Memory is an experience of the body. The body is the place of images.
Hans Belting

WESTERN MEMORIES is a retinal-mnemonic archive born from the involvement of 40 people born and living in Italy. Paola Bianchi asked them which public, rather than personal, images were imprinted on their retinas and which, even after a long time, continue to live on in their visual memory. Symbolic images that underline a change in the course of History, iconic images that are fixed in the personal memory precisely because of their collective value.
The archive of images was then embodied by Paola, generating the dance solo ENERGHEIA, the first device of the ELP project. The artist's body became itself an archive and repository of bodily images in a process of organic re-actualisation of History.
ENERGHEIA was then dissected; the postures of which it is composed were described verbally and recorded verbally; the audio files formed an archive of postures.
During the creation of a performance with other interpreters, as well as during the workshops, the audio descriptions of the postures were proposed for listening. Through sequences of exercises, each participant explores the resonance of his or her own body, first for each individual posture and then in the construction of a score, a personal dance. The method "eliminates" the choreographer's body as a model to be imitated, implementing the generative force of the word in the resonance in each individual body; it opens the group of participants to the consonance, a transversal and horizontal listening; it removes dance from any possible aesthetic judgement, but re-establishes its value as a bodily and expressive practice of every human being; It makes possible the spontaneous emergence of cultural imagery within the interpretation that each body makes of the same verbal indication. It realises scenic performances of great strength and beauty in which the individual body carries traces of both collective history and personal stories.
The democratisation of this method of transmission allows anybody to embody that movement by taking it on individually, free from the dissatisfaction of a result fixed in advance. During some residencies Paola experimented with this methodology, which has now become a real method, with heterogeneous groups of people: young dancers, non-professionals of various ages (adults, high school and university students), the physically and mentally disabled, dance therapists, people with Parkinson's disease, blind and low vision people.
What is born each time from the embodiment of the descriptions is something that constantly amazes for the activation of a personal imaginary that springs from the assumption of postures common to all. Imagination is the action of the image, an action that destructures the image itself to recompose it in another body.
The "elimination" of the choreographer's body as a model to be imitated and the activation of a personal body modality aim at the research of being in the scene as opposed to doing on the scene.

ELP | WESTERN MEMORIES develops in pieces, modular modules:

ENERGHEIA - anatomical solo

EKPHRASIS - choreography with 10 young dancers

ESTI - non-professionals dancers

ESTI | blind and low vision people

The Undanced Dance

POSTURE ARCHIVES - video 

OTHER MEMORIES is a retinal-mnemonic archive born from the involvement of 40 people with a migrant background now living in Italy.
As in the case of the archive WESTERN MEMORIES, the work process involved four steps: collection of images from about 40 people (mnemonic archive of images) - embodiment of the images with the creation of the dance solo O_N (the choreographer's body becomes an archive itself) - verbal description and voice recording of the postures present in O_N (archive of postures) - audio transmission of the postures to heterogeneous groups of people, whether professionals or not.

The human body with its mnemonic, dreamlike and imaginative abilities is the living medium of pictures. There is a strong interaction between the external pictures (which come from outside) and our body which absorbs them, processes them. Memory is an experience of the body. The body is the place of images.
Hans Belting

Since the body is the place of images, how do the postures of bodies change in relation to the images imposed by the culture of reference? In which way are postures from other cultures embodied? How do they change and what do they create?
The opportunity of a meeting with people who live immersed in different cultures opens the doors to new horizons. Mapping the world through the collection of images that have marked bodies is a way to come into real and direct contact with otherness in a mutual exchange of welcome.
This phase of the ELP project consists of the following modules:

O_N

Other OtherNess

The passage of bodily archiving in the ELP project began with the embodiment of Western images and bodies, of icons that are familiar to us, and then moved on to the embodiment of images from more than 20 different countries which, whether they are near or far from us, reflect a cultural and emotional baggage that is very different from our own. An imaginary that Paola Bianchi has not been able to embody in the same way as the western one, an imaginary that already belongs to her, that she recognises, that her body recognises and in which, even in the most terrible of embodied images, her body has found a comfort in being, a comfort due to the profound knowledge of the wounds.
What are those foreign bodies for her instead? How to deal with those distant images? Paola faced them no longer from the inside but from the outside to the outside, trying to overcome that fear that Donatella Di Cesare calls exophobia, that is, the fear of looking at the outside from the outside. From a place that belongs neither to you nor to me. Faced from the edges, from the margins, those images have attached themselves to her bones, those bodies have shared with her body the fluidity of blood, the tension of muscles.
And so it is precisely those migrant bodies that, by the very act of moving from one country to another, undermine the boundaries of the nation-state and are therefore criminalised, that have led Paola to a natural transition to those bodies that also deny the closed concept of the nation-state, the bodies of protest, the bodies in revolt. As Didi-Huberman told us, protest is an act of uprising to confront power from the highest possible point.

