“This is only about Dance, or Letters to the Cloud” is a multidisciplinary show that explores the intersection between dance, body, and real and artificial memory. It is the conclusion of a triptych that Hugo Cabral Mendes began in 2024 entitled “Letters to the Cloud,” which is divided into three parts:
• “Letters to the Cloud” • “Letters from a Dancer to the Cloud” • “This is only about Dance, or Letters to the Cloud”
The triptych “Letters to the Cloud” seeks to immortalize ephemeral art by creating a shared memory between the audience and performers, where the audience is invited to participate in the work through a cloud where the memory of the show can be immortalized. We immortalize the moment through three foundations: physical, analog, and digital. Three different qualities: invisible, imaginary, and palpable. Three different states: gaseous, liquid, and solid. We merge: what our eyes want to remember, what our hearts want to keep, and what our skin will not forget.
“This is only about dance” comes from all the dances that have been lost, whether through simple forgetfulness of the choreography or the moment, or through the years of violence of colonialism and imperialism that wiped out many dances, traditions, and memories. It comes from all the improvisations that have ever been done and that remain only in the memory of those who saw them and those who did them. Whether from the dances of idols and references that, in a memory that does not belong to us and is passed on to us, meets our imagination. Whether from the night dances that, in the smiles and glances that danced them, were forgotten in their apotheosis of intoxication of the now. Whether from the dances of life that many hearts and memories have taken from us.
“Letters to the Cloud” exists in the search for how to eternalize something that only exists because it is not possible to eternalize it. The place where one lives in peace with the impermanence of living in oblivion. A break with the past, a flaw in the programming or reception of the signals that make us exist in our solitude of thought and our intimacy with a future of ephemeralities and “nows” that only exist at the speed of sunlight.
We live in an era where attention is fragmented and validation boils down to a click. We inhabit and find ourselves diving deep into ourselves through the solitude of the screen, leaving memories recorded forever in the Cloud.
The public is invited to film and photograph the act of ideas being transformed into sharing, and the experience concludes in the invisible tangle of glances and synapses that intersect in hearts, pierced by the exchange of what is born in the most intimate places within us — the DREAM — to participate in the creation of a collective memory in this invisible place, leaving their letters recorded in the cloud, that is, sharing in a cloud/drive the experiences and moments that one day, in the ephemerality of dance, we forget.
Dance dies when the last spectator and the last performer die. In this way, through the digital Cloud, we are able to immortalize dance, immortalizing the moment of direct exchange between the work and the audience.
These bodies are not just their bodies. They are the bodies of all the dances that have already died out. Dance is an ephemeral being on the verge of extinction. These bodies are not just their bodies. They are the bodies of Humanity.
This show, “This is only about Dance, or Letters to the Cloud,” concludes the triptych and represents an attempt to reconcile and challenge the physical and digital worlds, tradition and innovation, ephemerality and eternity.