From an aesthetic point of view I don’t have a specific artwork that influenced me but I’m really inspired from paintings and photographs. Basically my projects begin in terms of images. I go regularly to exhibitions and museums. My inspiration there is so high. When I was working with Sara, we had many meetings to re-write the script and during our conversations that I started literally envisioning a dramaturgy.
Since you transform your experiences into your artwork, we are curious, what is the role of memory in your artistic productions? We are particularly interested if you try to achieve a faithful translation of your previous experiences or if you rather use memory as starting point to create.
A crucial theme was for me the use of memory to take the body back to an experience and translate it into a movement: so the dancers/performers shared important information with the spectator. The body remembers because it experienced. For me it was the way we could communicate those stories using this thought. We have memory of a movement because it has a meaning for the body of every spectator. In this sense we don’t need to use words to tell a story, but the story can be creatively translated into something new.
When I work in general on new choreographies, I try to bring back the dancer to his/her personal experience, to something that belongs just to him/her: then we can recognize/connect with it from the outside. The first time I talked about memory was in my documentary “When I dance”. The film was based on a dance theatre show I directed based on the stories of some refugees living in Berlin. I worked with five dancers and built choreographies from the dramaturgy based from the interviews of the refugees. One of my points was telling stories with body language because of its universality.
What is the role of technique in your practice? In particular are there any constraints or rules that you follow when creating?
Obviously, technique is fundamental in any discipline, and I try to improve mine attending as many workshops as I can and constantly studying.
However, I actually don’t follow many rules, in fact I’m a bit against them.
If I have some, these are respect and listening. I work with different people, with different backgrounds and I have a vision I want to realize with them. I try to listen to their needs, to talk with them in order to build a reciprocal trust before we start working. This is a rule for me: if there is no trust there is no work together or doesn’t make sense in terms of the artistic research. Generally I work better one to one because I build a specific work based on the skills, attitudes and openness of the dancer/performer/actor. I like to work with dancers/performers that love to improvise and are not scared to break their limits without judging themselves and the research work. Of course there are also rehearsals where I have to do some choral work but I find them harder (especially if I am alone) compared to the one to one where results come (for me) more easily.
How do you see the relationship between emotional and intellectual perception of your work? In particular, how much do you consider the immersive nature
of the viewing experience?
My works always start from an intellectual concept or script but they develop hiding the intellectual side to become a tale, based more on feelings and emotions. Of course there is a dramaturgy but it is made less immediate for the audience.
My experimental film for example is quite difficult to understand without explanations as well as the second chapter of the Trilogy (for the theatre), The rebellious body. The film talks about the loss of the childhood, the coming of age and the entrance in the adult world. The child faces this passage through two characters who symbolically represent the world of children as an uncontaminated world that is destined to finish. During the post-production I asked a feedback to many people who didn’t know the logline and they had a vague intuition of the story but, of course, they couldn’t clearly explain what they had seen. This is normal especially because there is not a narrative structure.
The Rebellious Body, part of the original script of Sara, was based on the essay “The Great Caliban: the Struggle against the Rebel Body” of Silvia Federici and represented an aspect of the adult world: work and, in particular, industrial activity in the industrial world which has implemented more and more forms of control on men's and even more on women’s lives, producing a body discipline aimed at mechanization processes. I started from the analysis of this text to research how body could elaborate the concept of control and go further, telling its own images and which solutions he could discover to get free from it.
So emotionally some works communicate something that the spectator can’t explain in a rational way, but he has just the feeling he caught it. I think this was a success for me, to cover the passage from the intellectual to the emotional. In this sense the viewing experience is fundamental to leave behind ratiocination. It has to do with the memory argument that we discussed before. We watch and recognize what we see in an unconscious way.