Sofy Yuditskaya interviews Luísa Saraiva
Featured image: documentation from Luísa Saraiva performance, 2022. In Luísa’s words: Kind of fandango : Old popular Spanish song of moderate movement and syncopated rhythm in triple time, arising from one that began with the words ¡Ay, tirana, tirana! : An ungrateful, elusive, or evil woman. : Cruel woman
Luísa Saraiva is a choreographer and performer born in Porto, Portugal. She studied psychology at the University of Porto and dance at the Folkwang Arts University in Essen. In her choreographic practice she uses a transdisciplinary approach to movement, language and sound.
Her work and artistic practice developed through collaborations with artists such as Lea Letzel, Carlos Azeredo Mesquita, Senem Gökce Ogultekin and Catarina Miranda.
She was a recipient of the research scholarships INOV-Art, from the Portuguese Ministry of Culture in 2010 and of the one-year Individual Programme for the Development of Artists by the Nordrhein-Westfalen Ministry of Culture in 2017. She was selected for the danceWeb scholarship in 2019 under the mentorship of Mette Ingvartsen, Anne Juren and Annie Dorsen. Her piece “A Concert” in collaboration with Lea Letzel was awarded the NRW Ground Support Prize in 2018.
In the season of 2019/2020 she was one of the choreographers-in-residence at the K3 | Tanzplan Hamburg. As a curator she worked together with the Folkwang Museum in Essen and Galeria Municipal do Porto on interdisciplinary formats. Her website: https://luisasaraiva.com/
Sofy: I would love to know what the process of making your Kochi Biennale project was for you and if you can introduce the project a little. How did you get interested in the content and what was the practice around developing it?
Luísa: I’m a choreographer who works a lot with sound and with the contribution of dance to the understanding of the voice and to the understanding of sound. I believe that sound has a haptic nature especially if it’s made through the voice which is an instrument we all possess inside of us. I started by making pieces that were about connection to instruments. My first work was in collaboration with the visual artist Lea Letzel and we did a piece together with 23 electric guitars. It was a lot about how to play an instrument that also has 23 bodies and how to relate to playing it from the perspective of a dancer. So how to challenge people’s perception of instruments. It started with that, and with the way you can decontextualize and also challenge perceptions of gender. Because it was guitars as instruments and their repertoire is very associated with male images. I then had women who don’t play that instrument performing with them.
In 2019 I started to really get into the voice as an instrument. It has an inner movement and therefore you can make that inner movement visible by externalising what happens within. That externalisation can be through sound and also through movement. I first started to work with Baroque singing. I built the work on Baroque music that had a bit to do with how you learn music, especially if you are trained classically. If you’re trained in classical ballet you listen to classical music and the way we understand technique in the western world is so connected to classical music—until [we get to] Baroque music. It’s the moment where we shift from being unprofessional [amateur?] to being professionalised.
I was also interested in that because dancers are not [professional singers]. As a dancer I’m not a professional singer but there was a time where let’s say more elitist music was also performed by non-professionals and it was the music that you would play together as a community of educated people. In this I started to be very interested in that idea of the amateur, and what the amateur brings in affects the sound we can produce with our bodies. Then through that I started to develop this practice of exploring not only music but sound and moving with those inner sounds— [I started] discovering the sound of the wrist and the sound of the hand and the sound of the elbow. How can you sing not from your mouth but from your knee? And from your foot and so on.
Sound travels as movement travels right? If I do a movement with my arm the rest of my body should be present and we can see that when we see dancers dancing, there is something about the form of the body and there’s something else when you see a dancer that can do a movement that the rest of the body is not [isolations].
A friend of mine likes to say « it is not mute, it speaks », the same thing could be said about the voice. I can focus here on the mask [face], but the rest of the body can also « voice » when sound comes out. I started to develop this [project] first in the context of a long choreographic residency with the Turkish dancer Senem Gökçe Oğultekin, we started to work together a lot on this. She is also a highly trained singer. Then the pandemic came, I was alone and there was a lot of space for research.
I started to invite other people to join that research and to really work with all the space of breath and song. From inhale to exhale, and all the sounds that can be produced with a whole cycle of breath.
Breathing is something we all do that we perceive as silent or mostly silent, but actually there is movement happening. When you’re breathing there’s always movement happening, so how could I get that translation of the sounds of breath into sound, into song, into movement?
