The body as a document of today

This Festival is focused on looking at the sources and inspiration of contemporary dance. The central point of discussion is the relationship between Body/Spirit/Science. This gives us the chance to confront issues and try to understand what we are doing with our body when we have already reached a point at which we can not only reconstruct it, but remodel, redesign, transplant our face and clone it. How does it reflect in the observation of body culture? How are choreographers answering it?
Dance tries to reach a body momentum to become art. A performer, when enters the stage ignites something mysterious in his physicality. The rhythm of the heart is faster, the blood is running in acceleration inside of the veins, the high concentration and all the burning within provokes a sort of internal explosion which science cannot easily explain.
How can we understand the inspiration, the possession of this energy which emerges from the anima of the artist? And again, how this transforms itself into art? The anima which animates the body moves as a catalyst of the wide spectrum of ideas and relates to the influences of the world.
The actual question: is the body, frozen in the laboratory, regarded as something to be used for medical or vanity purposes? Are we slowly becoming androids? What happens to the body in a physical state of trance during Shamanistic ritual? Dance has been related from ancient times to Dionysian traditions as a product of certain possessed spirits. On the other hand, on the side of science and psychology, the answer of some schizophrenic souls has been the starting point of progressing artistic ideas. The figures of Isadora Duncan and Vaslav Nijinsky are an example of that.
Dance and religious belief also cross each other's paths in the world of visionaries. Art and Folly is one of the themes to be addressed in the symposium. La Biennale del Corpo is a laboratory for contemporary visions. The city of Venice offers an openpossibility to look at the past, analyse the present and perceive intuitively the future. It goes Under Skin with the symposium, seminar laboratories, and performance festival. It is an opportunity to examine ideas and give an insight into contemporary art for the understanding of its creative impulses. Getting Under Skin is to see how the skills and competencies of performance experience tick from the inside.
It connects with today's art in process. We are living in rapid transformation of the notion of identity. The questions of finding a personal language or striking originality are related to the individual concept of nations or culture. We are living in the times of the new provocateurs where people are burning cars to redefine their lives and culture. The body brain is a register of emotions and information which may find their response in contemporary art. Intimidations of mortality and the need of space bring out something special in a talented person who has no intention of going quietly. A journey into an artist’s psyche sharpens our understanding of their gift and their beliefs. The neural mechanism connecting perception, emotion, faith, and creativity will lead us to appreciate, even more, the mystery of art. l read once somewhere that the difference between art and science is their relationship to truth. The scientist is committed to pursuing the truth. The artist is not.

Ismael Ivo
from the catalog of the 4th International Festival of Contemporary Dance

Can one gain insight into bodies and minds? What is this fusion of   aesthetic, ethical, biological, social and spiritual experience like? It seems that we are easily seduced by visual appearances. The question is complex but let us attempt to break into the obscure and try to investigate physical images, organic bodies, inspiration and creative/ spiritual needs.
In a multidisciplinary meeting the task is to observe the bridge between the flow of energy of the brain and the heart, the physical strength in connection to a belief and spirituality. Corpo, Anima, Scienza. As in the description of Michael Williams we are trapped in our human condition between a “Divine Image” and a “Prison of Flesh”.
We can examine diverse views and disciplines with the help of scientists, philosophers, writers and experts, spiritual leaders and artists, which can shed some light and uncover paths for information and guidance. Is it that our anatomy is inseparable from the body science of knowing oneself and that it is linked to foundations of perceptions and emotional processes? Already in the mid to late eighteenth century medical and aesthetic theory was devoted to the exploration of the nervous system. Physiology embraced the entirety of the body’s motions, ideas, and sentiments.
Head (caput), seat of the brain, was for the Romans – and for most peoples the organ that contains the soul (that is, a person’s vital force) and that exerts the directing function within the body (Jacques Le Groff). On the phenomenon of trance, religious rituals offer the image of bodies possessed, inhabited and placed at the disposal of divinity. In dance the radical exercise to posses the body is there in flesh and blood and the person is no longer  herself/himself (for example Vaslav Nijinsky or Isadora Duncan). Divinity needs a body. On the other hand the ethics of gesture and behavior are social acquisitions. The processes of learning or imitating seem natural because they are common to the whole of society. The conception of movement and expressivity is referent to philosophical, religious, psychological and artistic patterns of culture today. A study by Jean Claude Schimitt mentions that normative rules of behavior and gesture can change in the light of universal values.

This symposium within the Biennale of Venice should give an open space for inspiration, reflection and it should devise progressive perspectives. Let us put the body in focus as a central object of change, anthropological inquiry and eternal human curiosity.

Ismael Ivo
Introduction of symposium from the catalog of the 4th International Festival of Contemporary Dance