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Chorea Vacui visio-poetic meditation

"the proper essence of the visible is to have a layer of invisibility in the strict sense, which it makes present as a certain absence." Merleau-Ponty, Eye and the Mind

Chorea Vacui (2021)

by Teatringestazione

directed by Gesualdi | Trono

with Giovanni Trono

Chorea Vacui is a device to provoke the visible, whose mechanism is driven by the indications of the text with the physical and measurable space that welcomes the spectators. The intersubjective dynamic between text and space triggers an extension of the 'visual' sensibility, which transports the spectators into an outsized poetic dimension, where time and space, history and presence, matter and antimatter, the visible and invisible, come together, generating a further possibility of perceiving ourselves together as a living body.

We feel the need to react to this tragic time, which occurs to us all indistinctly and beyond all boundaries, with an act of poetic provocation, generating a threshold beyond which we want to believe it is possible to recognise ourselves as part of the same matter, bodies among bodies, atoms among atoms, a substance encrusted with animals and stars; to overcome the principle of centrality and supremacy of man over man and of man over nature, in favour of belonging to the infinite universe.

"True reflection presents me to me not as idle and inaccessible subjectivity, but as identical with my presence in the world and to others, as I now realize it: I am all that I see, I am an intersubjective field, not despite my body and historical situation, but, on the contrary, by being this body and this situation, and through them, all the rest." Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception

Chorea vacui thus questions how sensitive phenomena can be measured by reversing the spectator's position.

If I look, I let the world exist. I am the sight. My grammar is made up of absences and distances. I live in a world of vocatives. I want to say nothing but the geometry of movements; the rest, which is life, will be taken care of by nature if it resists man.

The spectator is called upon to take part in the process of constructing the visible: a looking that is capable of not separating; a fracture in our way of seeing that subverts the hierarchy between subject and object, making us recognise bodies among bodies, a "looking" part of the material being looked at.

If I look, I create and make the world real. My grammar will be made of shapes and distances, and my word of lines and curves. I live in a world of vocatives, which I call and observe only because they have a name and a form, everything else is not in them, everything else is in my reading, and my reading is mine alone.

If we remove any reference in the scenic space, the eye is faced with the vertigo of emptiness, sinks into its orbit, vision retracts, and the evoked image appears.

One has the impression of happening in the measurement of the world, if I may say I am here.

Everything else is emptiness.

Chorea Vacui was created in 2021 as a spin-off of "Bestiale Copernicana", a 2013 work developed in artistic residence at PAN Palazzo delle Arti di Napoli; R.E.D. Residency Eina Danz - Eina, Oslo (NOR); Trasparenze festival e residenze - Modena. Chorea Vacui was programmed for FIT Fosca in tepidario Festival - Firenze; Bologna, Teatri di Vita, resiDANZE Festival; Festival Risveglio di Periferia - Milano; Cortile Teatro Festival - Messina; TOTEM Scene Urbane - Ferrara; Codex Festival - Noto (SR); Periferico Festival - Modena.

Reviews:

Renzo Francabandera on PAC - Paneacquaeculture >>> https://www.paneacquaculture.net/2022/09/28/un-giro-intorno-al-totem-sfiorando-il-big-bang-sulle-rive-del-po-intervista-a-natasha-czertok/

Gigi Giacobbe on Sipario.it >>> https://www.sipario.it/recensioniprosac/item/14565-chorea-vacui-regia-anna-gesualdi-e-giovanni-trono.html?highlight=WyJjaG9yZWEiLCJjaG9yZWFzIiwidmFjdWkiLCJjaG9yZWEgdmFjdWkiXQ==

Giulia Cavallaro on QuasiAnonimaProduzioni>>> http://quasianonima.it/2022/07/24/vedere-linvisibile/

Sara Curreri on QuasiAnonimaProduzioni >>> http://quasianonima.it/2022/07/24/un-dispositivo-poetico/

FULL AUDIO PERFORMANCE in italian password >>> chorea

video excerpt from a first theatre version. password >>> vuoto

SCRIPT in Italian, Chorea Vacui by Giovanni Trono.

“We must take literally what vision teaches us: namely, that through it we come in contact with the sun and the stars, that we are everywhere all at once, and that even our power to imagine ourselves elsewhere—"I am in Petersburg in my bed, in Paris, my eyes see the sun"—or to intend real beings wherever they are, borrows from vision and employs means we owe to it. Vision alone makes us learn that beings that are different, "exterior," foreign to one another, are yet absolutely together, are "simultaneity" Merleau-Ponty, Eye and the Mind

TECHNICAL DATA SHEET

Chorea Vacui - Full text by Giovanni Trono. The text has some variations in accordance with the venue hosting the performance.

Performance duration 45 min

STAGING

The performance is suitable for any type of space, both outdoors and indoors, whether formal or urban spaces or communal areas. If outdoors, it is advisable to schedule it from sunset onwards.

set-up and unset two hours

The performance is conceived for any kind of space, indoors or outdoors, formal or non-formal, for a theatre, a museum, a park, a courtyard, etc. The visualisation area is defined with the specificity of the space hosting the performance each time, therefore adaptable to its characteristics.

LIGHT

In an outdoor space, we will locate a square dotted with four self-powered LED light points. In an indoor space, the space is bare, unprepared, exposed in its everyday, spontaneous, illuminated by lights that could be described as service lights. In both cases, the audience sits in a semicircle in front of the space defined by the four LEDs.

Sound

Spectators wear wireless headphones, immersed in a sound environment that evokes the appearance of the action on stage.

Mixer, microphone, 40 headphones, silent system hi-fi (with a splitter to achieve double the number of spectators).

The company's technical equipment currently allows the performance to be open to a maximum number of 40 spectators, each wearing a headphone; the number of participants can be extended to 80 if the 40 in excess bring their headphones that can be paired with each silent system headphone. Alternatively, the performance can accommodate groups of 40 spectators, i.e. it can be repeated several times on the same day, taking into account a 30-minute change between runs.

PEOPLE TRAVELLING 4

photos Messina https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjzZjyc

photos Milano https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjzZhtb

photos Firenze https://flic.kr/s/aHsmWL1Qv6

https://flic.kr/s/aHsmWL1Qv6