That actually also has a lot to do with yoga. I work with a yoga therapist to work on thyroid and heart problems, breathing problems, and there really is something about activating the resonance within that allows you to also breathe better and expel what you don’t need. That is where this practice came from. I started to do it very regularly, to really work on the cycle from inhale to exhale, to really work on the pneumatics of the body, on seeing the body as a kind of bagpipe of air and sounds. The whole body, so how to make it extreme, how to extend the sound of the inhale and how to extend the sound of the exhale so you could do a 45 second note, you can do it even do it even longer when you inhale because then the air stays in and does something else. To really take it to this extreme that free divers do, and martial arts practitioners do because they need a lot of impact but then they also need to sustain their breath for a very long time.
This research on the space between breath, sound, and singing also opens up different qualities of movement. How do you make sound visible through your movements and through the way you relate to other movers in space? There is a lot of traditional singing that has to do with that—I knew these traditional songs from Portugal (and probably all other mountainous regions) that have similar raison d’être. You are, for example, from a forest indigenous community, you learn how to sing in places with echo because then you can create reverb and you can be listened to from very far away. These are all traditions that play with the idea of natural amplification and going outside of the body. So it’s not [limited to your] your body —the sound lives on beyond you. This idea that the voice is decentralised from one body and is something that can travel and overcome the limits of the boundaries of you—this is something that is very important for dance.
When you make movement in a group you are always dealing with relation, the whole time. And you have to deal with it especially if you work a lot with sensation and with somatics—which is the movement practice that I come from. I was very formally trained in modern dance, in ballet, but then I kind of went away from that and got more into somatics. I started to learn songs, Portuguese songs, that really had this long sustain in accord, in harmony, they were mostly polyphonic, only or mostly sung by women that worked in the fields. I was not interested in them for folkloric reasons, the place they represent, their role in tradition, or Portuguese culture, because those things are problematic, or can be very problematic in themselves. But rather [my interest was] why they were sung in these forms, why so loud, why such long notes, why in dissonance, why three voices that meet in a dissonant chord? What does this all say about very very very ancient melodies?
Portugal is a peripheral region in Europe [that is] very open to other parts of the world but not in contact with the movements of classical music in the centre of Europe. There are melodies from the 8th and 9th century that remain exactly like in the Balkans, a little similar to islands like Corsica, Sardinia, because these places were isolated. And these are very very very old melodies that kind of do not work in equal temperament so that’s why there’s something for us [to find] in this dissonance.
It creates friction and therefore creates vibration. There’s a big search for vibration and that’s when I started to really combine these two things—to sing the songs, and true, the songs are very charged with themes like motherhood and violence against women and adultery. They are mostly songs that are also kind of forgotten in Iberian culture for a lot of reasons. I asked old ladies, I went to speak to them because I did not work in the fields myself.
That’s why I’m not so interested in the folklore because I cannot represent that. I don’t come from that, I come from a city from a family with a professional background, so why should I go and sing those songs? Well, I should because they are a very valuable musical form that is not performed at all or that is only performed in that context [folk festivals etc]. Their big formal value is constrained, and I don’t think that makes sense because there are very interesting musical things happening there and sounds worlds happening there.
Of course the old ladies said « we sing so loud because then the other villagers would hear when we stopped work or when we start and also because there are no men, we could be as loud as we wanted ». That is very interesting because it says something about their restrictions, the difference between restriction of movement and restriction of sound. The women were working the fields in groups. There’s always big restrictions and control of women’s movements in traditional societies but the sound can expand, and this idea of the sound as a way to express the consequences of patriarchy on women’s bodies is definitely something that I am still working with.
Now I’m continuing to do this practice and I’ve only started to sing songs about women being murdered or being in attempts to be murdered and fighting back and killing their aggressor. There’s a lot of those in Northern Portugal, I guess in American culture the similar [songs are] the murder ballads. Something like this from the UK I guess is old time music, there are a lot of those bad women being kidnapped or being married in a more or less aggressive way and then fighting back, or being murdered by their partner or kidnapper, or being violent against men who promised them things and didn’t deliver. Promised marriage and didn’t marry for example. There’s very interesting tales and songs and one can wonder if the songs were ways to transmit knowledge about things that you should avoid or things that older women tell younger women. There’s also a lot from 19th century Portugal and Spain about men leaving to go to America and abandoning their wives and children. There is a lot about the ideology of female suffering which is something very very strong in Southern Culture. Naturalised suffering is a very interesting paradox. Singing to bridge this heteronormative role of the suffering of women and the songs are very often lemons and with a lot of bitterness.
