Companies are disappearing.
New authors flourish, lonely, modifying the composition of organic from a work to another. The result is a loss in the creation of personal languages, built in favor of shows, that are very well elaborated as they use materials such as ink-cartridges and when they are exhausted they risk to become manneristic too early. That happens because they don’t give time to personal research.
Theatre, as physic place, is losing the ability to regenerate in quality of popular attraction that looks at the contemporary times as a collective resource.
It’s not a coincidence that the audience of contemporary languages is less and less attracted from theater and that in contemporary times artists and patrons look more and more to other venues rather than to theaters.
Contemporary dance is a thought that moves and that calls the rules into question.
A concept that, empirically speaking, provokes a perspective shift. This makes the research of new prospective begin.
Contemporary dance can find its roots in lands which are very far from her. It can transform experience into substance.
Honestly, I don’t believe in Manifestos, as they fix something that should keep moving forward. Still, I feel the need of fixing to leave behind. To make obvious something that’s has already been understood.
I wish manifestos could generate an unexpected dialogue, because, even if this is a light exercise, there are some things that must be explicitly affirmed.
(You can modify the reading order whenever you want)
P.s. I’ve always been against Manifestos because they are always about obvious concepts. However, today I wanted to be obvious too.
Manifesto for a doable dance: the body
1. Get back to body to permanently remove it from the centre of the stage.
19. Taking the body to a side of the stage is not enough to remove it from the centre.
4. Body is athletic, so it’s necessary.
13. An object on the stage is a body too, so it has to be necessary. Do not get on stage with an object and then abandon it and dance. An object is a limit, and you have to deal with it. Fred Astaire has been very clear about it.
7.You need to wear your shoes if you are wearing an evening dress, even if the show is on the beach. This applies both to women and to men.
21. Do not toss your hair if you haven’t choose a Heavy-Nu-Hard-Dub-Core-Metal-Trash-Grunge-Black-Death-Doom-Epic-Hair-Power-Avantgarde-Grindcore-Stoner-Viking-Post music. And even if you have, try to verify if it’s necessary before doing it. Megaloman was cool in 70s.
15. The body applies itself to reach the maximum effectiveness.
23. The maximum effectiveness produces a drawing.
2. Still, the drawing it’s not the centre, it’s a waste that owns the maximum effectiveness.
11. Still, the drawing it’s not the starting point.
12. The drawing itself doesn’t carry out a thing. A pose at most. Olé.
26. Remove tattoos. They’re signs you must measure with. You can get a temporary tattoo you can find in Riviera Romagnola in summer, but they have to be in line with each project.
18. Body must be reinvented.
25. Body must be reinvented only though a project.
6. The project must be clear.
3. Do not confuse clear with simplification.
14. Do not confuse simplicity with simplification.
23. Free simplification from whichever tentation. Amen
22. Body is substance.
5. If you use the body to reach the maximum effectiveness in dynamics, space, time and relation you will trigger the hypothalamus. You can’t go crazy because it would be like talking nonsense.
8. More bodies in the same space are substances in connection.
16. This connection is space, time and direction.
21. This connection has nothing to do with love, emotion, psyche, friendship, and relatives.
17. There is also a creative problem to solve, the impreview.
9. The impreview is the lucid disorientation which is able to trigger a primitive action.
10. There’s no need to have club or fur.
Manifesto for a doable dance: the space
11. Space is architecture.
3. By mentioning architecture we mean the activity body does to create the space.
19. Sound, light, forniture, flesh and bones are body and they generate a space.
2. Architecture becomes a map to highlight body collocation.
23. The map is a drawing.
12. A drawing it’s not necessary a map.
13. The map builds the body. Also the opposite can be true.
4. The map is outside the body, and the body in free fall sticks to the map outside itself.
18. You cannot roll on the ground. This wouldn’t generate any space.
10. The minimum visionary dimension of space is the desert.
7. The Body must have a confrontation with the vastness.
5. The space is constantly changing because it is continuously operated.
17. Operating means continuously rewrite space balance.
21. Moving left, right, backward and forward is not enough.
9. By Operating, you include the silence and the void: the absence.
1. The absence task is to change space perception.
6. Beware the absence: if it is too much, it triggers the final applause.
22. Perception is epidermal.
14. Forget the emotions unuseful to the space.
8. Space it’s not frontal, it’s not into the body, it’s not among the other people, it’s not a void to fill up, it’s not an intergalactic dimension… rather cosmic.
16. Space is among bodies, and besides them. (Go back to #19 if you need to define “body”)
12. Space must considerate the body of people who are watching without considering whether it is inside or outside the operated space. The audience is in the same desert, only far away… maybe.
15. The relation is the concept between space and body.
Manifesto for a doable dance: time
I know nothing about time for this reason I decided to omit whatever point to get into a circular substance which is wide desert but also pulsating and always looking for a way to cross the rhythmic evolution which regards also writing because rhythm articulates and chains up the substance that instead should be lost pending something that will never happen because the advent can only determine the finale since the end is what has been deposited in the epidermis through shared time and for this reason all the stage tools such as body and light and sound contribute to determine a constant obstacle which must be able to keep the tension and to avoid the ruinous end which triggers an applause or a dark stage that cannot be relighted given that the fake finale is a satisfied and no more performable play which gives the possibility to slide into time to trigger a continuous escape from the finale getting itself in disequilibrium but not in free fall because if the fall happens is circumscribed into temporal contest erasing the fall from the contest losing the beginning and end concept to acquire the perception of the work that always has and always will be in motion with the body which won’t change the altitude between athletic action and daily action because it got rid of rhythm grabbing something precise from time
Marco Valerio Amico
translation by: Claudia Leone