Interview by Rodrigo Fonseca
Umbigo magazine, April 2022
Rodrigo Fonseca: At the beginning of the play, those figures reminded me of acrobatics. The way you positioned yourself, your arms, almost always hanging down… Was this related to some imagery from your past?
Diana Niepce: Throughout the play, the ideas of non-gravity and three-dimensionality are quite present. There is a journey of the construction of the body, a dead, rigid body, that I build through theirs. In constructing this body, I use images that have something sculptural about them. Goddess-like figures emerge, Christs. These figures create tension, they reconstruct my body. And, yes, many techniques come from the circus/new circus, which I want to work more in the performative field. The piece has a long, durational time… I wanted to work on the verticality of the body, of the body that is verticalised, of the body that generates tension and that, at the same time, is fragile. The body’s fragility is rather poetic. But in everyday life we don’t allow space for it to be born, we don’t have access to detail… This happens in intimacy. Anda, Diana is also about falling, about the body that falls – I fall many times during the play.
R.F.: During the performance, there is a constant interplay between the two dancers on stage, a game of weights and counterweights, of back-and-forth. You are always the wheel, but your base changes constantly.
D.N.: It’s a game of tension, of counterweights, of opposing forces. This happens in an unbelievably detailed and millimetric way because the risk is very present. In my work, I have been exploring the extension of bodies into each other. I have been working on these tensions for some time. Even in my last play, this trace was already present. The bodies in Anda, Diana do not work in isolation and, when they separate, they leave the spectator in an uncomfortable place. Of course, my body has the language of the past, as a dancer and acrobat. My new body is a great fusion of techniques. This piece is also a diary (published by Sistema Solar), written in a very raw, exposed, violent and sarcastic way. In the play, I tried to create an oneiric atmosphere, with its own time, so that the audience could experience the body that is being built.
R.F.: At the beginning of the piece, the music has a metallic, obscure and intimate profile. But when you are alone, standing in the centre of the stage, the music is transformed and the atmosphere becomes more delicate… We hear birds tweeting.
D.N.: There is a recurrent ambiguity in the play: is it violent? Is it poetic? In the play between the three, there is also the idea of submission, of domination of the bodies… My body finally dances when it completely separates itself from theirs. Anda, Diana explores the image of the dancing body. This play’s music imagery is inspired by the sounds produced by an MRI. Have you ever had an MRI?
R.F.: No.
D.N.: The MRI produces a deeply electronic sound (trum trum trum). It sounds like a war environment. When you have an accident, the first test is an MRI. This starts from the idea of how sound inhabits this space, a space that can be seen as a somewhat frightening journey. Gonçalo Alegria (sound) has extensively used descriptions of these experiences that I wrote about in the book. And, yes, the sound of birds is present in MRIs! It serves to relax you. This play is particularly important to me because of my body’s reshaping. But I’m also interested in the reformulation of other bodies: what is the body that dances? What is the hierarchy of the performing body? These kinds of questions have been with me for some time. My body is a transformation of the previous dancing body. It is not obvious to a dancer how to work it, nor how to work with me! They never quite understand what my level of fragility is, there is a lot of fear of falling! I’m quadriplegic, there is a great level of risk in the things I do, but I’m interested in exploring it. The risk puts us in a state of contemplation that opens a new way of looking at the body.