emotional blackmail.

S: What do you mean by “emotional blackmail"? It's a very strong word, “blackmail”.

C: I think this is the best way to describe it. I could even refer to personal experiences to illustrate this, but overall I think that popular music, which is one of the basic components of this work, exercises an excessive manipulative power on us. And it is a quite perverse mechanism, because this music presents itself to us in camouflage; it seems innocent, even ridiculous to some, and at the same time it has a very direct and powerful emotional impact on us; some kind of cruel blockage of the intellect and direct sensitization of our emotional functioning in an Artaudien way. I have worked using love songs before. Take the installations Desire is irrelevant and Truly for example, I have often noticed people surrender within seconds after having entered the installation space. You can clearly observe the moment. You can notice the muscles relaxing, the hands unfolding; you even see the space between the eyes relaxing… I was thinking the other day, while listening to one of those love songs on the radio, that when you are in an emotionally accentuated state, like when you are falling in love, or you have just split up with someone, you feel that all these songs have been composed just for you…

S: It’s about you…

C: Is it? I tend to believe that this music is such an important part of our emotional education that it conditions us to feel like this in advance. All the mechanisms of our emotional education are constructed in a way that privileges a hypersensitization of feelings and a neglect of the intellect. The lyrics are symptomatic of this and this is what I call blackmail. It is a communicative dead end, which does not allow any possibility for the dialogue to be carried on. It's the end of all sorts of dialectics and so it is a blackmail. If someone tells you: "I love you and I'll die for you", there's no response to this "I love you".

S: Do you mean that "I love you too" is not a good response?

C: This second “I love you”, equals “me too” and it is already a degradation. It is not equivalent to the first one. The one who pronounced “I love you” first has already lost the game as Marivaux states in one of his plays. And it is not only Marivaux who has pointed out this connection between love and power games. Works from the Baroque era in French literature and philosophy analyzed this condition extensively.

(…)

S: Do you sometimes feel frustrated by this gap between the media representation of love and the reality of love, which is not so glamorous, maybe, you know, with flowers and fireworks all the time…

C: All I try to do is understand the connections between those two “realities”, but somehow I also tend to believe that, ultimately, representation evokes the way things are.

S: You think it's what they are?

C: Our experience is a construction guided and corrupted by constructed representations, so I don't know what the outcome of that is, and whether it can exist beyond that. It is a vicious circle after all.

S: Can we feel less authentic because we just imitate the common representation of love? Can we really feel in love, inside, authentically, without feeling like a player in a game that is already written for us?

(…)

S: How do you feel when you watch these couples dancing? Do you relate, do you want to join?

C: No, I don’t. I like to watch people and to engage in discussions with other people around me, who do not participate in the dance chain. But I always try to keep my distance while observing the happening and it is not so difficult because I am usually hidden behind a camera. Anyway I have already had the experience once. S: You mean in a performance?

C: Yes, one of my obligations for the DESTE Prize was to put together a presentation of my work and as usual I was trying to find a way to elude that obligation. Finally, I invited the journalists and the public to slow dance with me in the space of the installation Truly. Each of them was given the time of one love song to address me their question and I would whisper the answer to their ear while we were dancing closely.

S: Was that the first time you worked using “slow dancing”.

C: No, I became interested in this form a lot earlier. In 2003, during the performance You make me feel brand new, I had directed a slow dance performed by two female dancers and in 2004 the time of the performance Forever is gonna start tonight, the structure of the marathon was already very much elaborated. The performance was based on a preset menu with various interactive options offered by three professional performers. One of these options would be to select a song from a set list and slow dance with one of the performers. Eventually, this ended up being a marathon.

S: Do you think that an important part of romance is the longing part? That something or someone is not yet there and we just wish…

C: It is absurd but probably it is the most interesting and dense construction period of a relation. It is in a sense the relation before the existence of a relation. There is an extremely interesting text on that by Stendhal in his book De l’amour. He calls it "The crystallization period". I find the simplicity and the perseverance of this idea so important. He says that in the mines at Salzburg, in autumn, the miners lowed a small naked branch of a tree down inside the earth, and left it there for a period of time. When they brought it back up to the surface the branch was fully covered in beautiful shinny crystals. This is how longing and first encounters work for Stendhal. Before we properly get to know someone-who corresponds to the branch in Stendhal’s metaphor-we fully cover them with our desires, projections, ideas, expectations-which are the crystals-and this is what we finally see and fall in love with. At the end when we really get to know the desired subject, the crystals go away and the branch remains naked again. This is when we become aware of the discrepancies, between the real and the imaginary, the person we are facing and the person we have fallen in love with.

S: The love subject has nothing to do with the person's real identity.

C: Exactly, you fall in love with the crystals, not with the person who is covered in those crystals. You fall in love after all, with your ideas, projections and desires.

