An Interview with Mariana Arteaga

Mariana Arteaga is a Mexico City based choreographer whose work explores the potential of dance and movement in building new forms of citizenship, community and coexistence. Theo Di Castri sat down with Arteaga to discuss the significance of her practice within the urban and political landscapes of contemporary Mexico. Interview, text, and translation by Theo Di Castri.

When Mariana Arteaga was asked to choreograph a portion of the Bicentennial Independence Day parade in Mexico City in 2010, she felt conflicted. “It was a project that was marked by a lot of contradictions,” Arteaga recalls. “There was, of course, very little to celebrate what with the Calderon government being in power, the economic turmoil, and political scandals.” In the end Arteaga decided to accept the job: “I needed to put food on my table, but I was also compelled by the challenge of choreographing a parade—it was something I had never done before.”

The project would open a new chapter of the artist’s work and marked the beginning of her ongoing preoccupation with questions of collectivity, movement and the urban landscape. “I was coming from intellectual and artistic circles that are highly critical of the government and that view something like this parade as an unacceptable display of nationalism and the celebration of a corrupt State,” Arteaga explains. “But the people I was working with had volunteered to participate in this parade because they have a great love for their country and wanted to celebrate it. So what do you do in such a situation?” Arteaga embraced the parade project as an opportunity to break out of her usual social circles and to work with people from all different parts of the city, all different walks of life, social classes, occupations, and perspectives. “It is in trying to understand and engage with others who have radically different experiences and views of the world than yours, that the exercise of collectivity really begins,” she reflects. “It was a beautiful experience in learning to listen to other parts of the story.”

Yet finding common ground on which to begin such a project was not straightforward. “My task was really to create a kind of breeding ground out of which an ephemeral community could grow,” she explains. “I think what we had in common was a desire to dance and a desire to say something with our bodies.” Over the three months during which they worked on choreographing the parade all sorts of new relationships took shape: newfound solidarities, affects, logics, complicities—and even romances! “I drew such energy from this project,” says Arteaga. “There was a generosity and a collective lovingness that emerged out of working together.” Perhaps most powerful of all however, was seeing a diverse group of Mexicans being able to come to consensus and get something done. “In that sense, it felt like we had created some kind of ephemeral utopia in the midst of everything that was going on in the country.”

The experience of choreographing the Bicentennial Parade became the inspiration for the Arteaga’s next large project, the award-winning Úumbal: Nomad Choreography for Inhabitants. Commissioned by the Museo Universitario del Chopo in 2015, Úumbal became a way for Arteaga to continue her exploration of collective choreographies in public space. She began by making an open call for dance steps from anyone interested in contributing to the project. These steps became the raw material out of which the final choreography was woven. In the second stage of the project, Arteaga worked with a group of dance enthusiasts to create new movement sequences inspired by the crowd sourced steps. Finally, after auditioning and assembling a group of 60 amateur dancers, — volunteers between the ages of 14 and 60 years old—Úumbal took to the streets to perform these sequences throughout various parts of Mexico City.

For Arteaga, Úumbal created a unique space that was distinct from the traditional format of the protest march or the state parade. “In the case of the Bicentennial Parade,” she explains, “the energy of the group was channelled in a very controlled, permissible way. With Úumbal, however, our starting premise was that the street was ours. The use of the space was defined by the collectivity of the choreographic project rather than by some outside force.” According to the Arteaga, this premise allowed participants more room to play with and use the space of the street in different ways. There was no announcement that there was going to be an event and the street was not closed off in advance. To avoid having the police intervene, the group created its own strategy to protect itself. Brigades made up of the friends and family of participants walked along the periphery of the dancers carrying signs to the effect of “Take care of us! We’re just here to dance!” as opposed to the commanding language of “Stop!” or “Go!” that is usually deployed in such situation. The strategy was successful. “We’ve actually had very few run-ins with police,” remarks Artega. “In general they haven’t been hostile to this kind of intervention. And I think that has to do with the behavior of the collective. It’s a big group of people of all different ages dancing and playing.”

