DIAFANIE. NOTES ON THE BODY

Diafanie is a monthly collection of reflections connected to corporality that Orbita | Spellbound National Centre for the Production of Dance curates in the form of notes, with no pretension of being orderly or finalised. In fact, Diafanie attempts to complicate debates in order to sketch a utopian manifesto of the body of tomorrow, a map of observations and reverberations relevant to what gravitates today around the word “body”, what kind of bodies need to be displayed today and what distortions or simplifications it is no longer possible to accept. According to the philosopher Byung Chul Han, slickness is the distinctive sign of our times. Slickness does not hurt or offer resistance, it only gives a pleasant sensation devoid of depth. Nowadays, the body is in a state of crisis – Byung Chul Han continues –, the belief in the measurability and quantification of life dominates the digital era, which dissolves the body into data so as to make it conform to them. Orbita | Spellbound National Centre for the Production of Dance moves in the opposite direction to slickness, opening up a conflict, an abrasiveness, the contradictions of the human experience. It is in the wound that things are discovered, that something moves us. The body, the subject of each performance, rather than being an organic screen, passive and smooth, is seen as material through which geopolitical and social questions, dissident and rebellious impulses flow.