BODIES OF PROTEST has generated the performance installation NoPolis.

Most of the times the process and the method leading to a choreography remain hidden to the public. The ELP | dance project blog (https://elpdance.blogspot.com/) collects all the thoughts, reflections, materials, scraps that are generating every step of the project. The blog wants to open to new connections and exchanges of views with other, close and far, dancers and choreographers, bypassing one of the constituent elements of the choreographic knowledge, the act of seeing.

Living this complex present has opened up numerous reflections on my being and acting in the world as well as on my being on the stage. These two aspects of my existence have never been separated from each other, and they clash and confront each other in a continuous dialogue. The body is my linguistic specificity, it is my instrument, but it is also the area of investigation around which my research revolves; poetics of the body.* So I wrote in 2014 and now more than ever I feel the importance of this statement. What then does it mean to take on the present time in the bones, in the body, in the scene? The thought has become action. The postures born from the retinal-mnemonic archives (collection of images from groups of 40 people) have been dismembered, shattered into a thousand pieces to be recomposed in the body through a random process of reconstruction, going on to generate figures and no longer images. A body no longer free to move in space but constrained by a score recorded in voice, a body that cannot choose, a body trapped in the eternal conflict between inside and outside, between what it must and what it wants. A state of being in the scene that calls into question the solitude of the contemporary human being, closed within defined rules, always poised between his own will and the moral and legal law. A questioning of authorship, of the will, of interpretation, of the integrity of the body.

* Paola Bianchi Corpo politico. Distopia del gesto, utopia del movimento edited by S. Bottiroli and S. Parlagreco, Editoria&Spettacolo, Spoleto 2014

SHATTERED ARCHIVES generated ASSIMILIA and BAD Being in the Act of Doing

The investigation into bodies of work is an ambitious and somewhat endless undertaking. From strictly physical works to intellectual ones, from hated works to loved ones, from salaried works to personal financial risk works, the types are endless as are the reactions to these types. However, one thing is common to all types of work: the body, whether it is almost motionless or in constant motion. The body acts and suffers, the body exists and hardly resists, the body transforms. And that transformation is precisely the focus of the investigation. Gestures repeated over years creep into the folds of muscles, tendons, bones, work marks the soul and body of an entire life. Capital modifies the body with work, educates it, disciplines it according to a logic of subservience to capital itself.

ELP | BODIES OF WORK is generating the series of choreographic actions FABRICA.

Invited by the Liberty Association to participate in the Voci dalla storia project, for many days I did nothing but listen to the interviews collected in 1995 by Fiorella Rodella, then a student and now a psychotherapist. Voices of Italian people who survived the torture and horror of the death camps: antifascists, partisans, militants, citizens and citizens who had opposed the fascist regime and for this reason deported to the camps of Dachau, Mauthausen, Auschwitz, Buchenwald. Touching and powerful interviews, recorded on thirty audiocassettes and kept in a closed suitcase for almost thirty years. Brought to light by the Voci dalla storia project those tapes, now digitized, became the living material on which we worked. One question immediately arose: how to come to terms with a memory that is slowly disappearing along with the last people who survived that horror? How to make memory alive? What does it mean to take in images-remembrance, to put into motion images-pain, images-trauma? In the impossibility of recounting trauma, my body becomes a graveyard of memories, an inventory of loss, a place of stagnation and rebirth of images destined for disappearance, where oblivion and memory, presence and absence alternate in an attempt to transmit an intransmissible experience.

 Voci dalla storia is a project conceived by Liberty and supported by Unione Reno Galliera, Città Metropolitana di Bologna, Municipalities of Baricella, Granarolo dell'Emilia, Malalbergo and Minerbio, Parco della Memoria Casone del Partigiano “Alfonsino Saccenti,” with the contribution of Regione Emilia Romagna

ELP | RECLUSE BODIES generated:

• […] KZ
• PEZZI
• VOICE OVER