I am interested in issues of kinesthetic empathy and the embodied transmission of physical experience in the interaction with the audience.
The starting point of this research has been an intense investigation on empathy, that I explored during the creation of the duo “Aoouuu”, in the frame of Tanztage-Berlin.
In my opinion empathy is one the most important element that is present in communication and in the relation to the other. It includes listening, interpretating and sensing the other in order to be able to put yourself at its place and to come back to yourself with more informations. I was questioning if this process of empathy is possible to activate or to desactivate and if there were practices that could reinforce the activation.
The performance, can be described as a streaming communication, based on an emotional physical intellectual system, where I raise the question of what is possible for the public/viewer and the performer to percieve out from their heads; behind movements, expressions and words. An exploration research is parallell developed for understanding how fast this communication is and which effect it can have on the body/mind.
The exploration is started with a dog and observed and communicated with, for some weeks. Then moved into another stage, with no dog presence, finding some materials that came from the absence of the dog and the memory of how we interacted with it.
“We are two, sometime we become three, or many, sometimes we become the public, or even one feeling, or a plant, the tree in winter under the snow, in this space full of things, crowded and fat in a communication system, constantly flowing through the present and the past that we experienced and are still experiencing. Focus on the immediate situation and the physical relationships that are present. Working with improvisation to animate a subtle interaction between the dancers’ bodies and audience, always open to shifts and changes in any moment, or how time determines the moment. The mind and the body look for feelings and stretch themselves around their own and public wishes, as well by their effects, through the past that we lived together. ‘Do you follow me?!…’ the one which contains memories.”
TANZTAGE 2014
Sophiesaele Berlin
http://www.tanztage.de/tanztage-2014.htm
http://argusschlaeft.com/2014/01/07/tanztage-2014-coaching-project/
Concept, choreography, text: Barbara Berti
Performance: Sunniva Vikør Egene, Barbara Berti
Costume: Barbara Berti
AOOUUU #2
Ackerstadt Palast Berlin
August 2014
Residency in Acker Stadt Palast August 2014
Workshop 14th and 15th august
Aoouuu #2 is a dance piece that explores the interaction between the performers and the audience. How do dancers and viewers perceive each other’s movements, gestures and expressions? How does that change our relationship, our selves? Neurologically the piece is like a deep-going bodily, emotional and intellectual practice, aiming at an open and receptive experience, which possibly allows the formation of new more complex and flowing synaptic links in our nervous system. Like its predecessor Aoouuu hopes to create new links between the physical, the emotional and the rational. The interaction it proposes may even go beyond the limited scope of the performance, and take effect on the perception of everyday situations.
“We expand, evolve, it happens in the same space where you are, where we belong, even for a second.
Like its predecessor Aoouuu, the piece explores to create new links between the physical, the emotional and the rational.”
In recent years I developed a conceptual approach to dance performance, in which a situation is created on stage in order to examine and highlight aspects of the relationship between the audience and the performers through movement, text and improvisation.
My works has taken also the form of an ongoing research project. It is based on an interaction system – a concept that questions the idea of dramaturgy itself. It focuses on the audience and its influence on the development of the performance, which consist of previously established elements (structure, choreography, texts or voice as sounds) as well as improvisation.
BARBARA BERTI 