‘Resting before the game, or defeated afterwards?’ The question comes to mind as we watch four performers lying on the floor while we take our seats for Salvo Lombardo/Chiasma’s Sport, the last part of a trilogy aiming to ‘re-mediate’ three works by 19th-century Italian choreographer Luigi Manzotti through the lens of postcolonialism. Taking a critical distance from Manzotti’s work, Lombardo’s choreographic research manifests with simplicity, commitment and honesty, reflecting our fractured contemporaneity.
Sitting up close along the long sides of a white runway, we witness the gradual evolution of an iconic Greek-Roman wrestling move: all the possible and ambiguous shades from tenderness to violence, from an intimate hug to conflict. This single move is repeated again and again in an almost ‘Bauschian’ way, so that each repetition brings a new variation, even subtle, towards escalation. Every iteration re-invents the movement and the relation between the performers-as-athletes from attraction to opposition: adjusting the timing, creating a vibrating stillness, and exploring the dynamics of touch, grasp and attack give a different nuance to the ultimate goal – the fall of the rival’s body.
In her corporeal research on contact improvisation (which in its early stages looked like wrestling), Nancy Stark Smith suggests that falling before reaching the ground operates inside a Gap, a suspended void that opens onto unknown orientations. Here, the falling and landing are raw, heavy, loud and uncontrolled, awaking pain kinesthetically. Without muscular engagement to defy the pull of gravity and the desire to make a new effort, these crashed bodies could stay on the ground in abandonment and defeat. Yet they rise again to continuously return to the wrestling move, not to master their training, but to explore the performativity of the unexpected attack and the intensity of the present.
On the sound of gunshots, this abrupt dropping of bodies-as-objects to the ground makes us reflect on our own materiality, and the vanity of conflict. To the initial question – resting or defeated? – the answer comes: in violent conflict, we are all losers.
