L’endroit2e | Terrestre
Simona Bertozzi (Italy)
Meet one of the rising stars of the Italian dance scene – Simona Bertozzi. Her L’endroit 2e, the Winner of the Gd’A 2006/2007 competition, is a dark and truly captivating performance inspired by Milan Kundera’s novel Slowness; while Terrestre is a work in progress, a dialogue between biological and emotional memory
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L’endroit 2e
choreography & dance: Simona Bertozzi
sound & music: Roberto Passuti
lighting: Roberto Passuti
duration: 25′
Terrestre (work in progress)
choreography & dance: Simona Bertozzi
sound, music & light: Roberto Passuti
duration: 20′
Videowork: “Terrestre, still life in movement”
project authors: Simona Bertozzi, Marcello Briguglio, Celeste Taliani
video: Celeste Taliani
choreography & dance: Simona Bertozzi
sound & music: Roberto Passuti
duration: 8′
about the perfomances
Perception as a whole
has its true and final explanation
in the tendency of the body to movement.
Henry Bergson, ‘Matter and Memory’,
London: Swan Sonnenschein (1911), p. 41
Action and memory.
An action which inhabits a space in memory and becomes an organic interpretation of plasticity in its ability to transform the body.
A body which is recognised and/or contested. Outlined by the form of time; somewhere between universality and experiential detail. A body set (in a hybrid!) between times past and the intrusion of the local “object”, the instant and its unexpected throb.
An action which generates its own length, showing itself as a trace of dynamic definition which brings one image option to life while hinting at the plurality of other ones left concealed.
A terrestrial body. Through “scars” and idiosyncrasies, it accepts and rejects the traces left by the passing of time. Everything from the complex and layered image of biological and emotive maturity, to anthropomorphic and animalistic signs.
A terrestrial character is one caught in an act of re-composition-evolution, reminiscence and alienation.
Initially it is an incomplete body. Precarious but capable of reacting to situational stimuli, though only with a simple, limited, almost forced mobility.
It is disharmonic and biologically restricted to mechanical reactions. It builds its own movement within the current surrounding environment and interposes itself spatially by revealing an almost encyclopaedic evolutionary routine.
The body then returns in its complete state, “ready made”, emotionally and experientially significant. Its very presence is liquid and marks the time of the dialogue with memory which spills over and returns to pronounce interstices, extensions of the spinal column, as well as deployment and vacillation of the limbs. Its perception is predisposed to the unexpected and the indomitable, conveyed through extended periods of respite flowing into more comprehensive and structured dynamic formulae; reiterations and solutions to starting anew in order to leave or be leaving, carved into the space, a web of deep ailments, ghosts of survival.
It is this movement of the body and mind which constantly rejuvenates the images so as to not remain locked in history.
The final act is a conditional synthesis; an attempt to give a face to the remainder of the immutable animal/human and intra-human penetrations along with their destiny beyond the realm of history.
To imbibe the central nucleus from biological and motivational memory, informing the body of the morphology which can adopt a temporarily frozen condition wherein action and space are linked not by acquaintance but by representation.
Unable to interpose itself through harmonious permeation, the body lunges, knocking from one state to the next, pushing the boundaries of its physical ability, searching for a solidification of form.
To be terrestrial appears to be sustained by virtue of its very instability. It finds equilibrium within its precariousness. It aims at the essence of things in order to attain cleanliness of form, and at the beauty which a rebirth can bring with it.
Simona Bertozzi
about the choreographer
Simona trained in acrobatics, gymnastics as well as ballet. In 1998 she graduated in Dance History at the University of Bologna, where she teaches the basics of new dance since 1999.
L’Endroit2e is her second choreography which premiered in January 2007 at Aerowaves’ Resolution Festival and she is also the recipient of the first prize awarded by GD’A 2007 Young choreographer’s competition.
Simona is currently working on her new project Terrestre, which will premiere as a complete piece at the upcoming 2008 Santarcangelo Festival.
