concept and choreography Paola Bianchi
on stage Valentina Buldrini, Paola Bianchi
lights Paolo Pollo Rodighiero
production Agar, Progetto Interregionale Spazi per la danza contemporanea
thanks to Sala5x10, Santarcangelo Festival
the sound of silence invades the space
a buzzing as deafening as the silence can be
a figure acts in an EMPTY, BLACK space
another figure doesn’t act
her space is a red space. A RED space
the first figure makes gestures which have been made a long time ago
dead gestures, lost in the darkness of the stages
gestures which must be read again
the other figure is sitting. she shows her back
a lavatory, a loo
the time of the first figure is suspended from past and present
it’s the time of memory, the interpreted and transmitted recollection which is never real
a time which cannot be placed
the place of the other figure is the place of waste, solitary and intimate
the place of the dumb thought
a close, defined space
the first figure tries to make the image live again
the other figure celebrates the sense of the dead image
the first figure makes a route. She passes through years and gestures
the other one stays. she waits. she doesn’t go through
sometimes she outlines
the first figure ends her celebration dance
A few months ago I decided to digitize the VHS of my old shows, as they were about be demagnetized. They were the only testimonies of my past work. Once transformed into DVDs, those unuseful old tapes couldn’t become garbage. They held death images that needed to be properly buried through a liberating rite. So I started to transform the tapes into a wig. I wanted to give a new sense to all those hours of shooting, to all those gestures lost in the memory of interpreters and of a few attentive spectators. The intimacy of memory immediately suggested me the image of the lavatory, of the toilet, of that place which is frequented by everybody, for a necessity, like memory is. So my way of staying on stage became necessarily connected to the way of staying at the toilet.
In those tapes there’s a lot of gestures. Those gestures, those movements passed through my body, modifing it, deforming it. The same movement that from the head (the place of image in western culture) goes to the end of the back to melt into the nothing. Cessione is a testament. a way to tell a story without telling, without a story, the story of the many repeated gestures. a biography made of gestures, interpreted by Valentina Buldrini in an axcellent way. I decided to give her the ephemeral and still heavy burden
a testament
a way to tell a story without telling, without a story, the story of the many repeated gestures.
a declaration of loss.
an autobiography made of gestures.
the real memory stays inside the tapes.
in those useless tapes.
post-mortem in lavatory
PER FIGURA SOLA
concept and choreography Paola Bianchi
on stage Valentina Buldrini
sound concept Fabio Barovero
lighting design Paolo Pollo Rodighiero
press and organization Francesca Divano
production Agar
in coproduction with Marco Bianchi, Campo Campi, Luciano Nicolini, Benito Bianchi, Piero Bona, Bruno Monaco, Giancarlo Giorgi, Riccardo Nicchi, Zutart, Città di Ebla, Laura Gobbi, KosmosTheater, Ivan Fantini
with the support of Santarcangelo Festival and Teatro Petrella di Longiano
an empty space | on the floor a layout, signs delimiting the space of the action, indicating the direction.
a notes paper traced on stage | an obliged, decided route.
an only figure on stage | for her I created the performance
for that solitary and disoriented figure, who comes in and goes out the stage thus remaining on stage.
her being there in front of us becomes sometimes exposed, sometimes inposed - an ex and an in that alternate like the most natural act we accomplish in every moment, breathing.
a work about the staying on stage.
PER FIGURA SOLA’S ROUTE
I have been working for two years on the Fibonacci’s series and the golden section.
I showed in public my notes through performances and installations. I called them visioni irrazionali (irrational visions). I named them following the Fibonacci’s series.
an irrational approach, sometimes impossible to tell – as the golden number is.
the visioni irrazionali have been the material used in order to carry out PER FIGURA SOLA. they weren’t a “study for”. they were and will be like notes performed on stage instead of written notes on my notebook.
then, when I started working on the theoretical part of PER FIGURA SOLA, which represents the conclusive step of this long project, I have been working by subtraction, I started to take off. I wanted to reach the essential.
just some signs on the floor remain.
the internal counts of the choreography remain.
the golden rectangle remains, a golden cage made by our own hands. if at Leonardo da Vinci’s Uomo Vitruviano period man was the measure of everything, now things have become the measure to which man has to be adapted to.
among the several performers inhabiting my visions, only one remains, an only figure.
