Movement, Visuals, and Sound by EstadoFlotante
Artist Interview
Natural Pursuits (NP): There’re are a couple questions we like ask everyone to get the ball rolling. What’s your relationship with casual nudity?
EstadoFlotante: Being in the nude is essential for me, not necessarily only in an intimate setting but also in the social. To me it’s about loving yourself and feeling comfortable with your body. It’s a way to cultivate openness, affection and trust with others. I love being nude in the places in the world its allowed: at the beach, the pool, the woods, at home, the stage, the club…
NP: A man after our own heart. Do you consider yourself a queer artist?
EstadoFlotante: I am an artist and, yeah, I’m queer. Although my work is not necessarily about queerness, I think queerness is present in my exercise of living/existing and the work you make as an artist reflects the way you live your life.
Queerness for me has to do with being truly yourself to the fullest, detaching from—or defying—any imposed paradigm/rules that make you feel repressed and held back. More specifically, heteronormative, patriarchal, and binary centered culture.
I’ve been through a lot of transformation along my artistic path because I am a fluid-self, and also by collaborating with different and inspiring humans. The rules of the game need to constantly be changing and adapt to the way society evolves. I think we owe that evolution to all our queer voices out there that want to make the world a place to thrive for everyone. We need to flow and be open to these changes, so we can also contribute from that place of truth with ourselves. I try to exercise that for myself every day.
NP: Do you have a history of performing nude? If so, what draws you to it?
EstadoFlotante: Oh yeah, I performed nude for the first time when I was in college like 13 years ago, but that was only the tip of the iceberg-or the dildo (whatever you prefer best).
NP: We like to find out what’s going on beyond the surface, so, by all means, go on…
EstadoFlotante: I moved to New York and started dancing with Antonio Ramos and the gang bangers, whose work is about being nude. We were wearing something sometimes, but our genitals were always exposed.
I am also involved in the downtown dance scene and a lot of the time people’s work involves nudity…you know, it is like another costume and it feels very good and empowering—and sexy of course. I remember for a Movement Research’s gala (this is a historical dance organization) a few years ago, i was invited to perform with this choreographer and friend, Arthur Aviles. It was a very short piece—literally the length of a ringtone—where he gathered about 45 performers of all sizes and colors and genders to dance together for like 45 seconds.
OMG it was so beautiful to dance and be surrounded by everyone nude and expressing the most of themselves, everyone looked so stunning and its was so diverse, there was fire going on for sure…
I’ve been performing nude basically all my time in New York, most recently with choreographer Miguel Gutierrez and in my own work.
NP: So, nudity is important to your work.
EstadoFlotante: I can’t imagine not having nudity in a performance at this point. It is just such a natural thing. The work doesn’t have to be about it, but when it’s there it’s there. People sometimes require you to justify the why of nudity and I ask them back, “Do I have to justify myself also wearing a costume?”
NP: Not to us you don’t. We wanted to thank you for contributing the first dance piece to Natural Pursuits and can’t wait to show it to our readers.
W.U.W. (what is your desire)
NP: The piece is wonderful. Tell us more about it!
EstadoFlotante: Lately I’ve been more of an improviser, I wanted to explore in this video more like the sense of being connected and moved through touch. Something kind of taboo these days right? So, this dance happens from this idea of move and being moved. It comes from improvising, so, when you are exercising the idea on the go, it is not necessarily perfect.
There is a lot of work with yourself and with your partner on listening to each other, letting it go and taking more agency when you need to lead, it can get very confusing.
NP: I love how that them comes across with the colored sheets.
EstadoFlotante: I must also say that my practice is not exclusively dance. This video is also a visual piece, we wear these plastic sheets that also get in the way of each other, plastic always gets in the way these days. In some occasions means protection and safety, but at the same time it’s also harmful and it’s slowly killing us.
NP: You and your dance partner beautifully conveyed that struggle. At times it felt like a romantic relationship.
EstadoFlotante: Well, I gotta say that I’m dancing not only with my dance partner, Trevor, but with my partner in life, so for sure romanticism comes up. The sound in this video is also part of a new song in process that Trevor and I are making—yes, I also make music. I wanted to share part of this process through this visual piece.
NP: Any last thoughts?
EstadoFlotante: In the end dance is an affectionate thing, it’s A LOT about connection and sharing, and the act of love. And, as I said before, nudity is about cultivating affection and trust and I am happy to share that through movement in this video.
About the Artist:
EstadoFlotante (Alvaro Gonzalez Dupuy) is a Brooklyn Based Hybrid Artist whose practice ranges from dance/movement to music/sound, and video/visual composition. He is Originally from Santiago de Chile where he studied dance at UAHC, worked as a performer, teaching artist, and started to produce his own work. By interacting with sound and visual elements he explores the moving body from its internal and sensorial awareness as an attempt to unfold a vocabulary of the present that integrates and re-structures the space and its narrative.
He moved to NYC in 2012 where he studied at Dance New Amsterdam. Through his journey as a dancer, he had the pleasure to perform with Elizabeth Motley, Alex Romania, Miguel Gutierrez, Ishmael Houston, Antonio Ramos, Commons Choir/Daria Fain, John Kelly. His work has been performed at Dance New Amsterdam, Bridge for Dance, Sample Festival, Green Space, The Brick Theatre, House Fest, Freeman Space, Alvin Ailey City Group Theatre, open performance at Movement Research, Showdown at Gibney Dance Center, BAAD!Bronx, Binary Series, Dance HOLO, Center for Performance Research, The Breakers Bar, and Movement Research at the Judson Church. More recently he has been developing his performance project-practice DRIFT (a queer sonic- Dance Vortex) parallelly to his new pop music singles and Virtual video Performances “Out of Space”.
Websites:
Instagram: @estadoflotante