Fluency was a piece about an experiment and it was an experiment for many of us, on many levels. It was probably an experiment for Peter but it was certainly an experiment for me. I am an academic, and here I was, participating in an interdisciplinary performance piece in which, moreover, I was invited to participate not by becoming something or someone else, but by continuing to be an academic, only on the stage. Billy, Alison and Peter are experienced performance artists; I am not, so participating in Fluency was an enormous challenge for me. Through an open process of creation, Peter led us with expert and subtle, almost invisible hands, and we felt confident and comfortable that we were pursuing an idea together although we didn’t really know how we were being led. Following this path we ended up creating characters out of our own selves: I created a character that had my name, that in a way was me. But what was I? Who am I as I embark on this experiment? Can I be solely an academic, in the most monolithic, one-dimensional sense of the term? The piece is, to a significant extent, about identity. Early in the making of Fluency it became clear to me, as I talked to Peter, that as the character, or the subject in the piece, is constructed as embodied, that character cannot be “solely” about one thing or another. I certainly did not want to construct it unidimensionally. I am not only an academic, I am also a woman. And I am a Colombian. In Canada I am an immigrant, and English is my second language; I cannot claim that one aspect of this identity defines me more fully than the others. And yet, there was a significant reason why Peter wanted to have “an academic” in the piece, to see how that would work, that was very important. In that search, in the process, there was a constant tension, as we wanted really to pursue the question of cultural translation conceptually, to see how it played out in relation to the experience of Peter wanting to “become” a Nicaraguan, and at the same time to put the “academic” to the test, take “it” out of its frame and see how and whether it, its discourse, would converse with the language of dance, of the body.

Fluency brings together various discursive spaces—of academia, of the media, and of dance and performance—and in doing so it problematizes them. This helps construct mirror images that serve as a form of cross-examination, bringing to the fore various—at times disparate—contexts and methods. Is there common ground between these discursive spaces? A critique of academic discourse was built into the piece as a result, just as critiques of media discourse—as seen on TV talk shows—and of normative discourses in general—of dance, of language—were built into the piece as well. Given our variegated backgrounds and experiences, during the creation process we lived in and through the resulting tensions, navigated through them, and I think they emerged in the piece in interesting ways, through language and also through irony, misunderstanding, and moments of contact and relation and the anxieties associated with them. The transformative power of Fluency lies precisely at the heart of those tensions.