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According to Jacques Le Goff, the body is the place of paradox or could it be the place where sin and martyrdom meet. A place beyond logic or a problem without a solution, against the rules or, rather, beyond appearance. The body is the crucial place of Western dynamic tensions between the mundane and the the extraordinary, between reason and contradiction.

The place of paradox is composed of “choreographic cells”, whose main themes are the adventures of the body, the revenge and oblivion of the body, the metamorphosis and memory of the body and much else. The entire choreography is driven by the succession of one dancer’s choreographic cell followed by another and so on. Every performance, the dancers possess complete autonomy in deciding the the succession of the cells, without communicating their decision to the choreographer and the other inhabitants of the place.

The place of paradox is transformed into an autonomous thinking being, or “The minds of Billy Milligan” such as the book by Daniel Keyes  – his  autobiography of Billy Milligan – the first multiple personality disorder recognized by medicine.

The people who dwell in this place are living a story in which, beginning from the moment the dancers “draw lots” to decide who will be first to enter the stage, a further paradox is created: everyone knows the parts that make up the choreography but at the same time no one knows what will happen at each performance. If on the one hand the history of the body is a history of oblivion, renunciation, and political use of the body metaphor created by Western culture, on the other hand, as Marc Bloch says, the body needs to be given back to history. And give the body its story.

Choreography by Gabriella Stazio

Playing themselves: Roberta Escamilla Garrison, Joseph Fontano, Claudio Malangone, Sonia Di Gennaro, Michele Simonetti, Angela Caputo

Original live music and Sound Design: Francesco Giangrande

Co-production Movimento Danza, Teatro Stabile di Napoli – Teatro Mercadante

Duration: about 55 minutes for each episode

“The meaning of what we do is in the eyes of the beholder”
Place Is The Space – Live! is the new choreography by Gabriella Stazio for the Movimento Danza Company, one of the most important and awarded contemporary dance company in Italy, based in Naples.
Swinging between fortuity and definition, freedom and patterns, contact and contrast, Place Is The Space – Live! is a performance created for both indoor stages and open spaces.
It is a compact and captivating choreography, featuring an outside the box use of the body and of the movement, where space is the place.
The compositional concepts at the base are a few and clear.
The “NO Manifesto” by Yvonne Rainer as he says No to spectacle, No to virtuosity, No to make-believe, No to heroic, No to seduction, and so on.
The aleatory theory by Cunningham-Cage on the relationship between music and dance for which choreography starts without music, having its own space, rhythm, autonomy, its own inner rhythm. The rhythm of the bodies. The match with the musicians sprouts as Live!, on the stage, as a succession of live music improvisation.
The experimentation of the space as the place where movement takes place. As the place of the relations. As the place where to be oneself. Inside and outside.
And a narration of both emotional and physical states taken to the “pivotal point” resulting in the transition to the next ambient.
A meticulous choreography in which nothing is improvised but which is still open and leaves space to the Instant Composition by the interpreters, dancers Valeria D’Antonio, Sonia Di Gennaro and Simona Perrella.
Between space, pattern, mold, quality, rhythm, dynamics, experimentation with the language of movement: from time to time one of these elements undergoes the creativity of the Company, (Live!) according to the “swarm intelligence” in which sharing, cooperation and self-organization set a complex action resulting from a collective intelligence.
Annihilated any chance of a “prefabricated” performance, what we perform – with no objects on the stage, no use of lighting effects, no costumes nor multimedia supports – is an immediate spectacularity described by live music and the contemporary vitality of the bodies.

Choreography by Gabriella Stazio

Performers: Valeria D’ Antonio, Sonia Di Gennaro, Simona Perrella

Live music: Drunk Goat Live Progress
Matteo Castaldo (noises and samples), Giosi Cincotti (keyboards e digitals looper), Luigi Stazio (electric guitars, slides, ebow), Nando Trapani (tenor sax)

Durata: about 50 minutes