hosted at Teatro Palladium on Feb 1st with Sista
- The title of our season is “Vertigine”. What is vertiginous to you?
The body is a vertigo: The mystery of its mutations, the capacity for anatomical, sensory, perceptual adaptation and reconfiguration. The experience of corporeality is vertiginous, with the ferocity and fragility of its manifestations, to be observed somewhat secluded from the necessity of understanding, from the logics of meaning that affect thought. To be able to pause in the immediacy of these inventions is vertiginous, as well as to welcome the misdirection that touches the skin, activates neurons, vibrates and weaves unpredictable alliances. Vertigo is threshold, it is declivity, it is emptiness of the bell.
Vertigo is a postural condition that cracks perpendicularity, unbalances individual arrangement and makes one twisted, shifting and shape-shifting in the incessant recovery of transient balances. To embrace vertigo is to organize gestures in the volume suspended between provenance and projection, to be moved by space and to be among things. In research and practice, vertigo is, in my opinion, an inescapable and surprisingly generative bodily state. It trains awareness in its greatest degree of fragility and negotiation.
- What power do dance practices have to change the imaginary and/or act the world?
The philosopher Adriana Cavarero in her book “Inclinations” critiques the uprightness and describes the tilted, twisted, unbalanced posture as the only way capable of welcoming the other from oneself.
To deconstruct the tyranny of the vertical state is to make possible relationships as an authentically human, animal, vegetable, rocky dimension…
In this dance of inlets, of multiple extensions, fraying, magnetisms and geometries, I seem to glimpse an ever-living and changing way of posing in listening, of weaving relationships, of concatenating, a possibility to always reconsider the forms of dwelling, better yet of co-living. I observe and through the wonder of dance as an inexhaustible exercise of emergent and generative behaviors and make, thus, experience of the complexity of the living.
- Sista was born from a specific request from Marta Ciappina and Viola Scaglione, how did your gaze and practices creep into a relationship that is not only choreographic, but biographical?
I admit that I have always had some resistance toward the biographical dimension and its transposition into choreography, perhaps for fear that it would depress imagination and invention. Nevertheless, Marta and Viola’s invitation was irresistible.
Moreover, observed from the perspective of my initial indecision, it seemed to me an invitation to traverse a possibility, unprecedented for me, of creative vertigo.
I started from their words. I listened to them at length. From their stories immediately emerged the possibility of constructing a vocabulary that made the individual experience a deflagration. Desiring trails, spatial and temporal pulsations, rootedness and sparks emerged. Complicity and sisterhood disseminated a crossroads of events that, in the immediacy of their unfolding, continue to make space and generate visions. From this vitality I fed the work and the choreographic construction.