The Unborn

Spectacular fabulations or what one can learn from bacteria, asylum seekers and the unborn

interview with Flavia Pinheiro

by Fransien van der Putt

Flavia Pinheiro is a choreographer, theatremaker, dancer and researcher. In 2020, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, she came from Recife in Brazil to Amsterdam for a choreography master’s programme at DAS Graduate School.[KT1] Next to her theatre work, she is currently doing PhD research in Leiden focussed on the choreography between different species, ‘interspecies choreography’.

‘It’s about the relationships between humans and other species. I’m very interested in the ways you can get out from under categorisations, the hold of concepts, of certain knowledge. What resilience and escape tactics might we take from other bodies, from other species?

Pinheiro has been interested in bacteria for some time now. She sees these micro-organisms not as miniscule creatures or threatening invaders, but rather presents their behaviour as an example, especially with respect to how these adapt and survive. ‘Bacteria can alter their DNA if needed.

When I got to work at DAS, I found myself in a highly privileged, white environment. The great thing about DAS is that you get the room and opportunity for true exchange and taking your time - that was quite special, especially during COVID. But the social context’s closed character bothered me quite a bit. I’m not used to that in Brazil. I felt like a germ; unwanted, like contamination. You’re not allowed to touch each other, be enthusiastic or expressive. Everything I did felt aggressive or loud. I realised I had to do something outside DAS.

In Brazil I always draw a spontaneous and varied audience with my public interventions in public places. In any case, Brazil has a far greater and more diverse theatre audience than the Netherlands, because theatres are far more accessible, offer free programmes and have low ticket prices. Theatre is a public service. The collective also plays a larger role, in the making process and in the relationship with the audience. I toured a lot. Doing sixty performances was quite normal. Here everything is much smaller in scale and more exclusive. It’s all about the name of the author. With applications here, people also wanted to know what my ‘target audience’ is. That took some getting used to.

That’s why I organised gatherings with asylum seekers during my time at DAS. The movement work I do really makes a difference for them, and everyone has a different background, different stories. Of course, asylum seekers are barely visible. In my solo The Unborn, I work with invisible presences in a different way. It’s about the spiritual presence of the unborn, about spirits, even if I don’t literally believe in those. I speculate, try to imagine how this might work. My work is made up of speculative fabulations.’

Bacteria, asylum seekers, spirits - in the west these aren’t seen?

'I don’t want to get too abstract, but I feel great art is always about what isn’t represented, what’s unimaginable, which in turn is political, of course. In our neoliberal society, everything is quickly categorised and fixed in frameworks. The digital realm greatly contributes to this. We’re all in it, myself included. There’s the western tradition of speculating about journeying to non-western cultures, where the invisible becomes visible again, is allowed to be embodied, to be experienced.

But I feel it’s more interesting to stay here and focus on the western tradition: take theatre makers like Antonin Artaud or, on the other side, butoh originator Tatsumi Hijikata. Very concretely, they found ways of embodying the existential state of the unimaginable. They show how you might overcome the paradox of invisibility. Maybe you need to be possessed onstage for this. In my artistic work it’s about a shared moment, a collective ritual, with rules of course - a beginning and an end, certain codes of conduct - but especially the specific attention and concentration of theatre are important. This is why in The Unborn, the performer’s absence is represented.’

Absence as a form of presence?

‘Yes. The Unborn is about being out of focus, blurry, undelineated. Normally the focus is on what’s happening in the spotlight. But what if the performer isn’t there? What or who might still appear? And vice versa: how does the performer appear on the threshold of the visible and invisible? It’s about perception, about how we perceive. I’m not religious, but thinking from phenomenology: what shapes my perception as a spectator, what directs my perception? All types of things happen with me as a performer as well when I want to render absence or invisibility.’

We need a collective experience of this ambiguity in the relationships between different bodies?

‘The future as I imagine it is about involvement and contamination between different realms, between humans and other beings. That, alongside our identities and the nation state, we make space for a far broader communality. Our world is in constant flux. Rivers are getting rights, and we can take an example from bacteria’s behaviour. I want to connect the need for getting out from under certain categories and hierarchical classifications with the fleeting practice of relationships, connection, affectivity.'

The Unborn is about a world of unborn children. You call it an intermediate realm. What do you mean by that?

‘The intermediate realm is a place of transformation, of migration, a place where identities are constantly renegotiated. Throughout the world there are rituals for dealing with death. Colonisation and the trans-Atlantic human trade caused ritual practices to come from West Africa to Brazil, which had its own rituals. My mother carries that legacy with her. The story is about unborn babies that don’t want to be born, because their mothers are struggling with life. The unborn children are drawn to the intermediate realm, because they’re among kindred spirits there, with the other unborn or those who died young. Why would you want to be born if you can be happy there?

In The Unborn, something emerges that wasn’t necessarily my intention. It became a story about my mother’s pain as well. She lost three children before she had me. So I mean a lot to her. And I’m white, at least in Brazil. People would ask if she was my nanny when I was young. Do you understand? The piece is about major loss. Not just of a child, but also about a loss of identity, a loss of memory, a loss of time, orientation, position. It’s somewhere in the piece, even if it’s not articulated very explicitly, as regards the cerebral cortex, let’s say.

Anyway, I feel the western theatrical space is a sacred place just as well, and also a matter of faith: when you enter a theatre, you adapt, because a different physicality, a different mentality is expected of you. Time and space, our muscles, our perception; everything works differently. We experience in a different way. The Unborn isn’t just about the story of the unborn, but also about the theatrical apparatus, the collective ritual, the ‘regime’, as Michel Foucault would say. It’s a certain form of knowledge, where other things can be made true.’

Are you trying to move people towards the pain? Often surviving also means avoiding pain, no longer feeling. Is the paradise of the unborn so interesting because they don’t have to go through the trauma of life there?

‘Well, it’s about not having to be born into trauma. But I don’t know if it’s about pain. Maybe it’s more about melancholy. It’s a kind of mourning, collective grief and mourning of the colonist and colonised, of the white man or whoever.’

This interview took place online on 5 April 2024.

Fransien van der Putt (1965) is a dramaturge, writer, researcher and publisher of De Nieuwe Dansbibliotheek. She is involved in dance archiving and has a background in audio mixing, independent radio and theatre studies.