I’ve just received in the post one or rather two unexpected Christmas presents: videos of two contemporary dance performances featuring costumes by Sonia Biacchi from the Venice-based Centro Teatrale di Ricerca. I had the pleasure of meeting Sonia a few months ago and also did a brief post about her in this blog.
Sonia sent me two DVDs with two different performances, “Il corpo dentro” (The Body Inside), featuring dancer and choreographer Atsushi Takenouchi and with live music and sound effects by Hiroko Komia, and “Ultra” featuring Raffaele Irace and Giulia Ceolin, recently chosen as the only performance to represent Italy at the XIV Edition of the Biennial of Young Artists from Europe and the Mediterranean, that took place in September in Skopje.
Both the performances feature Sonia’s costumes. I must admit that my favourite one is “Il corpo dentro”, I think it’s definitely an extraordinary piece. The performance features Atsushi Takenouchi dancing on the stage and moving around inanimate costumes, giving them life as he puts them on his body (the following video is a sort of preview of the performance).
While his body changes shape thanks to the costumes – transforming him into a mysterious and fragile spherical object, a post-modernist whirling dervish clad in a sort of plasticky wheel-like tennure, a moving origami and an incarnation out of Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadische Ballet (this is my favourite bit and arrives towards the end of the performance, around 33:45 in the video I uploaded on Veoh that you will find at the end of this post – NB This is a 5-minute preview of a longer video, so you will have to install Veoh Video Compass to watch the full video in your browser or download it to your PC – and I’m also posting two short extracts of this bit that I have uploaded on YouTube).
As a consequence, the costumes also change, taking a life of their own, changing their silhouettes and becoming something else from what their costume designer originally had in mind.
The costumes help the performer creating a very special universe in which the dancer’s body and movements are transformed by the weights and volumes of these flexible three-dimensional structures that alter not only the body but also the space surrounding it.
The performance has a great physical power that shows an amazing symbiosis between the performer and the costumes and in-depth research into different elements such as music, movement, space, lights and sound effects.
I think it would be interesting to show the performance to fashion design students and analyse with them the way a garment can change its shape, silhouette and purpose according to who wears it and how he or she interprets it.
http://www.veoh.com/static/swf/webplayer/WebPlayer.swf?version=AFrontend.5.4.8.10050&permalinkId=v19559992y46sCAPp&player=videodetailsembedded&videoAutoPlay=0&id=21591012
Watch Il corpo dentro (The Body Inside) in Entertainment | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com
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