"Imaginary Gregory": Who hasn't wanted to fly at some point?

Who can say they haven't experienced the urge to fly? Not in a hot air balloon or an airplane, no: just the phenomenal feeling of leaving the ground. It's perhaps this unfulfilled longing that makes us admire circus acrobats in all their forms.

Now, giving that circus skill a poetic dimension, making that skill one more element, among others, that helps tell a story—well, that's what happens in Imaginary Gregorio , a work by choreographer Ana Armas, primarily aimed at children, but which any audience of any age can undoubtedly enjoy. The performance belongs to the genre known as "aerial dance" and features two fantastic performers: Amanda Berrueco and Gastón Santos.

Ana Armas was born in Rosario. She began studying ballet at a very young age at the Municipal Dance School. At 16, she moved to Buenos Aires and enrolled in the Teatro San Martín Contemporary Dance Workshop, a highly advanced school. After graduating from the workshop, she continued her training independently and, in 2001, joined Brenda Angiel 's aerial dance company, an ensemble that has just celebrated its 35th anniversary.

–Did you already have training in that technique when you joined the airline?

Brenda Angiel always looked for performers with a solid dance foundation, and it was only then, in her works, that I incorporated the technical resources I hadn't had until then; basically, the use of harnesses. Soon after, I was teaching at her school, and while teaching, I was also learning. Later, I became more interested in contemporary dance composition and realized I had to follow my own path. In 2011, I founded my company, Abismo Danza, which also included a school, which is ultimately also a place of research with the aim of creating new aerial dimensions.

–What kind of people are attracted to the practice of aerial dance?

–The air is an uncertain place, and although we're constantly adjusting our balance in everyday life, up there it's much more. All of this is very attractive and fun for people of all ages.

–But you never leave dance aside.

–On the contrary. People who come attracted by the experience with harnesses, or even to see if they can overcome vertigo problems, end up approaching contemporary dance. You're constantly playing in the air, and you can do it easily and quite quickly. Contemporary dance is something else; it has different tempos, and for me, it's essential that people can achieve that; it's always part of my classes.

–When did you start as a choreographer?

–I had done several collaborative works, but it wasn't until 2017 that I created my first piece entirely as an author. It was called "Rastros," and after two years of doing it at the Rojas Center, I wanted to create something for children.

–Are there few aerial dance companies in Argentina, besides Brenda Angiel's and yours?

–There are groups, at least in Buenos Aires, that use the harness technique, but they don't come from dance backgrounds; they focus primarily on circus or physical theater, and several are former members of De la Guarda.

–How did imaginary Gregorio come about?

"I've always enjoyed working with children, and at the time I was experiencing my first motherhood, which connected me even more to that world. But I was also interested in attracting new audiences to dance, a field in which there's almost nothing designed for little ones. During performances of Gregorio... something very beautiful often happens: perhaps the children enter the room excitedly, and a few moments after the piece begins, they calm down and look attentively."

–The opposite of what you see in many plays of the "winter holiday" genre, where the actors shout at each other and the audience. Were you ever afraid that Gregorio... would be able to keep the children's interest without any stridency? Or did you just do what you wanted to do and that's it?

“I did what I wanted to do, but I also had my fears (laughs). There's a very fragile moment in the play, when the little girl goes to sleep, the scene darkens, and she starts asking Gregorio questions; questions that are, let's say, “existential.” It's a long, slow moment as the situation unfolds. I love it, but I didn't know what effect it would have: would they start crying, get distracted, call their mom? It can happen sometimes, but generally they get trapped or answer the questions themselves.

–How did you choose the questions?

We did a lot of improvisation exercises with the actors; for example, based on the idea of ​​"things you happen to when you look at the sky." The first question that appears in that scene is precisely how many stars there are in the sky. But I no longer remember the answer, because we keep changing it based on the kids' answers. When asked how long it would take us to count them, our script said "all night and a bit of the morning." But someone said "one second" during a performance, and we incorporated that.

–To go back to the beginning, how did Gregorio... come together? Because, interestingly, it's a mixture of several things: identifiable characters and situations, a very clear narrative thread, but also fantastical elements.

–One of the first ideas was to explore how children relate to games and how they build imaginary worlds and seamlessly transition from one to another.

–There is a non-existent verbal tense, but one that children of all ages use with the “come on, we were...?”, and it is neither past nor present nor future but the most timeless tense imaginable.

–I wanted to look for something like that. I started searching, and among other things, I found a book called Dale que… , a story for early childhood in which each page features a different game, and they all rely heavily on imagination. The texts are very short, but they capture how the world of children's games, which sometimes involve just one or two objects, is transformed. Another topic was imaginary friends. When my family saw the book, they said, "Oh, it's because of that imaginary friend you had!"

–Not at all. Many adult viewers come forward to tell us that they, too, had imaginary friends.

–And then, with these starting points?

–We began with the performers improvising about games they remembered from their childhood and which ones they could try out in the air. And regarding the imaginary friend, what happens when he's no longer there was one of the triggers. This entire process took two years of work.

–Is there any history of aerial dance?

–In the 1960s, some choreographers, like Trisha Brown, for example, made some attempts with harnesses on New York buildings; but it never established a choreographic language. In recent decades, it did; collaborations began to appear, especially in Europe, between acrobats and choreographers.

* Imaginary Gregorio will perform a series of shows during the winter holidays at El Galpón FACE, Deán Funes 2142, in Parque Patricios.