Wild Card residency for Aymará Parola and Lester Arias

Workshop Foundation provided opportunity for Aymará Parola (AR) dancer and her musician-singer collaborator, Ariah Lester (Lester Arias, VE) to take part in Wild Cards artistic residency between 8-17 June 2018. During the residency, the two artists worked together in the creation of their upcoming project, which is the first meeting point of their two artistic universes. At the end of the program, Aymará and Lester held a residency sharing event at Trafó Studio, where they showed their developed creation and invited the audience to a talkback session.

Report of 10 days research under the frame of Life Long Burning Wild Cards Residency at Workshop Foundation in Budapest.

Brussels based performer/dancer Aymará Parola (AR) in collaboration with the Netherlands based choreographer/singer/electronic music-maker Ariah Lester (Lester Arias) (VE) :

« The first 2 days at the studio I worked by my own on different physical material which would became my point of departure when encountering my collaborator Lester a couple of days later. I gave tasks to myself witch combine physicalities that I been working on during the last years as a performer/ maker in diverse projects, with new interests and urgency of challenging the ways I create and the places I move my body from. During those days my research was inspired by juxtaposing elements from traditional Argentinean folk. My aim was to dissect those elements and play with different notions of space, rhythm, time, energy and extracting the dramatic quality in them.

I invited Lester because Im really found of the way he works with voice and theatricality. I was curious what could merge out of the collision of our practices, working methods, and perspectives on movement and making. Along our research time and the exploration of our interests, there was constantly the question of how to work together, expose our beliefs and what identifies us with each other within a performative context? Genuinely, themes such as the fear of death, monstrosity, contradictions, desires, duality, became part of the language. We founded the need of pushing our boundaries as makers of playing with the notions of power and vulnerability and daring to expose both, the most transparent and darkest sides within ourselves.

More than researching on a specific topic or quality, we were interested to bring all what we have into the working ground. We threw in the space ideas and tried very roughly to create scenes, situations, in which our identities would clash and challenge each other.

After a week of work, we puzzled it all together and were busy crating an art object that once filmed could inform us back, on the potentiality of the universe we were creating together. We finished the week sharing the result of this composition of loose elements within the frame of an informal presentation. It was interesting to confront the material with the gaze of the spectators and understand the different affections that a research could bring in interaction with the audience.

We definitely feel encourage to make of this experience a concrete body of work; a piece that could show further the development of this issues we just slightly touched.»

Due to the already indicated self-financing problem of the co-organiser Workshop Foundation, no Wild Cards editions could be realized in the periods 2013/2014, 2014/2015, 2015/2016 and 2017/2018 2015/2016 and were therefore moved to the last period 2017/2018.