El Alto | Queer: Gender Sexuality and the Arts in the Americas

El Alto 18 Queer Performance and Activism in the Era of Transfeminisms
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and Free Abortion) should prompt us to think
about how the forces and transformations that
cut through our struggling sense of corporality
neither ignore nor silence the vulnerabilities
that are clearly exposed on the streets. On the
contrary, they call upon us to come back to,
and at the same time, invent, a feeling and a
conception of “the body” as a heterogeneous
composition that is made up of force and
vulnerability, movement and stillness, action and
attentiveness. Spinoza’s idea that “no one has
yet determined what the body can do” —which
went viral during these protests—, goes hand
in hand with a non-substantial concept of the
body. The body is, in fact, a hybrid medley of
relations of force, movement and stillness, whose
determination to exist needs to be considered in
the context of space but also time.
On the afternoon of 13 June 2018, on a stage
in Buenos Aires City’s central Callao Avenue,
only 300 metres from Congress —the very
place where the Legislation on the Voluntary
Interruption of Pregnancy was about to be
debated—, and while the street gradually
filled with demonstrators, one militant for the
Campaign for the Right to Abortion said, as she
tested the microphone: “Today is a day that
makes us feel like both laughing and crying at the
same time”.
Just a few months earlier, I had heard a similar
statement: “I don’t know whether to stand still,
laugh or cry…” from a girl walking by my side on
8 March 2017, during the International Women’s
Strike. Holding her handmade placard, we
walked next to each other for a while (we didn’t
know one another but we still “stuck together”),
until she asked me to take a picture of her. As
her mobile made the shutter sound in my hand,
she felt confused, not knowing how to react…
We stared into each other’s eyes in silence as
none of us really knew how to react. The urge
to weep mingled with goose bumps; anger
intertwined with a feeling of empowerment.
A myriad of questions blended with the need to
scream; silence mixed with a host of words that
struggled to come out; and the hugs met with
smiles and laughter inspired by the gathering.
What lies behind these demonstrations cannot be
summarised by an emoji nor fit into a selfie. The
day we decided to go on strike —“strike” arguably
being the wrong term as female reproduction
and caring are 24/7 forms of labour that can’t
stop, even if they’re unrecognised as such—the
power we felt when sensitivity was restored
to the gestures that sustain our world (but go
unnoticed) was in no way akin to the shield of a
warrior who is certain of victory.
These bodies under threat, whose very existence
and whose right to life must be defended, and
which feature on the daily news in the form of
femicides (by life partners, family members,
etc.) raise the challenge of how to highlight
their vulnerability without limiting 1 of their lives
(i.e. without the solution being having fewer
nights out, fewer parties, increasing fear and
dependence, arguing for a life under police
tutelage). “Nobody is taking care of us but we
have each other.”
For over a year, the collective ORGIE
(Organisation for Stage Performance Research)
has been organising parties every month or
every other month which involve warm-ups and
dancing from a stage performance perspective.
In what they call Entrenar la Fiesta (Training
the Party), the organisers feature a body-onbody
encounter with the goal of expanding the
boundaries of our bodily motions. Nowadays,
as has happened before, the party becomes an
urgent space for political in(ter)vention. Artist
Roberto Jacoby viewed parties as manifestations
of what he called “the strategy of joy” at the
time when Argentina’s 1980s dictatorship was
ending. This approach to parties as political and
aesthetic spaces is now back. We get to dance,
some say, a way to chase fear and horror away
from our bodies. It can also be an exercise in
trying to understand the energy that we have and
the energy that we lack. The past few years have
seen a boom of parties that think about partying
from different angles, queer, lesbian, marica,
trans or non-binary, or whatever terms one uses
to describe the body they inhabit. Asides from
Entrenar la Fiesta, other parties like Hyedra
and Vicio (Vice) or the Antroposex Perrafest
(“Antroposex Bitchfest”) parties relentlessly
interrogate the “dis-comfort of desire”. There
seems to be a renewed urge for parties that not
only welcome everyone but that also tear down
the dynamics of bouncer-ruled discos, that
respect music as much as the deformities and
lack of form of our enjoyment.
As a political experience in today’s Buenos Aires,
these festive gatherings are influenced by one of
the biggest tensions of our days: how to conceive
safety, safe practices, without replicating
traditional punishing and vigilant practices. The
promotional poster for Entrenar la Fiesta warns
that “in the event of discrimination or violence,
we shall activate a transfeminist protocol”. From
a patriarchal protocol to a transfeminist one, we
see it’s a thin line between creating “safe” spaces
without falling prey to punitive stances, a prudish
idea of safety (guaranteed by a generalised state
of control) and “respectable” practices (like
those promoted through the moral panic stirred
by the #MeToo movement).
Entrenar la Fiesta (or ELF) is held at the Xirgu
Theatre, in an old-fashioned Italian-style
dancehall: the stage is empty, and we find
ourselves in the middle of a wooden dancefloor
without seats. The box galleries will be used to
store backpacks and coats. Clearly, we are here
to remove our clothes: whether partially or fully
is an individual decision. It is unclear whether we
are getting ready for physical training, for a party,
or for an orgy. This indeterminacy is was sustains
ELF throughout the night. The party starts with a
group warm-up guided by the ORGIE team: at this
point, the music infiltrates the bodies and invites
them to expand, to vibrate and tear down the
binarism of dance moves… Hierarchies collapse
through the skin and through human contact,
and this in turn encourages other motions in the
honest and transparent physical space of this
party. “When the boundaries between the bodies
are broken down painlessly, a party ensues,”
said Roberto Jacoby in 1992 in El deseo nace del
derrumbe (“Desire is born from collapse”). In
ELF, the boundaries between bodies are indeed
broken down, releasing the knowledge and the
sensibilities of performance art and bodily action.
The party is held in a theatre which is now part of
a university, and it has been conceived, organised
and coordinated by people with a background
in performance arts. As iconoclasts belonging to
a world where dance enables contact in many
directions, we materialise what we have learnt
by reading Wittig over many nights: the bliss that
breaks away from a reproductive organisation
of our bodies blurs and redefines the contours
of our skin. By playing with the dis-orientation
of our desires, we de-materialise as bodies that
enable new gestures and motions in space. This is
about training in the “queer art of lame dancing”,
as encouraged by a group of queer Barcelona
participants during a Dance Philosophy Congress
held in Madrid a few weeks ago, or about dancing
in whichever way we see fit.
ELF is not a mere party: it is a manifesto
written with bodies and thoughts in motion,
a declaration, and a sensitive treatise akin to
Pasadas de Sexo y Revolución (Overstuffed with
Sex and Revolution), a performance-cum-party
held in 2018), and similar to the first action/
piece by ORGIE Diarios del Odio (Diaries of Hate).
This piece, directed by Silvio Lang —the artist
connecting Escena Política and ORGIE—, is based
on a text by Roberto Jacoby and Syd Krochmalny
which compiled hate comments published in the
readers’ letters section of newspapers towards
the end of Argentina’s Kirchner presidential era.
Ever since its inception, ORGIE has seen a huge
increase of its membership while becoming less
spectacular in the events they organise: this
year they did not present “a piece”. Instead,
they prepared the party as a locus for political
debate and as an intersection between art
and politics, similar to what we saw during the