PER FIGURA SOLA talks about pretence. of being something without being that thing.
it talks about transformations, of attempts of transformations. a work about space, with no way out, sterile.
an irrational route. a laboratory with a cavy.
a study about staying, alone, on stage | there’s no more solitary place than the stage | it’s the place of measure
there is staying on before | there is an unarmed, ready, disposable, open being
there is the desire, the attempt to be “other”, “different”
there is a series of attempts, already decided, already drawn
there is no fatalism | there is a plan, a design, a route, an obliged trajectory
a sense of constant NAUSEA, a clear perception about our STAYING, HERE, NOW
precise erasing | organic flatting
there is no story
I cannot modify the trajectory, but the inside o the square | there is a layout
it is the game of goose
there is no exit
Homós
apologia dell’enantíos
workshop with final performance
teacher Paola Bianchi
Homós (greek) equal
Enantíos (greek) opposite
The representation of the equal to the defence of the opposite.
The equal is shown in order to exalt the singularity of the opposite.
Homós is the encounter between the two projects that Ihave been developing since 2004, Odissea dell’immobilità (Odissey of stillness) and Come Conigli (Like Rabbits).
The idea of developing a project about cultural clonation was born from the project Odissea dell’immobilità which was made by steps. Cultural clonation, production/construction of human beings having the same desires, thoughts, interests, taste. A reflection about homologation as the evil consequence of a wild globalization and at the same time the cause of it.
From the project Come Conigli came the idea of serial and numerical repetition of actions, the use of space in which the performance will take place, the number of the performers.
Are we now unable to let energies and desires flow, or are we unconsciously manipulated?
Do we need to be manipulated because we are no more able to act?
Or do we let that all this happens without any kind of consciuousness?
We are going towards what I call “annulment of personality” without any decency. It is necessarily bound to the incapacity of choice. The pressure made by the means of information takes to irrationality: the desappearing of any true competence, the continuous technological renewal, the fusion between State and Economy, the widespread secret, the unquestionable false (with the consequent desappearing of public opinion), the eternal present (annulment of historical conscience).
We are flesh for television, unconscious victims of ipnopedia.
Homós foresees a workshop and a final performance.
Corpus Hominis
concept and choreography Paola Bianchi
on stage Alessandro Bedosti, Piero Leccese, Matteo Garattoni
sound concept Fabio Barovero
lighting design Fabio Sajiz
press and organization Francesca Divano
production Agar, Torinodanza, centrale FIES
collaboration to production Città di Ebla
thanks to Cango Cantieri Goldonetta, l’arboreto, Raum, Blusuolo centro arti performative, Cristina Riccati, Silvia Parlagreco, Ivan Fantini
We represent the age of minimum reason and maximum destruction.
Ulrich Beck
This work comes from a consideration of the body as a place where the relationships of domination and subordination are registered. I will not reveal the power, but rather the victim, a victim of itself, of obsessive, daily self care: the body.
bodies, alone, spectators of the world
bodies without body
WILL YOU HELP ME?
bodies dissociated in organs, relatively passive physiological material
bodies medicalized
bodies that disappear, that fall apart with vibration
FIRST FUGUE
bodies measured and exhibited, tidy and clean in the beauty of their appearance
bodies celebrated
bodies subjected to practice, preparation, civilization, education, conversion, bodies
trained, disciplined, flexible, malleable,
docile bodies, written surfaces, branded by the wording of the law
SECOND FUGUE
bodies punished, standardized, corrected, colonized, validated
bodies massed in solitude
bodies in-formed, regulated
bodies like “things”, catatonic
plastic bodies
bodies-goods
angels that fall to Hell, the damned who descend to Hades
THE NECESSARY SURRENDER
“everything could be different, but I can change almost nothing”
brain death as a necessary and sufficient criterion for diagnosing the death of an individual
superiority of the encephalon
intimacy publicly exhibited and thus denied
victim/executioner - the roles get confused
material bodies that remain
civilization’s disabled
NOTHINGNESS
STAGNATION
In what is defined as a somatic society, epistemological, ethical and aesthetic technologies discipline, adorn, punish, celebrate the body.