S: And then…

C: And then comes disappointment. The subject is not what we desired, it is alien to us.

S: Do you believe in love at first sight? Did you have this experience?

C: I have experienced it. I would say it is a very accelerated crystallization process.

S: Actually, I can really identify with everything you've said, because this duality is in me too…

C: I think it is really important though to realize what constructions govern those conditions. When reading Diderot’s Le paradox sur le comedien, I realized that the whole perception of these ideas is driven a bit further. To my understanding, Diderot says that it's better to be conscious that you are playing a part in a theater of social life, and keep on playing it, because this consciousness makes you a better actor. The simile between everyday life and theater has been present in the history of philosophy and literature long before it was expressed the thinkers of the Baroque era that I referred to a bit earlier. Every era creates a symbol, which is an imaginary answer to the question “what is the meaning of life”, and often the connection between reality and theater comes to the surface; that which I find fascinating though, is that for the Baroque the answer is that the world is a theater and for that there is a practical application in everyday life. In Jesuit schools of the time for example, the entire learning process was based on theatrical practices described in the Ratio Studiorum and the students were literally trained as actors. The idea is simple: If the world is a theater in order to have successful citizens we need good actors. There is also this extremely interesting landmark in literature, Les liaisons dangereuses, by Laclos and its existence is not coincidental. Through its cruelty, the book reveals a system of thought relevant to the Baroque. The mentality and practices of the era, with the particularities of a specific society and culture, are presented in detail. One of the main characters in the book, Mme de Merteille, describes in one of the letters she sends to Valmont, how she has trained herself on her seductive skills. She explains with clarity how she has practiced her way of looking at people, how she has consciously learned to control her movements, how she has worked on her voice, etc. She develops these descriptions in a very conscious and meticulous manner and eventually she explains how she came to be a winner in the love game.

(…)

S: In Thessaloniki it was held in a forest, right?

C: Yes. It was in a small park in Kalamaria area.

S: So it was much more private...

C: Yes. More protected lets say.

S: Here in Tel Aviv it's very public.

C: Yes, it was a conscious choice to take a really open space in the center of the city. The Central Square is where everything happens: demonstrations, parties, kids learning to cycle… so it is a space that works like a microcosm of a spectrum of social experiences.

(…)

S: Don’t you think it's really cruel for the people dancing to be put in this vast square?

C: It is, from a more architectural perspective; at the same time slow dancing is a very specific dance which could be performed in a way that can be completely abstracted from its surroundings…While you are slow dancing you are creating a very restricted space within space and you inhabit only that private space of yours. For a moment you, become oblivious of the rest of the world. Slow Dance Marathon is of course not a real marathon but rather an anti-marathon, since a human chain is constructed to keep the motion going on and therefore there is no competition. In this sense the whole emphasis is placed on this form of dancing which is repeated. The reason I became interested in slow dancing in the first place, is because this dance is not like any other dance.

S: In which sense?

C: For the reasons I mentioned before, but also because slow dance is a very radical form of dance. First of all there are no steps to follow, no codification, and the movement does not go beyond simple walking, so the virtuosity which is an important part in all social dances is in this case rejected. Think about Salsa, Rumba, Cha-cha for example… There are steps to follow and figures to perform. But every one can slow dance.

S: Everyone is invited and capable to participate.

C: Exactly, which is not the case with other types of social dancing. Also what fascinates me a lot with slow dancing is this radical eradication of our “personal space”. Until the 20th century, dances we find in Europe are constructed in dancing without interfering with the “personal space” of the partner, which is codified by the extension of limbs. I am thinking for example, about the minuets of the palace court. Then in the 20th century, with colonization and the universal exhibitions we have all these new dances appearing in Europe and originally they were perceived as unethical or vulgar because the distance between the partners was eliminated. Still, a certain degree of distance was always maintained, while slow dancing is really a total annulment of the private sphere of the other. That’s what I was talking about earlier in response to your question about the square; you can be completely abstracted from what's happening around as you are literally dancing on the other person, under their shoulder, in the space between the neck and the torso.

(…) S: Are there any Arab participants here in Tel Aviv? C: Yes, there are. This was also an issue for me to resolve after I was invited to reenact the performance here. Tel Aviv is a highly politicized zone and I had to realize what it means to stage this work here. Coming from Cyprus, a divided island as much politically as culturally, I am in the position to realize how such politically orientated artistic intentions can turn out to be problematic and often bear no consequence to political reality. So, I had been reflecting over how I could protect it from having any kind of political application in Tel Aviv, which is really not what I am interested in. Slow Dance Marathon is a performance on human behavior. It has been an open call to everybody. The perceived intention of making a Palestinian girl dance with an Israeli boy, involves taking the accent to a very different direction from what my intentions are. This will happen at the end but not because I have directed it, it’s because it appeals to people from a human point of view. (…)