A DANCING MACHINE IN THE SCHOOL PLAYGROUND (LA MÁQUINA DE BAILAR).
How do children and the teachers who deal with them live in the school playground? To what extent can the Dancing Machine stimulate dance and playful movement? Will there be a correlation between the artistic design of the machine and the development of children's creativity at recess? What will happen when we put a new element in the middle of an everyday space? Will it leave any mark on what happens every morning in the playground, in the children, in the teachers, in the school itself? And in the team that prepares this project?
A few months ago, commisioned by festival "TRAYECTOS. Dance in urban landscapes", we began working on the elaboration of a "dancing machine". The goal was to build an artifact to introduce into a schoolyard so that, through music, it would change the behavioral dynamics of children at recess time. The machine, schould appear by various educational spaces of the city, within the municipal program "creating neighborhoods, creating neighborhoods" that encourages inclusion, integration and participation.
The spaces of power.
The first question consists of a reflection on the occupation of the free space of the schools through the various activities developed. In this context, there is an overwhelming dominance of the football world, which, in a position of centrality, appropriates the best spaces. In parallel, an alternative occupation of other residential spaces is detected by children who were not immersed in the dominant system. The intervention reflects a research about occupations, flows and dynamics, analyzing the appropriation of the interstices and evaluating the dialectic of the different spaces hierarchized by the most common habits.
The transformation of space.
Various experimental ways have been formulated to transform the space that children are accustomed to perceive in a very dspecific way and, therefore, an associate to a very concrete activity. It was decided to modify the perception of the place (the ludic scene) as a first step to create an unprecedented, almost dreamlike space that could host unforeseen activities.
For what is a part of the company that refers to circuits sound cards, since the containment of a series of tray and crosses that, once connected, triggered specific points. In this way, the metaphor of the route would allow us to travel through the school spaces for recreation, weaving the strategic points, modifying the daily flows and rediscovering the previously invisible interstices. Each course, drawn on the ground, contains a series of written messages ("Baila", "Feel", "Breathe", "Salta", ...) that are staged with several exercises tested during several sessions by Lucía Reula A mode of choreography.
However, after being left as traces waiting to be activated with new codes and new uses. In this sense, a scenario has been created in the service of imagination and invention, which can be reinterpreted by children and invent new games or develop activities in a network of routes and crossings.
The dancing machine.
The dance machine materializes the arrival of music in a space. It contains everything necessary to develop the action. Beyond its container function, it is a mobile device that, once a place arrives, is deployed allowing the transmission of music that can be connected from any mobile device.
Beyond its purely musical function, there is also room for contemplation, formulating urban landscapes through mirrors built with mirrors, which deform space through various reflections. In this way, one can contemplate an everyday space transformed into the distinctive lake, something magical, in which the Cartesian laws of space dissolve into a thousand fragments and are concemiten that another space is possible.
