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Performance, 60min @ 60min @ Fivizzano27 , Rome
Anna Kushnerova, Sofia Kovarich, Valentina Compagnucci, Claudia Toto, Pierre Antoine Vettorello, Eleonora Salvato
Sound Recording by Anastasia Freygang
Set design and Autonomous objects sculpted by Jack Davey (https://jackdavey.uk)
Sound design by Alvaro Labao
Video by Rodrigo Mella
Special Thank You to Emilia Verginelli for inviting us to Fivizzano27 and to Michelle Annay Woods for hosting our audience with delicious foods and drinks.
SPANDA* is a Performance inoculated by Anna Kushnerova and Sofia Kovarich and a group of international beings-bodies who committed themselves for 10 days to liminal and collaborative processes @ Fivizzano27, Rome, Italy to emerge in an intensely somatic and acoustic real life encounter.
(*in Sanskrit , vibration, flutter, throb, and self-movement, used to describe the principle of movement in the universe as well as the reflective aspect of the divine consciousness.)
At Fivizzano, Spanda was repeated twice as a live performance (-jam) to the audiences; rehearsals were limited to preserve the unknowability of sensation for the dancers enhancing their direct experience. Dancers were asked to offer post-reflections in a written format describing their sensations during the performance.
For this performance the Dancers have been led to intensify their intra-bodily engagement with sensory objects, exploring unstable dynamic of improvisational dance as shared ways of knowing.
Jack Davey has devised strap-on metallic body extensions, via a minimal technique of straight line cutting and bending of metallic sheets. Dancers were present and informed by the minimal gestures of Jack’s sculpting method.
Before each performance Dancer chose to strap-dress/ enhance their body with the metallic sculptures according to their choice at the time.
Microphones were installed around the space to collect/transmit aural residues of the bodily encounters, as well as breath, at times - voice.
Acoustic encounters happen between metallic prothesis when 7 bodies in space meet and fragment into limbs, limbs are armoured or enabled with dense metallic plates strapped to body parts.
Beyond the boundary defined by their flesh, movers’ bodies collide, encountering other instances/obstacles in space: scratching, tapping, sliding, sticking. Magnetic/aural/condensed noise, so dense as-to swallow the space around. Body Armature that shields, incarcerates, extends, protrudes, enhances, disables, enables; materiality physicality diffuses into subtle frequency/ acoustics, soma becomes affect, fascia becomes its noise.
The Dancers perform their enhanced/constrained bodies connecting to an unknowable ecology, opening space to participate in embodiments that release ways of becoming known.
Anna Kushnerova
to submit my body to a new state, to enhance unknowability -
i select 6 metallic extensions,
sharp, constraining and expanded, i tighten the straps
i crawl…
i encounter Valentina’s topology
i offer her my sharp thigh
Valentina thickens the space between us with her attention,
my metallic knee meets her arm, she brings a mirror for me to to see my face,
sound of clashing blades lingers, contagiously beyond its own duration
i come to arest, allowing a Form to emerge…
clanging, Valentina’s ecology meets mine,
sometimes she is sharp, the way she lets me share her vitality - is soft
i sense her invitation to play,
I risk myself to somatic change
her breath changes, and changed, i meet her yet closer: over and over
until i become her prothesis, i become part of her rhythm
somewhere in the bardo of somatic complexity:
between being constrained by the sharp edges of our extended peripheries and the desire to experience the aural affect of our touch
between the cold reflective edges of metal and the desire to risk into the novelty of sensation
we emerge as a gigantic instrument with no obvious organisation
metal plate strapped to my right foot, forces it to arch, i loose balance
utilising the nervous magnetism, curling to extremes, i collapse
i diffuse into the shifting rhythms of other dancers
i bounce back and forth between sensing and the void, the touch of metal keeps my skin acutely sensitised
in this hyper-attentiveness, i create myself as i move
gently swarming Reality with the symphony of my exosomatic armature, my physicality shimmers in response to its sharp endings
i find myself in an unstable ecological dynamic
red light shifts to green light, sounds of metallic collisions, of breaths, heartbeat blend into vibration,
vibration that exists at a frequency tangible in a kind of synthetic virtual space between all of my senses
there is a familiar sense of the mechanical cyborgian future, also reminds of what we can never relate to
sentient beings aware of their limitations and potential
shimmering embodiment
To exist is to be engaged in a certain form of play, which as Gregory Bateson suggests, has the structure of negation.
Claudia Toto
light made me alien
made me, alien
sweet shy metal and mirror of my fears, cold mystic metal hands will close my eyes, they will suck and enrich my flowers
forgive me nature to be as metal as possible
shine dear shy metal, shine dear shy me
dark happy solitude in the mirror of you people and green red expanded world in the pupils of my skin under your skin
love love love love on skin
sound of the future no machine nor nature just meditation of skin struggling to reach love
after the world, there will be this green red love making
no one knows if humans or some other creatures will perform it
stars again fluid again Mars is far Mars is here under skin where there's no trouble, but just a tiny delicate music made of creative red and elegant green and soft love, soft last kiss
Pierre Antoine Vetorello
The memo
Walking backward, walking forward, walking to the sides. Like a crab. Tits. The sound is getting more intense. Did we founds the keys?
The energy is here, walking on my hands, this sharp edge entering my skin and gently getting out. Rodeo. Jellyfish.
Sofia Kovarich
sharp corner
cutting through parallel proximities
opening influx of wild sensations
release
body channels waking up to cold
metal breakfast
micro sacrifices of flesh for the dark sun
invisible fields of morphic resonance
thickening the air with secret songs
direct access
immediate download
reflections of hidden fire
liquid metal portals
inducing
hyperbody
flash
Anastasia Freygang
i feel no time. i m strapped up and there is my fellow bodies meeting metal edges and soft touch. i hear us banging. it screeches and rumbles when we come together bathing in red light.
i sense proximity turning slowly. i look at self forgotten faces. i m hearing breath and moves along the floor.
stepping in and out i listen and i see - doing capture and tending to a self dissolve.
Jack Davey
Bending the mirror. It hits hot flesh with a crash; gathered, visceral and in unison.
The sound overwhelms us all.
A body extended. Bodies enfolded in each other a hard barrier to break. Divided embrace.
Forms cut through force, bound and cold. I observe the behaviours of skin feelings. Sound emulates through communal voyeuristic movement and transportation.
I make hard objects for soft people — Or hard people find the softness in my objects. Maybe I am soft? Or am I hard?
Eleonora Salvato
ITA
Un corpo che non vuole significare ma comunica.
La bellezza del non dover interpretare, emancipazione del simbolo dalla mente razionale.
Canale senza limiti, epidermide irriconoscibile/metallica.
Il tatto diventa udito e la vista è daltonica.
Alieni ibridi immersi in un rituale collettivo, ci siamo donati tempo e cura.
ENG
A body that does not want to mean but communicates.
The beauty of not having to interpret, emancipation of the symbol from the rational mind.
Unlimited channel, unrecognizable_metallic skin.
Touch becomes hearing and view is colour blind.
Hybrid aliens immersed in a collective ritual, we have given ourselves time and care.