Around bodies

dance performance

2021

Around bodies is a dance performance staged in the immersive context of a circular stage.

The choreography and animated projections create a four dimension show that explores the invisible contribution of the gesture.

What does it mean to talk about the body?

Around bodies is a chapter of a personal research about the theme of the body, gesture and its resonance and control. A research that I don’t consider exhausted and that I think concerns us very closely as designers and directors.

A circular stage welcomes visitors. The lights slowly go down, the show begins. The installation presents an actor alone in the scene: a monologue of the body combined with the moving forms of projected graphics. This is an abstract landscape of images.

A four-front performance that stages the body and its articulation. An exploration dance of the scene through movement and investigation of the mutual influence between the gesture and the space around it. To what extent is the actor moving the images or the projection machine dictating the movements of the body?

Human body and architectural body are shown in all their perspectives. The circular stage invites the viewer to explore the space in all its dimensions; every privileged vision is here excluded, the performance has to be observed from all perspectives, investigated at 360 degrees. So the Elizabethan-inspired La Tour Vagabonde theater, with its circular layout, seems to be the ideal frame to walk in the viewer on this journey.

Human movement and ephemeral technologies investigate and dig into the forms of the gesture, trying to embody it. The narration is replaced by a gestus: a story that deals with the sound, the image, the space to go through and the right time to do it. A visual and auditory journey to explore the invisible contribution of the gesture, to try to capture its ephemerality.

<< la storia o narrazione sostituita da un gestus, come logica delle posture e delle posizioni; la ricerca di un minimalismo; la danza che invade la camminata e i suoi accidenti; la conquista di dissonanze gestuali. >>

Gilles Deleuze, L’esausto, Nottetempo, 2015, p. 28

The stage structure consists of a metal frame. The circular platform with a diameter of 300 cm and four pillars form the main structure of the installation. Four arcs of circumference complete the construction and allow the anchoring of the technique necessary for the performance: two projectors are fixed to each arc of circumference by specific supports.

In order to make the animated graphics projected visible, four white tulles are anchored to the metal structure. Each projector reproduces the image on a arc of circumference of the cylinders, therefore two projectors allow to animate almost the whole solid. The white Tulle material used for screens is the most suitable for rear projection, guaranteeing maximum transparency and high image quality.