The imposition of American mainstream cultural mores and ethos in friction with the exile’s performances has created "the ‘other’s culture” which different from the culture of the mainstream and the culture of origin further disidentifies, displaces and dis-spaces. Yana Elsa Brugal and Beatriz J. Rizk mention Afro-Cubanness and its role in the production of the magic systems that derived from its influence on Cuban identity and life. As they explain, more than the “immediate communication” with the spirits, what it is particularly important for its performance value, is the communication with the orishas (African deities) or with the dead in the case of crossed spiritualism. However, what I find most important is that this communication becomes transcendental because it is “poetic and metaphoric.” (25)
In Bodies of Water, the images, chants and the highly theatricalized movements and texts, manifest the use of the water as a medium for expression in which these magic systems emerge as a matter of identity both for Tenenblat’s exposure to Afro-Brazilian and my own to Afro-Cuban influences. Exilic performances, if put against Garcia Canclini’s characterization of postmodernity as a back drop “comes to erase the line that separated the modern high art from” what he calls, a “daily and massive sensitivity.” (177) For Latin Americans, postmodernity is more of a “complex situation of cultural development, a process of transformation” which I argue finds fertile soil in the exilic manifestations of rituals. Gerardo Fulleda Leon reminds us that Caribbean ritual is not limited to its mere recreation on stage. On the contrary, “by intervening in the cotemporary zones of who we are, it helps us to invigorate what we can become.” (179) Fulleda’s statement sounds suitable when theorizing about the possible mutations that take place during and after ritual performances.
Emily D. Edwards in Firewalking: A Contemporary Ritual, strongly stresses the role of rituals in personal transformation. In our case, we wanted Bodies of Water to become a participatory ritual, a “mechanism” that could breach logical conventions. (98) Nestor Garcia Canclini’s proposition of an anthropological approach, developed around ritual, seems to equip the artist with “gestures of rupture” that although unable to become “acts” (defined as the effective interventions in social processes),” instead “become rituals.” (23) I realize that normative art institutions, with the exception of Performance Studies, succumb to what Bourdieu refers to as a “pragmatic and functionalist aesthetic imposed by an economic necessity that condemns simple and modest people to simple and modest tastes.” (Garcia-Canclini 21) Thus, The Firehouse, in its own marginality, became the ideal space for our piece’s process and message to find its own poetic aesthetics.
At an individual level, although our ritual may not serve as effective interventions in social processes, it may offer instead a space where to vent the anger and frustrations that derives from prolonged and forced displacement. Yalexi Castaneda-Mache and Ileana Hodge-Limonta en Escenario simbolico en el ritual del espiritismo cruzado, rito y representacion: Los sistemas magico-religiosos en la cultura cubana contemporanea (Symbolic Stage in the crossed spiritualism ritual, ritual and representations: the magic-religious systems in contemporary Cuban Culture) make a comment on how believes and ritual in mutual confrontation and confirmation with each other within the social reality, display an important relation in which every individual practitioner interprets his/her own experience, dissipates hopelessness and rediscovers a renovated sense of his/her life span.(48)
The cultural activity within this manifestation (the ceremony of crossed spiritualism with its chants, its prayers, its objects, its representations and its significations) represents what for our performance became the ultimate canalization of a religious sentiment, in which objects acquire poetic connotations. In the eyes of the believer they become containers of a strong representative weight which brings into contact two worlds, the real and the oneiric in which one supplies the lacking of the other.
It is in this context that the individual creates his/her altar, the symbolic setting for “the bonding of the symbol and the symbolized,” the merging of the object and the spirit. (51) Turner expressed that symbols are capable of arising the excitation, the canalization and the domestication of powerful emotions.” On the other hand, Nancy Morejón in her essay For a Poesies of the Altars argues how ritual has escaped many social rules and has endured through eras as a legitimate expression of humanity, as humanity shaped to its own image the forces of nature that once overpowered it. As she states, sacred-magic rituals have revealed more about history than some philosophic treatises, economic speculations and political ways of thinking, ignorant of the power that lies in what she calls “thoughts by images,” the very mean of expression of our piece.(57)
Nancy Morejón argues that it is not the religious sense of sacred-magic rituals what has given birth together to poetry and theatre, but the viability that their expressions donated to the art of gesture and word on a tempo that we know now a days as artistic manifestations of a kind of artistic language that even now allows us to explore scenic truth. It is in this context that the altar, using Fernando Ortiz’s definition, becomes “a group of illusions or things destined to a specific end.” (58) Morejón argues that these, our altars, “express our mestizo soul through various pantheons, various mythologies." All the language of divination and the rescue of an identity, apparently lost, are recuperated through them. Altars are in of itself a proposition to organize, as artistic expression, the elements contained by nature: water, air, fire, earth. It is there where our animism lays, our relation with the elements.
In the end, Bodies of Water provided us and the audience with a space where water altars and thoughts-by-images swarmed the place as water changed containers and as we transformed a simple space into our own site for crossings, interpolations and transculturations, a space where to harvest a unique way of knowing and understanding, a specific exilic place where we could all survive the passing of time.
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