The Dance of Fireflies. Orality and Transmission in Virgilio Sieni’s Work

Abstract

This essay investigates the meaning of  contemporary dance transmission through an analysis of the creative and pedagogical work lead by the Tuscan artist Virgilio Sieni. Adopting the concept of orality, the author goes through his career, from the early stages of his education to his present activity both with his dance company and with the Accademia il gesto, particularly focusing on recent accomplishments and projects. On the one hand, she articulates on the process of dissolution of the dance tradition that his work witnesses, by extending references and motivations to a vaster context concerning the art and the human cultural heritage (with particular emphasis on the Italian one). On the other, she shows the consequent redefinition of the meaning, methods and targets of transmission in a dialectical confrontation with contemporaneity, intended as an attitude towards one’s own present and not only as a chronological phase of history. Readapting Didi-Huberamn’s politics of survival perspective, the author further recognizes, in the aesthetic and human encounter among people of different background and age, the way Sieni draws the present near the past, the individual identity near the collective one, through the transmission of his aesthetic gesture.