In many ways Úumbal was a response to the disapperance of 43 students that sent shockwaves through Mexican society in 2014. For Arteaga, the project offered a way to the re-value of both the individual and the collective social body. at a time when the State has the power to make bodies disappear. “Without a body there is no testimony. The body is the only thing that says: here I am; I am,” reflects the artist. “When the State assumes the power to make bodies disappear, there is a brutal collective dissociation. When there is no body, when the body disappears: there is no way of understanding. Hence the importance of re-claiming the body and of making the body appear in public space, of saying: here we are; we are.”

“How can we reflect on the city and its architecture if there aren’t even the conditions to walk in the street?” wonders Arteaga. In the choreographer’s eyes, the city has abandoned the idea of the pedestrian. She points to the ratio between the wideness of the streets and the narrowness of the sidewalks as evidence of this fact. Or to the fact that where walking is permitted, it is put to the service of commerce. “Take Avenida Madero, for example,” she offers. “It’s a beautiful pedestrianized promenade, but it’s crowded with shops. You go there to shop, not to walk. The pleasure of walking in and of itself has been lost.” But for Arteaga, the loss of the pedestrian’s access to the street and to walking goes beyond the material conditions of the urban landscape. “We’re not talking only about sidewalks,” she cautions. “We’re talking about security, we’re talking about being women. The idea that one shouldn’t walk in the street at night has been so normalized in Mexico. We can’t widen our reflection on architecture and public space unless we create the conditions to interact with and enjoy it.”

Arteaga’s latest project, Maravatío is a response to precisely this predicament. If the Ayotzinapa case of the missing 43 students provided the impulse for Úumbal, it was the devastating earthquake that shook Mexico City on September 19 that inspired her newest work. In the wake of the quake, Arteaga describes being struck by the outpouring of care and support she witnessed between complete strangers. “It was as if the collective body of the city arrived at an agreement by which it suddenly became okay to show care for strangers; to stop working and producing in order to be with others.” What she witnessed raised important questions about what she sees as the collective self-repression that the residents of Mexico City impose upon themselves. “Under normal circumstances,” she points out, “people walk down the street in bodily fear of each other, expecting robbery or rape.” For Arteaga, the normalization of this fear was called into sharp relief by the outpouring of care she witnessed in the temporary state of emergency and exception caused by the earthquake.

Maravatío is motivated by a desire to explore the idea of “choreographic complicity” and the ways in which strangers can create spaces of care, play, and enjoyment within a city otherwise lacking in such spaces.  “Choreography is happening all the time, all around us,” remarks Artega. “Anytime we’re making a decision about how to comport ourselves, we’re exercising choreography. Stepping into the metro at rush hour, for example. Despite all the discomfort, there is a bodily knowledge and expression in the way that we accommodate our body with those of others.” Maravatío is intended to explore such practices of complicity and care amongst city dwellers. The project unites a groups of strangers in public spaces and generates a collective choreographic score. Unlike Úumbal or the Bicentennial Parade, Maravatío displaces the need to pre-structure or co-opt the movement of its participants and was rather an experiment to see whether a collective body of strangers can resolve itself. Each participant was be instructed to interact and play with two randomly assigned strangers in the group. The emergent result became an exercise in working up the trust and bodily disposition needed to care for, move with, and enjoy the company of others in a context other than that of emergency. Maravatío premiered in Mexico City in May 2018 and has since gone on to be performed in Santiago de Chile in October, the Indonesian dance Festival in November. In January 2019, the work arrived in Uruapan, Michoacán, México as part of the program of intervention on school violence at the Federal Secondary School Urban Number 2 and Arteaga is currently working to stage the piece in the Mexican state of Morelos this spring.

“Be it the highly regimented movements of a cadre of military police, the coordination of volunteer workers in the aftermath of the earthquake or the spontaneous eruption of a dance party in the street: choreography can act as a repressor or a facilitator,” remarks Arteaga. “Either way, it puts the body at the center of our attention.” Throughout her work, the artist seeks to deploy choreography as a device that restores value to the body. “My choreography seeks to reveal or make possible our desires: the desire to be together; the desire to care; the desire to be cared for.” In a country currently dominated by a political landscape of violence, fear and disappearance, the possibility of allowing the body to appear in public space feels increasingly under threat. By creating the conditions to explore and celebrate the collective appearance of bodies in public space, Arteaga’s corpus stages an exuberant refusal of the status quo and offers a much needed reminder that things can, and ought, to be otherwise.  

To learn more about the work of Mariana Arteaga, click here.