Every society talks about bodies, moulds them, orientates them, marks them, reduces them to reason.
STYLES OF FLESH
Odyssey of stillness
project of creation by steps
The standing journey. The escape that doesn’t find the way. Standing motion, the energy self-generates, self-nourishes and flows inside.
Perfect / imperfect. Contraddiction of oxymorus.
The initial impulse for this project is "The notebook, the proof, the third lie: three novels" by Agota Kristof, but my research has gone beyond Kristof’s novel, individuating some themes of interest:
symbiotic being twins / excellent couple / indivisibility of the double / unstable equilibrium
siamese being twins / freaks / eye-spy
division / separation
multiplication / clonation / omologation
cryptophasy
excercises to strenghthen the mind through physical work / repetition /
perfection / overcoming our limits.
These themes, amenable to some variations, will be faced separately (one by one) and/or uniformly, generating some steps showed to the audience. Each step will have a different title and modality of intervention: video installations, sound installations, performances.
odissea dell’immobilità # 0 HaccaH - a performance for children from 3 to 5 years old, in which we worked around symbiotic being twins / excellent couple / indivisibility of the double / unstable equilibrium / necessary separation (début: March 2004, festival Meli Mome, Reims, France)
odissea dell’immobilità # 1 Monocore - hinged on siamese being twins / freaks / eye-spy / cryptophasy (preview: September 2004, festival Carte blanche à Perceuse, Lausanne; début: October 2004, festival Torinodanza Focus 6 Cantieri Italiani, Torino).
odissea dell’immobilità # 2 Double-face - first study’s phase on staying. An installation of two bodies in a shop-window. (May 2005, festival Interplay Focus 8, Torino)
odissea dell’immobilità # 3 Kytos – in potere - (September 2005, Festival Crisalide, Forlì)
odissea dell’immobilità # 4 Chrónoshomo - a step dedicated to repetition / perfection / overcoming our limits. (July 2006 Drodesera>Centrale Fies)
Chrónoshomo odissea dell'immobilità # 4
odissey of stillness # 4
private exercises on pubblic release
by Paola Bianchi
on stage Alessandro Bedosti, Matteo Bologna, Matteo Garattoni
management Chiara Gallazzi
production Agar, Torinodanza, Drodesera>Centrale Fies
Chrónoshomo, the machine man time. the body as a complultion machine. anatomy laboratory. the body compete with itself.
There is no expression will, no communication will. the body work force dance in the immobility, in the tension variation, in the forced slowness, in the unremitting repetition. search the perfection in the body imperfection. exposition of the study, of the daily training, of the private physical work, individual.
In the word chrónoshomo, both Greek and Latin, I like the assonance with the Italian cromosoma (chromosome), the place where there are the hereditary gene, at the same way these exercises gave rise to my body study, as a sorte of movement genetic map.
Kytos _ in potere
odissea dell’immobilità # 3
odissey of stillness # 3
concept and choreography Paola Bianchi
sound concept Alessandro Bartolucci, Paola Bianchi
scenography by Renato Ostorero
on stage Paola Bianchi
organization Francesca Divano
production Agar, Festival Crisalide, l’arboreto di Mondaino, Città di Ebla
thanks Controluce, Yann Gioria, Francesco Renzi
# 3
Kytos cell
in potere translation from ancient locution with german origin “à bandon”, from which the French “abandonner” comes, from which the Italian “abbandonare” comes.
