CAPTURING EMOTIONS
It’s a new beginning. The ground floor is prepared. Just take a deep breath and inhale a good quantity of “air”. Hold up for 3 seconds. Prepare yourself for an imaginary submersion. While exhaling the “air” release and surrender the body as you would lose balance. Short before falling make a step. It’s an opportunity for a new beginning. It’s a sort of awakening.
We look to the internal perception of our own bodies. It’s undeniable an important component of our contemporary sensibility. Finally it corresponds to our physical/emotional human condition. There were a few stages of earlier thinking inside of a psychoanalytical study. They spoke of an “internal contact” (tactus intimus). We do perceive sensations and feelings due to internal contact, for example, pain and pleasure. It was not attributed to a specifically sensory system but called “bodily passions”. Our internal sense is corresponding to memory and imagination. It is complemented by external senses corresponding to sight and hearing. The body is in no way forgotten but is capable of modifying the activity of the soul, and in turn, of being modified by the soul. It generates emotions and bodily sensations of many sources.
Dance is essentially a visual discipline. Through dance, imagination is awakened, and if allowed give to the spectator a correspondence or a physical-emotion. Choreography brings visions and movements ignites’ our capacity to internalize and externalize hidden desires and to express enthusiasm. It is a seductive communication which corresponds with fascination and a moment of unity in the audience room. This magical momentum is a sort of breath and an infectious feeling moving from person to person and sending messages of love, fear, or shame from the eyes. Dance is a laboratory for human emotions and social imagination.
We are very deeply touched by the recently farewell to two dance genius: Pina Bausch and Merce Cunningham. Tentatively, the dance world embraces a series of wildly tendencies; the word “movement” seems not enough to express the fluidity of the situation. It must propose a change of the existing criteria and a new look at the standards of form and content.
At the same time as result of globalism there is a hunger for multiculturalism. For sure dance is not an isolated phenomenon and must respond to the outside world. It also incorporates the changes in our life related to technology and communication. But fundamentally it is deep translated by the creators responding to their culture, frequent changes in economical and social conditions, and their “geographical environment”. Their interactions look at the world at large in pursuit to generate moments of vision and provoke emotions. Is emotion already considered a taboo? This pursuit is part of a larger question that permeates contemporary life.
On the program we can see that the artists have adopted strategies using their “geographical space” related to literature as well cinema and fiction to tell stories that unfold in time. It draws like from a “blank canvas”, virtual reality, and instant replay, slow and fast motion.
This year’s Festival includes a range of geographical reach and offers two major focus with various invited dance artists from Australia and Canada besides Italian and other international productions. It creates narratives and transcends limits of time and space. Choreographers search for “veins of inspiration” breaking free from conceptual ideologies to reach outward. In this process we are able to find not just a definition of a style but a tapestry of visual emotions.
Ismael Ivo
from the catalog of the 7th International Festival of Contemporary Dance