BEAUTY
Art is beautiful!
BEAUTY
How to define and express it? ls art perhaps the secret lover of beauty?
Where are the limits of the beauty of movement and the beauty of the image? We perceive our world as a constant flux of figures and images. But if we think of the beauty of a person, the image we see is fixed rather than moving. As human beings, we are divided according to our aspect, colour and size; we are tied to different cultural backgrounds. What's more, our perceptions change and taste and aesthetics change in the Flux of our social instances. Globalised philosophy has diversified our aesthetic perception of what is beautiful, but the function of beauty consists mainly in the desire to attain a social position.
We live in an era of commodification, where beauty serves to promote the selling and commoditisation of the image. Beauty is therefore not the exterior expression of an interior value, but a mere phiysical manifestation. The art of dance uses movement to turn this conception on its head. It brings to light other values that modify the meaning and form of appearances. Dance amplifies the meaning of beauty and frees the receptors of sensitivity and emotion.
Beauty, the current edition of the Biennale Festival, offers us the possibility of celebrating the human body and its vocabulary of movement in all its cultural differences. It offers us the opportunity to go beyond our preconceived ideas and broaden our vision of the aesthetics of movement and the progressive nature of art in the contemporary world.
TRACES
According to Plato, the function of art is to evoke the intelligible world through representations of the beauty of the human body. In today's world, characterised by the rapid flowing of time and the speed with which technological advances are made, it is up to art and artists to assume the function of a specular memory that will leave a trace of our existence. This is nothing new, considering that in the past art (drawing, painting, sculpture and architecture) is evident in the works of Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Palladio and others. The focal point in their visions consisted in the ability to look at the world through beauty, intelligence, and a sense of reality. Now we are perhaps entering a phase of “rebirth" where the profusion of ideas, images and behaviours makes them very quickly obsolete. The amount of conceptual modifications in reference to art, entertainment and fashion is striking. In this context the art of choreography, looking at body and movement, must aim at more than distorting conventions and perhaps go back to recycling the existing ones. There is a brilliant example of a precise way of representing the meaning of beauty and images to create a completely new and historically relevant aesthetics, an aesthetics that successfully contains many of the principle aspects of contemporary experience. This is clearly expressed in the work of Andy Warhol. By observing the characteristics and posture of an individual, you can capture their soul as it is playing out and discover their real, natural beauty, interpreting what they ask of their body or what it reveals. In Latin, as also in Greek, sympathia means having one common feeling, sharing a moral affinity. The body and face represent a symbolic framework that forces us to deal with a complex and ancient cultural experience. Human beings posit themselves as the measure of all things and as the rule of ethical judgement over the rest of creation. They are the interpreters of those revealing signs that, seen in the corporeal forms of all beings, indicate a secret alliance, a mysterious synching. We are always interpreters of beauty and physiognomists. In 1603 the philosopher Della Porta published in Venice the six volumes of his Coelestis Physiognomonia, where he analysed the influence of bodies, movements and the alignment of the stars on appearance, beauty, character and even the destiny of men.
ROADS
The 2008 Festival aims to follow several roads in developing a survey of beauty and of treatment beauty has received and is receiving, inviting affirmed and nascent international and Italian artists to compete, no holds barred, on the changing and seductive field of the human body in performance.
Ismael Ivo
from the catalog of the 6th International Festival of Contemporary Dance