Disseminare gesti pe(n)santi, archiviare danze di gravità. Spostamenti e passi nella ricerca

Abstract

This paper aims to share the movements or the steps that recently re-locate my research work. I talk about “re-location” to explain how, after my PhD studies, are still central some specific “directions” of analysis: 1) the “feminine” and the incalculable creativity displayed by women’s choreo-graphy; 2) the “archive”, a space of embodied deposition and survival that keeps challenging the claimed ephemerality of dance. In my current research process, I re-locate my thinking/dancing body towards new questions, gestures and events to be observed. I rely on the methodological tools provided by cultural and postcolonial studies; I position myself at the crossroad of Dance Studies and deconstruction; I move across the fleeting borders of the aesthetics of dance, video-dance and digital performance, in order to trace and re-trace, as I were performing an archival exercise, the seeds – the memory-gestures – inscribed and disseminated by some examples of female writing. I consult a Matriarchive: an imagined space of archivization where women-choreographers are the “archons”: they “commence” and “command” their body writing; they use their insurgent body-weight to affirm their agency; they re-inscribe the contemporary scene with new embedded body languages. I investigate, more specifically, the kinetic quality of “gravity”: a corporeal technique and poetics which has been embodied, denied or rejected; a choreographic law which has been historically archived and displaced on the screen (Maya Deren The Very Eye of Night, 1958); it has been re-located on the liquid architectures of the digital/urban space (Erika Janunger, Wheightless, 2006); to be disseminated, beyond and elsewhere, on the new archival space provided by video-performance installation (Nisrine Boukhari, The veil, 2006).