In videos and performances that move the body and soul, the artist brings exuberant dancehall culture to Art Basel’s public art program

Discover Cecilia Bengolea’s infinite library of dance steps

What happens when watching Argentinian artist Cecilia Bengolea’s video works on dancehall culture? The limbs twitch, the hips sway. The dance genre portrays a certain glorious profanity through its rigorous, multiauthored choreography, but the strongest effects on viewers’ bodies and minds might come from the sense of connection to nature and the elements, and the performers’ commitment to creating meaningful movements.Dancehall sprang from the English-speaking Caribbean, creating a rich language of dance reflecting Jamaican popular culture and lifestyle. The contagious exuberance and joy portrayed in Bengolea’s work reflect a baseline energy that runs throughout her performance and video oeuvre: Lightning Dance (2018), Dancehall Weather (2017), Shelly Belly Inna Real Life (2020), and Oneness (ongoing) in particular come to mind.

Bengolea uses dance, performance, video, and sculpture to forge creative and emotional exchanges with local communities and artists to explore the body’s intelligence and notions of hybridity. A self-proclaimed autodidact, Bengolea calls herself neither dancer nor filmmaker, but instead works with materials and mediums as tools for thought. ‘I tend to use media that I don’t know very well, to discover materials,’ she says. ‘I didn’t go to a dance conservatory. I studied cinema in Argentina, but I don’t film in the way I learned. There’s a difference between doing and being. I do certain things, but I don’t define myself by what I do.’


	At Art Basel Parcours in September, Bengolea will show two works. Oneness (ongoing) is&nbsp;a participatory performance, consisting of both a video archive and live performance. The work, which splices together images of dancers and DJs such as Equinoxx, Craig Black Eagle, and Erika Miyauchi,&nbsp;will be shown in a theater as part of the Parcours sector, as well as in the fountain on Messeplatz, the main square in front of the Art Basel halls.

This six-hour archive is randomly mixed through a software algorithm and accompanies five dancers from Jamaica, Argentina, and Ukraine performing live alongside reggae and dancehall DJ Master Will’s performed music. ‘The program of algorithms that mixes this archive creates a continually evolving artwork that occupies a unique space between live performance and video documentation,’ explains Bengolea. ‘Oneness replicates a system of cultural exchange by creating a feedback loop in which the relationship between the live and the recorded is synthetic rather than static.’The film Shelly Belly Inna Real Life is the result of a collaborative project with the dancehall communities in the Jamaican towns of Kingston, Spanish Town, and Bog Walk. It follows several local performers and artists, offering a rare glimpse into the alleys and lush nature in which the scenes’ steps come to life. ‘Without beginning or end, dancehall’s choreography forms a succession of eternities, granting it a place within the calendar of spiritual time,’ says the artist. Through documentary footage, field recording, and behind-the-scenes material,the piece alternates perspectives between performer and spectator, exploring the origin of signature dancehall steps deep within Jamaica’s urban and natural landscapes. Bengolea started filming during her first visit to Kingston in 2014, then returned for two months each year until 2019, integrating herself further into the dancehall world.&nbsp;

Dancehall originated in the late 1970s in Jamaica’s most marginalized spaces, particularly inner-city Kingston. Bengolea is keenly aware of her presence within these contexts in relation to cultural appropriation: ‘Only dancers from Jamaica can invent dancehall steps, but everyone can reenact them to spread their spirit. The dancers in Kingston are inclusive and great teachers, eager to share their dancehall culture with foreign dancers and to reach global recognition, often through social media.’ This, among other things, grants the genre its powerful socially transformative function. ‘It is a way of communicating deeply across levels and celebrating life and death – an infinite library of steps, like Babel.’Transformation here also speaks to the body’s capacity to articulate sounds, move, and transcend its own matter. How did dance, choreography, and working with the body’s intelligence come to Bengolea and shape her practice? In Buenos Aires she found a teacher of anthropological dance, Guillermo Angelelli, who was affiliated with a community studying archaic ritual dances from South America and Asia. ‘I learned the dance of the wind from the Altiplano de Bolivia,’ says Bengolea. The three-rhythm dance uses hyperventilation to move at high altitudes, a technique necessary in the Bolivian high plains, which are more than 3,000 meters above sea level. ‘But Buenos Aires is at sea level, so we were hyperventilating more than expected,’ says Bengola. ‘We got into high, esoteric states of mind.’

Archaic and street dances have the social function of building collectives and celebrating life events. Strongly drawn to the ritualistic dance cultures of South America and the Caribbean, Bengolea also considers the American choreographer Merce Cunningham a primary creative inspiration. ‘He sees dance as what it is, and doesn’t use it for narration, as a tool to conduct emotions,’ she explains. ‘I don’t use dancers in service of my narration, either. I believe in this collectively created language, or the multiauthor work that dance needs.’Later in her career, Bengolea collaborated with the French dancer, choreographer, and singer François Chaignaud, with whom she founded her theater company Vlovajob Pru in 2007. This partnership resulted in performances like Sylphides&nbsp;(2009), in which both Bengolea and Chaignaud suspend themselves inside latex vacuum-sealed bags, abstracting the bodily form to a sculptural object. Hybridity’s power to transform has spun a strong thread through the artist’s practice from a young age: ‘As a child, I had asthma and I couldn’t run, so I galloped everywhere with my pony Flor. I loved the possibility of speed that I couldn’t reach running by myself. Ever since, I always thought hybridization was possible, like centaurs. The galloping was my first hybrid dance.’ What kept her dancing, however, was being able to use dance as a tool to think differently, to meditate, and, she says, ‘perceive myself as something other than a subject. To speculate with having other perspectives, as different beings or objects.’

Bengolea’s work lingers in the mind. Through her videos, sculptures, performances, and collaborations, she prolifically carves out spaces for her uncontrollable desire to incorporate new ways of being. Her discerning choices and openness within the communal stages she sets, and is then welcomed into, underscore the importance of relationality. Above all, they offer the intoxicating power of performance to everyone who sees them.Cecilia Bengolea is represented by Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm and Paris. Her work will be shown and performed in September at Messeplatz and along the Parcours route in the Alte Billetkasse Theater, Basel. Judith Vrancken is a freelance writer and critic, and the in-house writer for Nederlands Dans Theater in The Hague.

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In videos and performances that move the body and soul, the artist brings exuberant dancehall culture to Art Basel’s public art program

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Discover Cecilia Bengolea’s infinite library of dance steps

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