Division/separation/abandonment/leaving
Uselessness of the individual, left out of the relation between him and the external world.
A reduced, restricted field of action.
Separated, lonely, broken up cell.
Protection/exposition.
Motion/stillness.
Action/emptiness.
Two halves cages.
Two separated halves presuppose a unity.
Two twins halves presuppose an identity.
There’s no unity.
There’s no identity.
Kytos goes toward the nothing, toward the unpersonality because of unlessness.
There’s no possibility of change: the figure can be action or glance, show or spectator.
MONOCORE
odyssey of stillness #1
concept and choreography Paola Bianchi
on stage Paola Chiama, Paola Bianchi
sound concept Yann Gioria
lighting design Daniel Demont
scenography by Renato Ostorero
organisation Alessandra Simeoni
production Torinodanza, Perceuse Productions, Arsenic, Agar
collaboration to production Blusuolo, Santarcangelo dei Teatri
thanks Luca Scarlini, Mauro Genugu, Katjuscia Fantini, Cédric Bach – Grand Garage du Nord, Ivan Fantini
#1
Monochorial - said of each monozygotic twin developing in a common chorionic sac.
Monocore - one heart.
A cage. Within the cage, two living beings. Two in one. A mundus bifrons, dialogic, dual. Constriction of an entirety. A cumbersome human anomaly.
A wake-walker, victim of an excess of presence. Internal hysteria. The strolling somnambulist no longer asleep. Hysterical reality of two in one.
Equilibrium alone can save them.
boustrophedonic script
the place is an operative field
coupling force / separation force
there is neither beginning, nor end
centripetal energy
I want to change my shape
I feel like an accident
One is born alone, one dies alone
Are we an exception?
Despair and anxiety are mingled with cursing, laughing, mocking, the ridiculous. Depravity, a morbid glance.
Eye/spy. Participative sensory attraction. Reluctant, yet fascinated.
A porno stare.
in bianco
volo nuziale senza ali
wedding flight without wings
forced icon Paola Bianchi
sound elaboration Roberto Cecchetto
scenography Valeria Di Munno, Cristina Gallo Bruno, Erica Moscon, Sandra Pavic, Oscar Racca, Paola Silvestro, Elisa Stroppiana - Accademia Albertina Belle Arti,To Corso Scenografia E.Ajani & G.Costagliola
exposition. naked immobility of memory. certainty of “no more”. always the same story. everything has to reach rock bottom to be realized. she stays, motionless. she waits. if you’re waiting you are the wait. human being is the wait. what is he waiting? then go away. leave the reliquary, leave butcher’ shop of memories. show your broken wings.
I DON’T LIKE HIM, LET’S KILL HIM
who are you speaking about? forced icon. your actions are shattering. you’re plucked like a chicken. small deaths distorted by keeping attempts.
you have an erection and this place is full of it. misfortune. who did say the two most common images are cross and cock? do you want her to be silent and dressed? a madonna crowned queen inside the drawer of your bedside table?
THAT’S ALL FOLKS!!
figura umana
teatri anatomici di Francis Bacon
human figure - anatomical theatres of Francis Bacon
concept and choreography Paola Bianchi
staging Paola Chiama, Paola Bianchi
lights Paolo Pollo Rodighiero
musical selection Lucio Spaziante
production Il Mutamento ZC di cultura globale, Montenegrian Mobile Arts, Agar
collaboration to production Santarcangelo dei Teatri
I Tiresias, though blind throbbing between two lives,
old man with wrinkled female breasts...
T.S. Eliot The Waste Land
Lonesome and forlorn in empty, perverted space, here’s the body. both victim and slaughterer. prisoner and gaoler. motionless in an endless fight. flesh ripped open from inside. crucified, nailed down carcass. «The stink of human blood delights me» howl Eschilo’s Furies.
FLESH MEAT
where is the orifice, then, through which a body can escape? hole opened up. a silent howl. penetrating force of male sex against engulfing power of female.
