Mimesis Journal

Introduction

Susanne Franco, Franca Tamisari — Sun, 30 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0200

Introduction to the dossier "Performing Memory Through Dance. Anthropological Perspectives"

An autoethnographic spiral: dancing “showerhead”

Elizabeth Waterhouse — Sun, 30 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0200

This autoethnographic essay considers the duet Duo by choreographer William Forsythe. Autoethnography is practiced through blending ethnographic methodology and dance studies analysis, writing from my critical perspective as a former Forsythe dancer and current dance scholar. My investigation returns to inscriptions and materials gathered during my doctoral fieldwork (2016–2019) to rethink the interrelation of time, memory, and dance in my research onto Duo. My focus is a particular movement of Duo, called showerhead, which I use as a spiralling thread to interweave my arguments and movement analysis. My writing explores how dance historiography may follow practical movement logics, and thereby depart from chronological narratives of rehearsal to performance. Instead, through an autoethnographic spiral, I account for embodied memory that is holistic and nonlinear, articulated relationally and defined by the particularity of Duo’s choreographic labour and curvilinear movements. My longitudinal study of showerhead shows how movement-intensive processes may merge bodies and cross times, as well as challenge insider/outsider dichotomies.

Dancing with and for others in the field and postcolonial encounters

Franca Tamisari — Sun, 30 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0200

Drawing from my research in Northeast Arnhem Land, Northern Territory, Australia, I show how Indigenous dancing embodies statements about being-in-the-world and being-with-others and, from a performance perspective based on participation, I explore the sensuous and affective nature of intercorporeality in relation to the transmission of knowledge and political negotiations both in the community as well as in the diplomatic encounters with non-indigenous visitors and institutions. Beyond the symbolism of gestures, I explore dance as a way of knowing and empathic understanding that reconfigures meaning and directs experience. Dancing with and for others in the context of Indigenous performances and in fieldwork is thus a modality of co-presence and co-presencing, an encounter which opens the way up to an ever-deepening engagement with others. If in the local contexts, dancing can be a way of knowing and relating with people and the environment, it becomes a ‘performative tactic’ deployed to create a space in which non-Indigenous people are challenged to learn and recognise Indigenous ways of being and are required to participate and respond.

Performing Salome in the Pacific. Three works by Yuki Kihara

Susanne Franco — Sun, 30 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0200

The essay explores three works by the Japanese-Sāmoan interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and curator Yuki Kihara. More specifically it delves into Kihara’s reenactment of the taualuga, a traditional Sāmoan dance, as well of the mythological figure Salome, who wielded dance as a tool for political manipulation and became Kihara’s evolving alter-ego since 2002. Kihara’s performances and videos, particularly Siva in Motion and Galu Afi, address themes of mourning over colonialism’s impact on Pacific peoples, in the wake of the environmental crisis. Drawing on influences from ethnographic photography and Western theatrical traditions, Kihara’s works offer a critical perspective on identity and power dynamics, highlight the fluidity of gender and cultural identity, and invite audiences to reframe historical narratives and challenge colonial representations. Her performances also contribute to the most recent critique of the long-standing canonical approach to dance modernism as limited geographically to Western culture and to rethink it rather as a transtemporal and trans-local phenomenon. Lastly, Kihara’s engagement with the Sāmoan concept of vā—meaning the collapsing of time and space—contribute to the decolonisation of museums by engaging with alternative forms of historical representation and creating a conceptual space where historical pasts, community memory, and embodied knowledge coexist and interact.

Afterword

Ann R. David — Sun, 30 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0200

“Voi non mi conoscete, ci scommetto!”

