CURA.

MICHELE RIZZO: Spacewalk was a work that intended to manifest a notion of space-time informed by the experience of ecstatic dance into an aesthetic translation. For that work, I developed a set design that resembled an un-rendered virtual landscape, in which space was offered as the receptacle of opportunities and possibilities. In one part of the performance, the dancers were invited to treat the set design as a canvas onto which to project their imagination. In Spooky actions (2021), I isolated this specific imaginative practice and created a dispositive through which two performers can practice it. As in other works of mine, the gaze is a central element of the work, as it is actualized in different modalities and directions. There is the inward-oriented gaze of the performer who is entering the imaginative practice, there is the protective gaze of another performer who has a role of custodian and guidance for the other, and finally, there is the gaze of the audience, which is invited to look at the whole dispositive, creating a sort of structure of gazes built on each other. In all cases, the gaze is treated as an active action, that constantly creates meaning. What the gaze touches, that is acknowledged, whether that is a physical object or an imaginary one. Finally, the work is a ludic exercise of listening and acceptance.

MR: I somehow like to think of my projects as a long saga, a sort of ongoing storytelling that generates new chapters every time. When I made HIGHER I initially didn’t think that it would generate two different trilogies, one for the theatre and one for the exhibition space. Spacewalk (2017) and Deposition (2019) are performances created for the theatre, in which I explored the experience of raving in almost an abstract way, associating the different phases of this experience to physical processes of evaporation and crystallization. This whole trilogy describes a circular motion that begins with the exudation of HIGHER into the trance space of Spacewalk and lands in Deposition through a sort of inverted transcendence. Then in 2018, I presented HIGHER xtn., at the Stedelijk Museum, as an adaptation of HIGHER for the white cube. Such renewed context and its spectatorship forced me to look at the work one more time, and it unlocked new interpretations of it, new perspectives, and meaning. At the time, it enhanced aspects that stayed latent in the previous version, magnifying them. Sometimes, it can also happen that a new medium comes on the way, and this might as well contaminate older works. For example, I have always considered dance as a sculptural agent, able to chisel characters and identities, and this year I employed clay sculpting as a medium for the first time, approaching it in a performative choreographic way. Most of the narratives that defined the conceptual infrastructure of Rest (2020), presented at the Quadriennale of Rome, are based on such understanding of dance as a sculpting agent, and as well follow the same sense of dramaturgy that unfolded out of HIGHER back in 2015. A performative work always comes to its final form through a complex process in which material is elaborated, transformed, selected, discarded, etc. Finding opportunities to elaborate and test aspects of a work in different settings is crucial to research-based performance development. Perhaps, for me, work is always stemming out of a few, perhaps even banal things or observations. The way these get translated, magnified, abstracted, deflated, deconstructed, and so on, is what makes it all exciting.

MR: Certainly, I think that reconnecting to a somatic experience of oneself is fundamental for humans in developing their identities. Yet, what I believe my dance research has offered me, is the understanding of the body as a not only physical entity. Even though, as you say, our lives have effects and are affected by the virtual infrastructure and prosthesis offered by technology,  the body is archaically virtual, as the whole corporeal experience is based on proprioception, meaning the feeling (processed through the mind) of the body and its movement. What is the consequence of this? That the body expands. The very notion of physicality merges with the realm of imagination, and the body becomes the manifestation of an infinite palette of possibilities. Movement itself can manifest into a body. As a dancer, I meet my moving body every time I dance. You can only imagine how many ways of moving the body can learn, and so how many moving bodies one can have.