EMERGENCY POSTURES
here an inner battle begins, a war which is lost even before it’s waged, fought with equal weapons between stillness and motion, fought for survival, for thwarted desires, with blinding brutality.
MIRTH IN THE DEPTHS
cheerful despair of beastly human disfigurement
enclosed in a fighting ground the exhibited body stands, to be «done», penetrated, looked at – spied upon in its privacy by perversion’s greedy eyes, both healthy and maimed, torn into pieces, the male body becoming female as it is made the object of a pornographic stare.
and like Tiresias, though blind, we are witness, throbbing between two lives, old men with wrinkled female breasts.
FreaK
living icon Paola Bianchi
video Elena Pachner Sarno
lighting and sound Paolo Pollo Rodighiero
Before I fell asleep, I felt the weight of my fists at the end of my light arms.
Franz Kafka
The icon dances. It's her rotten dance that continues and runs on. Estas son mis venas. The soul of the red remains suspended between flesh and heaven, between the fertile earth and the clotted blood of an open wound that does not bleed. A rope that does not break. Esto es mi cuerpo. Elastic stretched between the body and the dead image. Something that has already been done and is repeated live, as only the theatre knows how. Where does the fiction end? Silence. The mirror. A wounded body, displayed in its intimate deformation, a living yet mortal icon, an antithesis. The icon dances. She demonstrates. Her monsters.
Is it too heavy, too dark? FreaK, be free.
FK, a physical theatre production by Agar, was inspired by the life and works of the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. FreaK is a reworking of the production, a show in which video image and movement merge together: the video is at times an indiscreet eye, constantly spying for details, at times an interpretative reinforcement.
FK
concept and choreography Paola Bianchi
staging Paola Chiama, Paola Bianchi
voice Virginia Levy Abulafia
lights Paolo Pollo Rodighiero
costumes Roberta Vacchetta, Elena Gaudio
sound processing Nicola Zonca
mexican traditional music
thanks to: Teatro di Leo – Spazio della memoria, Teatro Dada di Castelfranco Emilia, Teatro Comunale di Cagli.
Whoever built a new Paradise
found the strength to do so in his own Hell.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Born with the Revolution, Frida Kahlo both reflects and transcends this main feature of 20th Century Mexico. It is reflected in her images of suffering, blood-shedding, loss, maiming, but also in images of humor, gaiety, alegrìa, which were so important in her tormented life.
A happy, proud child, a sufferer from polio and from the typical Mexican habit of making fun of others, especially if disabled, non perfect. Handsome little Frida with German, Hungarian and Mexican blood, she became all of a sudden board-legged Frida, Frida pata de palo. Screams from forbidden playgrounds must have haunted her through her whole life.
In September 1925 a tram-car crashed against the tiny car in which she was travelling, breaking her spine and ribs; breaking the already hurt leg in 11 places. Her right shoulder remained forever dislodged, one foot was smashed. A handrail went through her back, coming out from her vagina. At the same time, the accident left Frida naked and bleeding, but covered with golden dust.
Like no other artist in our tortured century, Frida Kahlo translated her suffering into art. She underwent 32 operations, from her accident to the day of her Death. Her biography consists in 29 years of pain. From 1944 on she was forced to wear 8 corsets. In 1953 her gangrenous leg was amputated. Her hurt back sets forth a secretion that “stinks like a dead dog”. She is hung, naked, head down, by her feet, in order to set her spine straight. She loses her unborn children in bloody floods. She is forever surrounded by clots, bandages, needles, scalpels. She is Mexico’s Saint Sebastian, and covered with arrows. She tragically incarnates Plato’s cruel description: our bodies are tombs, in which we are kept prisoners like oysters in their shell.
