The first days of last September in Rome signalled the beginning of a series of autumn festivals; among them the 18th edition of Short Theatre, a performing arts festival directed by dramaturge and curator Piersandra Di Matteo. Under the title of Radical Sympathy, understood as ‘a way of feeling each other through porosity…, from the very small to the atmospheric’ (online), the festival spread across the city to different theatrical and non-theatrical sites. The Roman Aquarium became the site for Alessandro Sciarroni‘s durational work Dreams, and Théo Mercier and François Chaignaud staged their electric duet Radio Vinci Park at the parking lot of one of Rome’s suburbs. Meanwhile, Mattatoio, a former slaughterhouse now a contemporary arts centre, presented Eli Mathieu-Bustos’s Have a Safe Travel and Robyn Orlin’s ‘In a Corner the Sky Surrenders – unplugging archival journeys…#1 (for nadia!)…’.
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Short Theatre 2023: Ante-mortem and posthumous choreographies
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5 min
Embracing the fluid margins of performing arts and expanded choreographic thinking and merging them with inclusivity, experimentation and ‘acoustic justice’, the festival also included various collateral events such as the gathering on disability Piegare l’Orologio: La Disabilità Sovverte Le Arti that was co-curated by the Performing Arts Contemporanee (P.A.C.) network. Short Theatre also adopted a curatorial approach towards accessibility enabling LIS (Lingua Italiana dei Segni/Italian Sign Language) translation where necessary and organising workshops for people with disabilities with Chiara Bersani (Sotto il Sotto del Bosco/Underneath the Undergrowth) among others.
In the range of works directly recognised as dance, Italian choreographer Francesco Marilungo premiered Stuporosa, a work on the physical performativity of funerary lamentation and ritual weeping, both cultural and collective expressions of grief across the Mediterranean traditions – here especially inspired by the Southern Italian traditions of Salento. In the absence of a corpse, the epicentre of this choreography of suffering are five young women (Alice Raffaelli, Barbara Novati, Roberta Racis, Francesca Linnea Ugolini and Vera Di Lecce, all absolutely fitting to the mood of the piece), who reenact the archetypal repertoire of the prefiche – the women invited to mourn during a person’s funeral by creating acoustic and corporeal accompaniments for helping to cope with loss.
Veiled, dressed in black with floor-length balloon skirts reminiscent of 19th-century garments, the performers look like widows; the surrounding old brick walls of the open-air Teatro India also make them seem trapped inside a castle. Approaching in turns the standing microphone, they induce a forced weeping that allows them to reach the emotional and physical stage of lament – after all, performative crying, an expression of loss and fear, is the result of specific muscle training. Their faces, apathetic and inexpressive; with their quick and tiny dragging feet they seem like wooden actors sliding on a magnetic theatre toy. The vocal repertoire of lamentation (sighs and sobs) is fused with re-elaborated traditional mourning songs performed live by the ‘coryphaeus’ Vera Di Lecce and the electronic music that she controls from her DJ set. A continuously revisited basin of water for washing hands and the face serves as a purifying source, and the white handkerchief, traditionally used to wipe tears, initiates a subtle and rhythmic bouncing in search of a choreography of farewell, reminiscent of traditional dances. In the thin line between laughter and crying, whispers and screams, lullabies and funeral songs, and in a transition from black to white, the performers’ bodies, numbed by the immobility and paralysis of mourning, relearn how to move and face life again.
Marilungo turns anthropological research into aesthetic artefact, a choreographic (and musical) exploration that corresponds to the needs of our critical times of widespread death and acts as an expression of catholic sorrow and pain. Moving and spectacular, the work’s replication of female fragility made me wonder about more fluid manifestations of gender for the work of mourning during contemporary times – on and off the stage.
Equally concerned with death but rooted in the terrorist attacks of 09/11, L’Envol (2022) is a work by Franco-Algerian choreographer Nacera Belaza, who recreates a flight into the void inspired by Richard Drew’s photo The Falling Man. Evoking the moment before the mortal crash of this anonymous man as he leaps into the void from the Twin Towers, Belaza weaves an atmosphere – fully composed by her in terms of movement direction, sound and light design – where verticality loses its spatial references, and the dancers seem to be suspended inside a void. This is an outcome of Belaza’s sophisticated light design of disappearance and felt presence. In this hypnotic choreography of silhouettes, the texture of the skin gets revealed like rare strokes on a dark canvas yet the ghost-like performers are deprived of gender, race and identity: the darkly lit stage makes it difficult to discern even how many dancers perform (maybe they move in spiral patterns but this could also be a fugitive impression).
In an ocular culture, heavily dependent on vision, who is dance for when it is made invisible? Belaza creates a choreography of almost metaphysical and emotional reverberation, meant to be felt (and not seen), uniting us – performers and audience – in our common, and not discriminatory, destination towards death. ‘The poetics of opacity’ – echoing the festival’s concept of radical sympathy – are also applicable to Belaza’s almost evaporating choreography, constructing meaning through feeling and sensing without activating the filter of rationality.
L’Envol and Stuporosa look at death from two different angles: the ante-mortem and the post-humous). Absence is tangible: the absence of a dead body whom the lamenters mourn, the lack of agency of the lamenters over their own bodies, moving bodies that are visually absent or fragmentally perceived, yet felt as present. This is a haunting absence that, like death itself, renders these bodies as no-bodies (perhaps even nobodies): immaterial, disconnected and spiritual yet significant and memorable, in the abyss of time. ●
