Touching Blues

Aimar Pérez Galí


When in 2015 Aimar Pérez Galí started his project "The Touching Community" it was clear to him that he knew too little about the impact that the AIDS pandemic had on the dance community. So he began to research, to seek out survivors, to ask questions himself, to read and write letters to dead dancers as he learned their names and their stories. That was his way of confronting the silence that over the years has served to cover up and forget the horror and pain produced by that pandemic. The project grew and unfolded in surprising directions as Aimar met the people and their stories, as the silenced names emerged from the mouths of witnesses, as he received answers.

Touching Blues, like the rest of the project, has a commemorative purpose: to keep doing this, to keep insisting that the bodies of those who suffered and still suffer from the HIV/AIDS pandemic continue to be remembered, heard and celebrated. 

 


A blues is a melancholic and slow song. And blue continues to be the chromatic universe of the proposal. A blue learned from Derek Jarman and his "blue boys", a blue that has something sad about it, but at the same time, also has something bright, festive and celebratory.

Touching Blues is a two-dimensional image projected on a vertical plane. All the multiplicity of the present is condensed on this occasion into a perfect square that appears suspended on a wall, like a painting, being able to be perfecty reproduced. Our bodies have become spots of light that move on a screen; hypnotic textures that make us see what is no longer there, what has already passed and disappeared. Thus, it seems that the rotation of the point of view and the rotation of the plane form contemplational state that perhaps approaches in a subtle way to devotion. All of this only deepens the commemorative nature of this project and our decision to honor and celebrate the bodies that came before us and died victims of what we still call today the "HIV/AIDS epidemic". 

Technical datasheet

  • Title: Touching Blues
  • Direction: Aimar Pérez Galí
  • Production: 2021.
  • Team:

    ANTES, Associació Cultural de Creació Contemporània / Aimar Pérez Galí.

    Espai d'Arts Escèniques Casal d'Alella.

    La Coordinación de Difusión Cultural de la Universidad Nacional Autónom ade México a través de: El Aleph, Festival de Arte y Ciencia; Cátedra Extraordinaria Ingmar Bergam en cine y teatro; Dirección de Teatro UNAM; Dirección de Danza UNAM; Museo Universitario del Chopo.

  • Duration: 01:19:29
  • Languages: English - Spanish
  • Original format: ProRes
  • TV systems: PAL
  • License: Creative Commons