Pietrangelo Buttafuoco

In 1923, Aby Warburg gave a lecture at the Bellevue psychiatric sanatorium in Kreuzlingen, as a way of demonstrating that he was, at long last, free from his demons. At that crucial moment, in front of doctors and patients, the father of modern iconology wanted to testify not only to the overcoming of his psychotic state, but also to the inner and intellectual journey that had led him to find stability.
In “A Lecture on Serpent Ritual”, as the transcription of the Kreuzlingen address has since been known, the scholar retraces his trip to New Mexico three decades earlier. Here, Warburg came into contact with the ritual world of the Pueblo Indians – a place in which, he recognised, magic and logos meet.
The images taken from these ceremonies revealed, in his opinion, the pagan and symbolic origin of the mask dance: an attempt to respond to the mystery of natural forces by transforming into their cause. Dance was not only expression or representation, but a true act of causality danced to become an active – and causal – part of the world order. The Antelope Dance in San Ildefonso and the Moki dances celebrated in August during the drought, imbued with ancestral and sacred forces, reminded him of the tragic power of ancient theatre, with its tension between Dionysian and Apollonian elements, between chorus and drama. “[M]yths and symbols, in attempting to establish spiritual bonds between man and the outside world”, Warburg stated in his lecture, “create space for devotion and scope for reason”. His had been a journey among archetypes.

Myth is a foundational element of humanity, at all latitudes. Myth explains and gives rise to the world through the voice of poets and artists. Myth is the tangible reality of the Divine, a perennial river in the life of mortals.
When Sir Wayne McGregor first informed us of his idea to articulate his next Festival around the theme of artists as myth-makers we, at La Biennale di Venezia, had further proof of our shared intent and vision. As a universal, myth is psyche and action in their essential forms, conflict between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, therefore pure humanity. And it is grafted onto dance as well as into all the ancient propitiatory rituals, at the dawn of every art. This is why stating that artists are – even unconsciously – myth-makers is not only philologically correct, but is the necessary attitude for divining the future. “Through movement, motion and meaning, the dance artists of the 19th International Festival of Contemporary Dance have created transformative modern myths”, says Sir Wayne McGregor in the complex and surprising programme, Myth Makers. To survive sudden and devastating changes, it is necessary to identify with forms that, even when disguised by the spirit of the times, appear to our eyes as immutable guiding principles.
Research by the Artistic Director of the Dance Department has turned to the fascinating process of permanence within change, which is the strength and power of myth, always present, inevitably contemporary and therefore eternal in the flow of the days of humankind.

It is the restless fire of everyone’s – albeit mortal – life, it is the spontaneous product of the collective psyche, the perhaps instinctive but wonderful lie about who we are, about what we leave, about what we are going to find: our own tail, to borrow from Tiresias, who – while prophesying – strikes apart two serpents locked in their embrace. To become both one and the other. In the melancholic desire for the unachievable.