Poetry and the body. Young people, poetry and bodies. The bodies of young people and poetry. Poetry and the bodies of young people. What is happening there these days?
I bring you two porteñas1 proposals for a particular treatment between the body and words, of the non-relation, where poetry is the raw material.
In the absence of the sexual relation, there are these experiences that give rise to contingency because they are not planned. The first: Mover la lengua [Move Your Tongue]. This is an experimental project. Its creators, the poet Maga Cervellera and the ballet dancer Martina Kogan, invite people to come together to dance texts, to give body to words. Move Your Tongue has a manifesto with which each encounter begins: poetry is not for the few, dance is not only for connoisseurs, we don't only dance at parties.
They ask: "Where is the body when we read, do words have a body, is moving your tongue dancing?"
On any given stage, which they transform into a ring with masking tape, three elements are presented: the voice of a poet, a body, another dancer, and an audience. Each encounter is unique. This battle between poetry and body is organised into rounds.
Under the premise that each reading must last a maximum of one minute, a poet will read a text of their own or another's, and the body of a dancer, or rather, a dancing body, will act as a sounding board. It is not a question of representing the text, but rather an attempt, a wager, to dance the impact.
NB: silence. After each round, there is no room for words.
The second: El Mamut [The Mammoth] a prehistoric, nomadic animal. This ritual bears its mark. Its hosts, Toti and Simur, from the courtyard of a house in the Florida neighbourhood of Greater Buenos Aires, put together their three Ps: poetry, barbecue and perreo [twerking/dirty-dancing].
An invitation, as they say, for the audience to move.
With more than a hundred iterations and a massive jump from fifteen to a thousand young people in the audience, El Mamut, always outdoors, is not going extinct.
What are they looking for there? It's difficult to say…. What we do know is that poetry is read there and, in fact, after each reading, Reggaeton is danced and choripán is eaten.
Poets and others who say they are not like poets circulate in El Mamut, invited to put their bodies and voices to work.
With a wide range of texts that can range from unpublished verses to classics to a written complaint in defence of consumers, there it seems, each time, the aim is to circumscribe something that nowadays is not working.
This experience, they say, aims to work on listening in times of degradation of the word, but sometimes what happens there is something else…
Fun fact: to end the night, a prize is awarded not to the best poetry but to the best perreo.
[1] [Editor's note: porteño/porteña is the word for a person born in Buenos Aires.]
