2023-06-03 20:14:38
Dance in the West between technique and aesthetics, organism and body politic, mirroring the centuries of battles and ideological conflicts in a continuous confrontation with the universe of live entertainment and theatre. Elisa Guzzo Vaccarino, leading dance expert and scholar, signed her latest book ‘Confini Conflitti Rotte. Geopolitics of dance’, a complex and large compendium that unfolds in ‘stages’ starting from a post-pandemic reflection. “Old Europe, the cultural center of the world – the author explains to time.news – has long since entered a phase of questioning. Decolonization, globalization, the birth of new ethnic-economic-political ’empires’. China , for example, Russia, the United States, India… A primacy that has undergone strong shocks and which obliges us to question ourselves about our history, our culture not only of dance because today, more than ever, the events of ‘body in performance’ must be read in a more complex perspective, including issues related to race, gender, identity, customs”.
Elisa Guzzo Vaccarino starts from the 19th century ‘Excelsior’, a triumphal homage to European civilisation, to science, to technology, in memory of the colonization of the world, and mentions another ‘Excelsior’, that of the 2000s, by Salvo Lombardo, which puts first plan every possible contradiction of an apparently pre-established scheme and above all in vogue at the end of the 19th century. “A long journey of writing and images, photos, portraits (Argentina, Anna Pavlova, Loie Fuller, Ruth Saint Denis, Kazuo Ohno, Mata Hari, the ‘spy’ killed during the Second World War), posters of shows and ballets for redesign paths with which to re-read the art and practice of dance – explains Elisa Guzzo Vaccarino again – Expression of a vast geopolitical web that always reflects the events of great history in its conceptions and evolution”.
And redesigning, in the first part, a new ‘geography’ of dance, between East and West, made up of grafts, contaminations, influences, Elisa Guzzo Vaccarino in the last part of the precious volume concentrates on spectacular intercultural cross-sections, a ‘time line’ five decades through some exemplary stagings, as the author writes, by Western and non-Western authors, from the mid-1970s to today. Pina Bausch, Peter Brook, Ariane Mnouchkine, Maurice Béjart, Bartabas, Alain Platel, Peter Sellars, Bob Wilson, Shen Wei, Saburo Teshigawara, Shantala Shivalingappa, Robyn Orlin and Dada Masilo are on the catwalk. “Directors, choreographers, dancers who gradually offer a portfolio of creations that are very indicative of how one can navigate in each other’s cultures – reflects Elisa Guzzo Vaccarino – starting from the cosmopolitan and curious Western perspective up to the works created by non-European artists and non-whites eager to cater to all cultures, also treasuring the western one, making use of their respective diversities and identities, affirming them, overcoming them – he concludes – as in the eternal swing of a pendulum”.
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