Benedetta Zucconi — Sun, 30 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0200

On 27 January 1960, the Teatro Gerolamo in Milan hosted the premiere of Giro a vuoto, a play written, coordinated and performed by Laura Betti, and directed by Filippo Crivelli. Giro a vuoto represented a distinctive experiment at the time. Indeed, the project brought together a number of prominent literary figures of the era, including Calvino, Pasolini, Flaiano, and Arbasino, who served as lyricists, and composers from both the avant-garde and functional music traditions, who set their texts to music. This resulted in the creation of an anthology of "intellectual folk songs" and an artistic performance centred around the charismatic figure of Betti. This paper reconstructs the genesis of Giro a vuoto, with a particular focus on the role played by the singer-performer Laura Betti. Through archival research on musical and textual sources, reception and cultural debate in the periodical press of the period in question, and thanks to first-hand testimony from director Filippo Crivelli (1928-2022), interviewed in February 2021, The focus will be on two key aspects: firstly, the strategic and demiurgic role of the performer Laura Betti, who experienced her artistic consecration with this performance; and secondly, the significance attributed to Giro a vuoto by the intellectuals of the time, who were eager to find new models in order to renovate popular music. Furthermore, the evolution of the show's nature will be examined as it underwent various re-propositions in the subsequent months and years, in disparate contexts and forms.

The Artisanal inventiveness

Francesca Di Fazio — Sun, 30 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0200

Reading the scripts of Italian puppeteers between the 19th and early 20th century, one can observe frequent modifications, additions, deletions, substitutions of entire paragraphs… The plays for puppet theatre are sometimes veritable palimpsests, ‘artisanal’ texts that reveal the substrates that formed them. The scripts, in fact, were often handed down from one puppeteer to the next, and each modified it according to his or her own needs, whether material or artistic, testifying to the craftsmanship of the writing process. This ‘artisanal’ mode of rewriting does not stop at the rearrangement of scripts destined exclusively for the puppet-booths, but also intervenes in literary works, opera librettos, other theatrical texts… Henryck Jurkowski argued that the specificity of the puppet theatre’s plays lies in a “dynamic of dramatic and stylistic transformation”. How, then, does this dynamic develop? Usually, in rewrites of texts for puppet theatre, comic characters are interpolated into the action and play minor roles. However, their presence can create extensive variations in the plot. Sometimes, entire scenes are created from scratch around the comic character that do not appear in the original source. At other times, the comic character is placed in the foreground, in the role of companion to the protagonist. Still other times, he becomes the absolute protagonist of the plot and ‘steals the scene’ from the canonical characters. By examining the transformations within the plays for puppet theatre in the repertoires of the art families of northern Italy, the article aims to shed light on the craft inventiveness of the author-puppeteers, in dynamics of rewriting at the crossroads between orality and written crystallization.

The sound and visual dramaturgy of Romeo Castellucci

Carlo Fanelli — Sun, 30 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0200

Known for a theater whose essence is built on the totality of the arts, Romeo Castellucci has, over time, confirmed his position of radical subversion of the relationship between dramaturgy and literature. Some of his performances will be analyzed as an example of this position, in order to observe how a “writing” advances in them which is made up of images, sounds and visual architectures and how the word, understood dramaturgically, is subjected to a mercurial regime of and surfacing, of technological redefinition in its being an act delivered on stage or written according to an unprecedented compositional process. From an imaginative language, stripped down, reduced to five words of the Generalissima, to the rhetoric of the voice and its carnality that composes a journey into the reversed image of the actor on stage (Giulio Cesare). Rethinking tragedy in contemporary terms, abandoning the concepts of guilt and destiny and a representation based on myth, redefining the tragic in the living as a dramatic, sound and vocal composition (Tragedia Endogonidia). The explantation of Hawthorne’s narrative text in The Shepherd’s Black Veil replaced by the drama of the image and its “presentation” to a watching community. The diachrony supported by the statuesque scenic gestures of Hölderling’s Empedocles that flows into the triumph of the sound image that manifests its dramaturgical power (The Four Seasons Restaurant). Aphasia and glossolalia that define the creation of another language that emanates from a choreographic and community code emerging from a remote era (Democracy in America). Finally, a «discipline of Western representation» from which originates a liturgy of the word that nourishes a tragedy in which bodies and machines have their anabasis in an extra-diegetic space (La Vita Nuova).

