Mimesis Journal

Choreographies of recognition

Alessandro Pontremoli — 2023-12-22

The essay introduces the monographic issue of the Journal on Dance and reality, highlighting themes and theoretical reflections between historiography and aesthetics on contemporary dance, especially Italian ones.

The rise of Dance Studies in the Italian university: a “history of histories” between disciplining practices and breakouts

Roberta Ferraresi — 2023-12-22

The essay aims to investigate the distinctive aspects in the generative processes of Dance Studies and History in Italy at the time of their definition as a scientific and academic discipline. These key-features are examined through the analysis of the Italian scholars who have recently tried to retrace the genealogies or to build a possible history of the field, putting them in connection to similar evidences shared at an international level. The development of the discipline in Italy is contextualised and explained in relation to the artistic, social and scientific trends characterising the specific period in which it was first established in the university, between the end of the 1980s and the 1990s; and in this particular perspective, it becomes also possible to re-read the choices and orientations underlying the “self-historicisations” considered within the paper.

Choreomania and Affective Currents. Remarks on "The Dancing Public" by Mette Ingvartsen

Piersandra Di Matteo — 2023-12-22

The history of choreomania recounts how a dancing crowd in the streets has consistently been viewed with suspicion. Estatic explosions of relentless dances, sudden spasmodic movements, bodily convulsions, and uncontainable gestures have recursively involved groups of people in public spaces, provoking religious condemnation, moral disapproval, political control maneuvers, and medical discourse-driven pathologization. Choreographer and researcher Mette Ingvartsen devotes a substantial period of investigation to this topic, leading to the performance The Dancing Public, a performance that invites the spectators to experience dancing together, to dwell within the sympathetic vibration collectively produced. The essay analyzes the writing of body and voice, conceived by Ingvartsen in the aftermath of forced confinement, biomedical controls of the anti-pandemic agenda of Covid-19, revealing a biopolitical unease rooted in the present that retro- actively engages with history through a choreography of affections.

Swans never die

Miriana Pelosi — 2023-12-22

What remains nowadays of a choreographic work considered a milestone in the 20th century Western dance canon? In which forms and bodies has it survived over time? Who collects its legacy and why? How does it resonate with present choreographers and what values can it convey in the future? These are some of the questions which Swans Never Die deals with. A project conceived by a network of national partners: Lavanderia a Vapore, Operaestate Festival Veneto and CSC Centro per la Scena Contemporanea Bassano del Grappa, Triennale Milano Teatro, Fondazione Teatro Grande di Brescia, Festival Bolzano Danza – Haydn Foundation, Il Cassero LGBTI Center – Gender Bender Festival, Mnemedance and DAMS/University of Turin. During the 2021/’22 season, SND has invited the audience to re-think, or better re-presentify (through workshops and performances), The Dying Swan, solo created by Michel Fokine for Anna Pavlova in 1905: an opportunity to explore styles, compositional techniques, cultural and anthropological identities. Fitting along the line dedicated to the reenactment of repertoire in contemporary age, the paper – starting from an historical and theoretical framework (not forgetting some emblematic previous variations on the “swan theme”, like the Invisible Piece by Cristina Kristal Rizzo) – aims to offer a phenomenic analysis of some salient moments of the project, through declarations, critical restitutions, documents, and work materials.

Maria Lai, Maurizio Saiu e il rimosso coreografico

Fabio Acca — 2023-12-22

In the case study discussed in the article, the author focuses on a project that has been little or not at all treated so far in Maria Lai’s artistic biography: Il sasso e la parola (The Stone and the Word), realized in Cagliari in 1991. An event characterized by being almost the only production conceived by Maria Lai in which, thanks to the collaboration with artists coming mainly from the field of contemporary and experimental dance, the scenic performance, although in a simplified operation of “total theater” that summons didactics of art, theatrical expression, visual and installation dynamics, music and poetry, nevertheless assumes an original and removed choreographic importance. A fact that, moreover, connects Lai’s path to that, in some ways analogous in terms of sensitivity and separateness, of Maurizio Saiu, a Sardinian and a historical exponent of new Italian dance.

