1) The title of the season is Vertigo. What is vertigo for you?
Vertigo is an illusion of movement-you think you are moving or that the space around you is moving-and this false movement makes you dizzy ! But it is also an adjective we use to tell about something unmeasurable, grand and astounding, but also something so strange that you are out of your mind ! Perhaps it is an innocent form of the body, the dizziness of innocence is the dazzling of a gaze that confuses the inside and the outside, that no longer distinguishes the material, objectified, expressed world from another, more sensory and imaginative matter. It is the arising of a flowing of the psyche, the fluid passage of consciousness to a pluralistic and polymorphic alternative reality; it is an experience without boundaries.
2) What power does dance have to change the imaginary and/or act the world?
It is crucial today, here and everywhere in the world, to seek and act in order to cultivate whatever freedom, to make space, to increase degrees of possibility and decrease degrees of domination. Dance is an energetic phenomenon, that is, a necessity of the body to move without meaning or to go along with that kinetic, sensory, imaginative capacity of the body and mind that we call homeostasis; it is a motion of happiness, it is properly the motion of happiness, nothing else. This is why the human species has always danced in some way and why all other species dance in their own way. Dance is anarchic, it is pleasure indifferent to power and might, it questions dependence and derivation, it is composition without domination. It is not only a kinetic workout, it also sculpts an eroticism that allows new connections between spiritual and libidinal energy, in a continuous state of yearning. Dance is definitely feminine, uniting our memory with our future, with nothing to lose. That is why I have always thought that letting dance happen is the highest possible degree of work on language, fruition and the sensible, all together seamlessly. One must let it appear, take care of this appearance, learn to create time and space for one’s dance in a world that will always threaten to neglect or belittle it. One afternoon as I was walking along the bank of a river, in the distance I saw birds, very elegant, perhaps from the gull family or the flamingo family, all white, standing drying in the sun along the river. They were not talking but they were definitely together. An ephemeral group, perhaps composed on the spot, they were definitely dancing.
3) Monumentum the second sleep is part of a larger project. Can you tell us about it? What kind of relationship emerges between the bodies on stage and the universes traced by the various “moments” of the project?
Monumentum stands for: memory, document, something from the past. Something that lingers and stops the continuous progression of the production flow, moving into the depths of memory, in a kind of temporal anachronism, multiplying gazes along the thread of choreography. It is the most contradictory title I have used so far, because it contains the desire to recognize oneself by disallowing the possible relations between desire, pleasure, capital and power, sinking inside the images, becoming their exact copy in order to overturn constraints into degrees of freedom. The atmosphere is that of a semi-darkness that grows darker and darker, the texture of this atmosphere seems to be able to rewind the bodies, it generates a dizzying condition, another possibility of vision, a posture of the body not overwhelmed by the constant recognition of its own image. This title therefore contains, perhaps somewhat pompously, a desire to bring out the agency of subjectivity as a living resource, a collective memory made up of gesture, music, outfits, a radical intimacy that leads to a certain nakedness of presence, a vibrant state of bodily pathos that allows itself to be shaped into mimetic waves of expression. Monumentum is built on two archaic spatial figures, a triangle and a circle, a circle where bodies trace choreography to the rhythm of an errant line, compose atmospheres as a way of perceiving and as a way of living, it is a space where it is possible to play with time, to make even a glance suddenly appear, a form of mutual contemplation, because looking already contains everything, words sounds rhythm language.