The City as a Score: Dialoguing with the Ex-Ghetto Ebraico of Bologna through Museum Research and Choreographic Practice

Silvia Garzarella, Sarah Marks Mininsohn — Sun, 30 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0200

This study, written collaboratively by a choreographer and a dance scholar, shifts between theoretical and practical discussion to explore the ex-ghetto ebraico di Bologna as an urban space of exchange. With embodiment as a foundational concept, our research encompasses archival and danced-based exploration, at the Museo Ebraico di Bologna and within the dance studio, resulting in a choreographic work. Rather than absolutely confining, the borders of the ghetto have been considered spaces of negotiation, involving exchange between inside and outside, private and public, and Catholic and Jewish aspects of city life. In discussing this process, we integrate broader cultural studies frameworks on maps and borders, examining the city's ‘body’ as a choreographic score in itself and the museum’s documentation center as a means to reactivate it. From the use of contact improvisation technique, to the joint creation of the musical score, to the integration of multiple mapping strategies, each element of this choreographic work is influenced by exchange. The choice to write collaboratively also responds to this underlying theme. Through this study, we aim to contribute to wider discussions of how choreographic practice offers possibilities for understanding local histories and contemporary uses of urban space.

L’Orfeo di Trisha Brown: il mito tra danza pura ed eloquenza mimica

Aline Nari — Sun, 30 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0200

In 1998, the American choreographer Trisha Brown, a pioneer of post-modern dance, proposed a personal reading of Monteverdi's Orpheusat the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels, for which she offered her own experience as an innovator in confrontation with a founding myth of Western culture and with Monteverdi's famous score of 1607, a milestone in the history of melodrama and European theatre. For Brown, an artist characterised by a conceptual approach to choreographic composition, this was an opportunity to deepen her reflection on the relationship between narration and abstraction, as well as a chance to test and renew her research on movement, accepting the challenge imposed by the dialogue with the complexity of the musical score and the cultural stratification of tradition. However, if the intelligence of the choreographic and directorial project were essential in decreeing the opera's success, the article highlights how it is the singer's body that is the ‘place’ where to trace the signs of what Brown admits was a turning point in his own artistic career. Moreover, dwelling today on this particular aspect of Trisha Brown's artistic production seems interesting to us also in view of a retrospective assessment of post-modern dance, its historical legacy and the still generative questions related to the great experimentation on the body and gesture writing that characterised the period between the 1960s and 1980s.

Re-enactment e Bildung: il caso etico de La reprise di Milo Rau

Andrea Vecchia — Sun, 30 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0200

Milo Rau is considered one of the most provocative directors currently. Rau is the artistic director of the NTGent theatre, an activist intellectual, but also a politically engaged sociologist and journalism expert. The director acts in the current discrepancy of performance practices. He reconfigured theatrical aesthetics according to that “global realism” for which “theatre is nothing other than a very concrete return to this simple Aristotelian lesson: everything we consider as real is nothing but a social convention” (M. Rau) . The study investigates the epistemological principles of the re-enactment procedures that characterize Rau’s world theatre. The work analyzes the practices and knowledge that differentiate re-enactment from the reality trend (“It’s not about truth in the technical sense, but about the truth of ‘repetition’ in Kierkegaard’s sense” states the director). The case study is the show La Reprise. Histoire(s) du théâtre (I) of 2018, in which there is the reconstruction of the homophobic murder of the thirty-year-old Belgian of North African origin Ihsane Jarfi, which took place in Liège in 2012. The study traces the writing process linked to the show, conceived as a struggle against dominant discourses and the bias imposed by the Law on the subject. The study analyzes in particular the methods of reconfiguration of the signs of the theatrical medium (the event/document relationship, also in relation to the media modeling of the performance) and the relationship of the device of La reprise with the spectator. Starting from the hermeneutic legacy of Butler’s thought (in particular the post-Hegelian ethics of the recognition of Precarious Life), the study analyzes how Rau brings to the stage a social sculpture that questions the demarcations between ethics and politics, between life private and public sphere. The thematization of the principle of vulnerability of the body, placed in the normative excess of “social temporality” and in the performativity of legal and moral action, shows how La reprisedescribes the opaque (ir)responsibility of the spectatorial subject, summoned into a public space which becomes a civil agora. The death of Ihsane Jarfi is not an example of “false moral orthopedics”; the assassination can perhaps become the beginning of a theatrical educational project that aims to make the spectator an active and aware citizen.