Alessandro Sciarroni - Folk-s, will you still love me tomorrow

“Folk-s is a performance and choreographic practice about time, that arises from considerations on ancient folk dancing phenomena that have survived into the contemporary era. The Schuhplattler is a typical Bavarian and Tyrolean dance, it means “shoe batting” and consists in batting your legs and shoes with your hands.

In Folk-s, this dance is performed and conceived as the indication of a pre-existing primitive form of thought. Dance as a rule, dictation, a stream of images that follow rhythm and form, not content. "Form is rhythm, is it energy that is perceived through the ears, not the eyes, eyeless" – The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. III.

Thus for the performers of Folk-s there is no other time but the present, which is non-past and non-future. It is the infinite insistence of the tide against the beach, the return of the same wave on the same shore. It is sound. Folk is most clearly revealed in the geographically and culturally decontextualized repetition.

In this loop of percussive gestures, the introduction of anomalies and variations seems to refer to a complex system of signs that evoke celebration and martyrdom, in the cruel and elegant presence of a new Exterminating Angel. Thus folk and popular, abstracted from the original matrix of their sound, seem to challenge and merge with the contemporary condition, in a relentless battle for survival”.

Alessandro Sciarroni