WHAT I SAW AND WHAT I THOUGHT
Piscina Mirabilis from Michele di Stefano
(part of the Body To Be project curated by Kinkaleri)09-11-22
My head, heart and gut are so full as I sit on the practically desolate station platform to catch the last train back to Bologna. There are many words within that are pushing to come out, but no one to receive them. I hold my phone to my ear without placing a call (I want to suggest to my three fellow station-dwellers that I am not chuntering on to myself, rather to a very patient comrade) and I descend into a rapidly flowing stream of consciousness. Words of reflection, gratitude, memories, and thoughts for the future. This is not my regular practice- not at all. It is a random moment of improvisation that feels like the closing act to an evening that shall stay with me for a long time.
Following a recommendation from a friend to get involved with or go to see a production from Kinkaleri (an experimental performance association based in Prato, IT), I decided to blindly sign up for a rather ambiguous performance project entitled Piscina Mirabilis from Michele di Stefano. The latest project of the mk Company sucked me in through the poetic proposal of ‘a scene [that] becomes an unexpectedly everyday place, not preordained, in search of a possible alliance with the bodies that inhabit it’. I’d be lying if I said that I knew what this meant for me and my involvement before taking part, but I now understand how this perfectly epitomises the time spent in the walls of the futuristic Centro per l’arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci.
The centre is closed for the day when we, the intergenerational group of performers-to-be, arrive. Many know each other and huddle together with cheery greetings. We each are handed a sheet of paper, a kind of manifesto, which offers the guidelines for the performance. Alone in a corner I spy one person roll up the paper and use it as a telescope - might we have already begun? Upstairs we receive a briefing, like we are about to embark on an undercover mission. There are a handful of key principles that we must honour before we cross the border into the large white room before us:
- For the next 3 hours, we are ‘in’, whatever that might mean to you. Whilst the option is there to stop, observe, pop to the loo or eat a snack, you do so with the respect that the performance does not stop and you are still in relationship with others regardless of whether you are actively ‘performing’.
- There should be no verbal communication.
- Rather than falling into movement patterns and individual improvisation, try to consider what exists in the simplicity of relativity between bodies in a space. What can emerge from observing these relationships without forcing a happening?
I notice how each ‘rule’, simple as it may be, becomes daunting when combined with a duration beyond most immersive, participatory performances. Less of an endurance challenge, I get the sense that di Stefano’s 3 hour proposal is one to allow for the unexpected to happen; to give us space to consider how we take care of, manage, both ourselves and the other bodies occupying the space. We might also read it as something that poses an opposite to the seconds-long digital ‘performances’ we are fed on the daily, and the increasing desire for more efficient human interaction - some kind of remedy to the withering attention span…
The mission begins.
We dribble into the space in no particular order donning different styles of walks, disguises. Some opt for a confused hobble during which they keenly watch their neighbours (it’s like they’ve forgotten the steps to this unchoreographed display), some are confident as they walk towards a spot and comfortably land in an observational stillness. Alongside us, the space is populated by pastel projections reaching up from various points in the room that create the illusion of many more shadowy giant bodies. And then there is the complex sound exuding from the modular synthesiser who sits in front of its skillful master; they too must sustain for 3 hours. They certainly manage. The sonic landscape fluctuates from deep drones to pulsating electric heartbeats, accelerating, decelerating, breathing with the group.
My entrance is cautious. There’s this (short-lived) niggling thought that I could have misunderstood the brief due to my limited grasp on Italian. It is because of this that I am reassured by the fact that verbal language is not an option. In this temporary world we are collectively constructing, speaking only serves to exacerbate misunderstandings. We resort to new dialogues; mirroring each other, toes touching sides of bodies, arms on arms, gentle grasps of fingertips, whispers of hairs passing your head. 30 people building detailed profiles of each other. These body conversations vary in length, in depth, in emotion, just like any verbal conversation. Sometimes they are as short as a fleeting ‘hi’.
A ‘conversation’ that still lingers in my memory was with a wonderful woman who magnetised me and made me approach with confidence at a point in which most of the room was halted in a mutual stillness. We sit together for some moments, a sort of greeting, then we orbit around the entire space and each other, connected by the gentlest of touches between fingers and arms. We stay like this in trance-like focus. We have all the time in the world to get to know the entire textural landscape of each cell on the other's forearm. Occasionally people join our dance, but they are only tourists, welcomed in with hospitality and departing soon after.
Zooming in, there exists many intimate relationships like this - duets, trios, quartets forming and dissolving again. The quantity of possible combinations give an indication of how unique each individual's journey can be.
The project's title references the largest Roman drinking water cistern, the Piscina Mirabilis in Southern Italy. I am delighted by this discovery as it solidifies (or liquefies) so many visual and sensational experiences. On one side, bodies as water, flooding and filling space; being shaped and shaping; creating currents and allowing ourselves to be led by them. On the other, water as nourishment, something to be collected, stored and shared; a monumental space that reflects us, warped, rippling then still.
Like sunlight through the open roof of the cistern, a large strip of white flooring cuts through the middle of the room, providing us with a sense of stage and sidelines, although the reality is that nowhere is ‘out’. Even the juice and snack table tucked into the right handside and decorated with nuts, raisins and chocolate, is an active performance space. I see a montage of the moments I spent here; my Wallflower Raisin Eating Dance performed around the halfway mark (I guess, there was no indication of time in the space); the surprising hug received from a person with whom I had just spent a long time finding various ways to sit on a stool; the first verbal communication exchanged with another once the three hours have concluded.
The end arrives with no surprise, not earlier or later than I had expected. The only thing that does surprise me is how overwhelming the return to speaking is. I fear that my receptive moving body everyone has been getting to know will somehow be let down by a verbal interaction that fails to emulate such sensitivity. I try to speak to those that I have shared my dances with, but my tongue feels different. Despite the delightful spread, I don’t stay long at the post-show aperitivo, and opt for a quiet departure.
A rumbling sound approaches from the right.
The lights of the train cut through Prato’s cloudy night, and I ‘hang up’.
___________________
designed by Michele Di Stefano
edited by mk
modular system Biagio Caravano
environmental score Kinkaleri
an atmospheric project for Body To Be and Istituto Alti Studi Coreografici
Read more about Kinkaleri here ︎︎︎
Read more about mk Company here ︎︎︎