Queering the Epistemologies

Ilenia Caleo — 2023-12-22

How is the performance intertwined with the transformations and crises of the present? How do the live arts make-world? And vice versa, can the forms of life and subjectivities emerging from ongoing conflicts provide us new glimpses into performative practices? From a queer feminist perspective, the paper maps some incandescences and zones of commonality between aesthetic forms and life forms – both understood as modes of creation, of invention. Contemporary live arts destabilize systems of perception that are considered stable, questioning the status of corporeality, the boundaries between human/more-than-human, the ways of composing the world, the logics of the sensible, opening up to new epistemologies and perverse archives. Hybrid, promiscuous bodies. Phantasmatic bodies, spectral frequencies, hauntings. Impossible, illegible, unthinkable bodies. Mixed, impure lives, meteorological dramaturgies. Mixtures with the animal, the machine, the inanimate matter. In these processes of research and interstices in-between, the performance does not represent but creates new corporealities, sequences of movements, scores, other possible anatomies.

Corporeality and processes of subjectification: biopolitical aspects of choreographic practices

Irene Pipicelli — 2023-12-22

The article intends to contribute to reconnecting the concept of biopolitics to the discourse on dance, both as a tool for the investigation of past eras and as a contribution to the analysis of practices in the present. After a brief survey of the concept, the article reviews some significant examples of dance theorists who have opened up this dialogue. The first two paragraphs lay the groundwork for the case study analysis of Luigi Manzotti’s trilogy consisting of Ballo Excelsior(1881), Amor (1886), Sport (1897), and its contemporary remediation by choreographer Salvo Lombardo.

The Performance Art of Carlos Martiel: The Political Body and Social Change

Maria Elena Ricci — 2023-12-21

In the current dehumanized and tragic realities shaping our society, many turn to art to use the felt anger, sadness or pain to create something which may help themselves, others, and the world. Performance artist Carlos Martiel is one of those who first started making art to help himself, then, with his raw and impactful works, he inevitably began to help others. This essay investigates Martiel’s work, focusing on the central role of the body as a catalyst for change in the context of performance art. By demonstrating how his artistic practice resembles nonviolent protests, the view of performance art as artistic activism is suggested, acknowledging how their effect, affect, and Æffect, is resonant.

Dancing the Landscape: Ecological Practices bewteen Choreography and Territory

Emanuele Regi — 2023-12-22

The article investigates how dance and landscape relate by adopting an interdisciplinary perspective that integrates landscape disciplines, and sustainability sciences, with performance studies and dance disciplines. Applying this lens, it intends to include some significant phenomena and processes that dance has undertaken in the last century concerning natural environments. From the ‘pioneers’ of modern dance Isadora Duncan and Rudolf Laban to Anna Halprin’s research in the second half of the 20th century, the movement of the body has confronted natural spaces in various ways, acting together with the landscape and not simply occupying it. In the 1990s, the development of ecological research within the performing arts further confirmed this investigation through ecoperformance (Maura Baiocchi) and ecodance, highlighting how artistic work could be constituted by integrating natural elements while denying the centrality of the body. A dynamic that will have a considerable influence on subsequent generations. We will focus on the ‘third dance landscape’ in Italy, as Acca defines it, where some artists investigate the possibilities of inhabiting natural and public space through dance such as DOM- and Fabrizio Favale. In order to better define the latter, we will focus on the processuality of two works created within the project Bodyscape di Danza Urbana (2022): Sull’irrequietezza del divenire by Elisa Sbaragli, Edoardo Sansonne and Fabio Brusadin and La möa. Danza per corpo e torrente by Lorenzo Morandini. Both these projects are realised in public spaces and integrate a strong relationship with the landscape understood as a cultural and natural element.

Between dance, museum and video: dialogic strategies in a multi-voice encounter

Xiao Huang — 2023-12-22

Starting from an original vocation entirely dedicated to the conservation, valorization and enjoyment of artworks, in recent decades, public museum spaces have increasingly opened up to hosting dance performance events. The interaction between museum and dance has led to a more excellent articulation of the possibilities of fruition of both, testing new configurations of mixing choreography and figurative arts, experimenting with dynamics of exchange and overlap of the respective audiences, and suggesting a rereading and reinterpretation of the spaces exhibition. The article intends, through the analysis of some recent experiences, to explore some of the effects of this dialogue between dance and museum, with particular reference to the role that a further subject has played in it: videographic and cinematographic art. Particular attention was therefore paid to the use of screendance as a preferential language for the documentation and dissemination of the dance performance interventions planned and implemented in museum spaces. The recording of the performances in a new artistic video product, with its expressive language born from the meeting of choreographic art and cinematographic art, takes on, in these cases, the value of mediation between the ephemeral dimension inherent to dance and the tendency towards archiving and to the conservation over time typical of the museum dimension