“I paint myself because I’m alone. I’m the subject I know best”. Not a painter of dreams, she would say, but a painter of her own reality. Yet Frida Kahlo still is the most powerful proof that what the French Surrealists had defiantly stated has always been commonplace in Mexico and Latin America, a part of its culture, a spontaneous mixing of facts and Myth, dreams and wake, reason and imagination.
Frida Kahlo usually said that she had undergone two accidents in her life, the tram crash and Diego Rivera. No one could doubt her love for him. He was not faithful. She would scold him: how could he make love to women which were inferior to him, to herself? He admitted: “The more I loved her, the more I wished to hurt her”. She with her own many lovers, male and female. He could stand Frida’s women lovers, but not the men. She absorbed anything in her almost pantheistic way of loving him: “Diego principio - Diego constructor - Diego mi niño - Diego mi novio - Diego pintor - Diego mi amante - Diego mi esposo - Diego mi amigo - Diego mi madre - Diego mi padre - Diego mi hijo - Diego = yo - Diego universo”.
With Diego she shared her love for and faithfulness to Communism. Marx, Lenin and Stalin appeared in Rivera’s pictures quite as often as Christ, the Virgin and the Saints appear in the Catholic ex-voto which deeply influenced Frida’s painting. Yet in Frida’s political opinions there was more than that: she was a pantheist by instinct, a woman and an artist involved in the glory of universal celebration, an explorer in the intertwining of all things, a priestess celebrating the holiness of all things created.
There is a sense of humor in Kahlo transcending both politics and esthetics, and life’s own chords. Her voice, as every one who knew her tell us, was deep, riotous, broken by caracajadas, laughs, and by leperadas, foul speech. Her very attire was humor, a great disguise, a form of theatrical self eroticism, self enchanted, but at the same time defying her onlookers to imagine her sufferings, the naked body underneath, to discover its secrets.
Death came to her in Mexico, from Mexico, on the 13th July 1954. Unlike Europe, Death in Mexico is considered an origin. It is from Death we descend.; therefore we are all Death’s children. Without the dead, we would not be here, we would not be alive. Death is our companion. Frida was talented enough to cheat Death, by using her linguistic prowess to describe it: la Pelona, la Chingada, la Mera Dientona.
While it is inspired by Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, FK tells not the story of her life, nor does it transpose her pictures for theatre. Rather, it means to give a deep look into her desires and fears, her eternal ambivalence between glorification of life and fascination for death, denied motherhood and wish to give birth, beginning and end. Her painting tells the story of a body exposing itself, giving a feeling of anguish and excitation. She exposes her body just like martyrs did in Christian religious iconography. Paintings of a body, exhibitionistic painting: but isn’t our body here to be exposed? If not, then why should one write, paint or dance? Our wish to be seen, to be looked at, is as primary as our need to live. Her violated, tortured body, her capacity to survive, creativity, vitality, all constitute themes for her work: our means of artistic expression.
FLATUS, UN CANTO DA
score for two dancers and music
choreography Paola Bianchi
drama Giovanna Fiorenza
on stage Paola Chiama, Paola Bianchi
original music Ezio Bosso
lights Paolo Pollo Rodighiero
costumes Osvaldo Montalbano
Lagers, jails, mental hospitals. Different evidences, similar in their tragical way of beeing. Our work began this way, looking at the inner nature of tales and images.
The drama is an essential narration. It's night: inside a room, there is only a camp-bed, and a drop falls regurarly and persistently. Two women, their nightmares, their frights, the torture-moment, the waiting, the help, the paly; and then again torture, waiting, help, till the hope expressed in a stronger and more determined cry which can prevent suffocation.
Anyway, afterwards we went away from the realism of the story to discover its essence and try to translate emotions into "theatre".
During the work, we became aware that the different ways of expression pervaded one another in one single score for four instruments: two bodies, music and light; therefore no more music to accompany movements, no more gesture coming out of sound, no more light to colour the bodies, but an unique composition in which the interaction of the instruments is complete to give and narrate the emotion.
As in a quartet, the movements of the soloists fit one other, to create an unique melody and pure armony.