So this idea of the body and the type of sound and using extended vocal techniques to break this more formal or vocalistic way to sing really helps to play with the restriction and expansion of the body so you are not depicting folklore or these scenes but if you are making loud screams on an inhale, your body is in that state. Expressing what is anger or what is lament when you deconstruct it. That’s what I have been working with let’s say in the last three years and I still am so that’s where the solos or this practice comes from.
Sofy: Wow what an epic tale. Can you speak more on how it ties into your ideas about what’s going on today and other sources where you get your material.
Luísa: I listened to a lot of records and recordings from the 60s and 70s. There’s many even on Spotify—it’s the beauty of technology! You have very old recordings from okoraemond—all these labels with ethnographic recordings from the 60s. There was a Frenchman, Michel Giacometti that came to Portugal and did encyclopaedic recordings of everything. All his videos are online on YouTube.
That’s mostly what I listen to. I try to listen for example, to many versions of the same song sung by women, sung by men, sung by mothers and daughters, by train singers [buskers] and all. There is a website called Portuguese music loving itself and then there’s also another one called Iberian music loving itself and it’s from a Portuguese filmmaker.
He went through the whole of Portugal and now he’s doing it in Spain too and he records anyone that wants to sing and so that website is insane, like you can find really one million recordings and it’s very easy. You can search by region, you can search by title… that’s mostly what I do and then I go to a few villages to talk to women who actually sang those songs to learn more about these aspects.
In the summer I’m gonna go to Galicia for three weeks and do the same in the north of Spain to listen a bit to the other side of the border. To research and talk to people about the why’s and the how’s of things.
So that’s a bit of my process— always listening to recordings and then choosing what to work with and trying to find people who still do it and talk to them, and see if they are teaching it to anyone else. Are they part of a link passing it along as well?
For example, I teach the dancers that work with me. We did Tirana, that was the name of the piece that first came out of this practice that premiered in September last year.
She built a version of a bagpipe made out of recycled materials so it would work like an external lung, something that creates a drone that sends us to that universe but that is referring to where we live and are today. She built four of these beautiful instruments that are like other bodies and that connect somehow because they clearly look very precarious and DIY, but they sound like a bagpipe because they’re basically a plastic lung full of our air—and they exist only when we activate them.
I don’t think that I need surprise, especially when we perform in Portugal. Of course people sometimes know the songs and of course it is surprising to perform them growling or screaming—there’s something that is first deeply foreign but then recognizable. And then you connect the two things together to make these connections is I think is something that is very contemporary because you place the tradition into the now and not into reproducing the past. In my view that’s the most authentic traditional practice in a way. Practise it in your reality, because what is tradition if it’s not [lived]? So that’s why I was saying before re all this folklore thing—I’m not so into it because all these songs are this way for content. Not for the sounds, the harmonies, the text, everything, it still says something to me so I can work with it; with what it says to me. And then I have the agency to play independently with it. Otherwise it becomes problematic because we are reproducing the past or because we as artists are obviously living in very different conditions and it’s very tricky to appropriate this working class practices one to one, or that’s what I believe.
Sofy: I think the way you performed it in Fort Kochi was so beautiful. Obviously that’s why we’re talking today! It really worked for me. So what are you working on now? What are you interested in now?
Luísa: Now I’m working on a new piece that will premiere in one year, so end of April 2024 and it’s only songs on violence against women. It’s really what I had said about the women being murdered, women fighting back, and all this is really focused on the bitterness of the violence and violence between women. Because there’s also a lot of mothers killing daughters, daughters killing mothers as content so it became very specific. So less about the context of the song but I am working with this repertoire.
I’m still touring with the two previous pieces Tirana and Hark!. I have shows this year with the work from 2022 and 2020. In the summer I start rehearsals for the new piece I’m preparing. I just chose the team: I will work again with Luis Alfonso and now with Alexandre, these two dancers and singers, and I will work again with the two Portuguese sound artists that I worked with in the last piece. I was really finalising the team now and preparing, reading a lot about what we can work on and reading a lot about technologies. Now we will use a bit of technology, so I am reading a lot about technologies that make sound visible—working from the idea of the Eidophone which is an invention of a female scientist and singer from the 19th century, Megan Watts Hughes. She invented a way to sing into a glass tube with pigment and depending on the sound you make a voice figure comes up.
