UMLAUT
Concept, texts: Vincent Giampino
Performance: Greta Francolini, Vincent Giampino
Production: TIR Danza
Co-production: Lavanderia a Vapore
selected for NID PLATFORM 2023 – Open Studios
Umlaut is a sound between two, the assimilation of two sounds that create a third with a double vocal and sound identity.
One of the questions from which the author starts to outline a choreographic project is: where are the bodies? What is the space that regulates vision? How much is it possible to play with the boundaries and aesthetic politics of representation of this space? In short, what is the plane of representation first?
For Umlaut, at the moment, the answer is the space of the set: television / film set / backstage theatre. Why? Because the theatrical space, in its dialogue between performance and audience, in its constitution as a live event, always points the shadow of the finger at the real, the true, whereas Umlaut wants to further shift the place of representation by emphasising its ambiguity and dealing with the choreographic possibilities of the ‘obscene’ in the sense of ob skené, the off-stage, applying the consequences of a post-truth time.
Within this choreographic environment, among the generative sources present, in addition to the aesthetics and practices of the author’s previous works (in particular ff_fortissimo), Umlaut makes use of the study of two figures and contexts: one belonging to the repertoire of the ballet Giselle (the second act) and the other Joanne d’Arc (with particular reference to Dreyer’s silent film “The Passion of Joan of Arc”).
Through performative practices of impossible interviews and trials of these figures, dialogues and monologues will be created. Dreyer’s film will become study material for a re-enactment of a choreography of the face of actress Reneé Falconetti, as a possible basis and support for further performative materials. The use and study of the performers’ vocality will take place by experimenting with the creative and compositional possibilities of whispering, which can be understood, both mechanically and by analogy, as the obscene form of the voice.
How desire can destroy your ego
Giselle and Joanne are two desiring figures whose specificities take shape through different corporeities of action, but both directed towards an elsewhere of which they become matter.
Giselle in the second act, the white piece, after being killed by the consequences of her desire, placed in an abusive masculinity, transforms, alchemises her desire, her passion, into an extreme gesture of care and protection, a sacrifice that saves her executioner and acts in a mode of selflessness.
The figure of Joanne, a historical figure and therefore inevitably immersed in a different eschatological context, becomes the body of a mission, an action, not the fruit of her own will but of which she becomes the bearer, vassal, performer. She embodies a desire not her own, coming from elsewhere. In the abnegation to this ‘mission’ of territorial liberation and reappropriation of the identity boundaries of an entire people, one finds a form of desire that acts by literally destroying the body of its bearer. In Joanne’s refusal to wear women’s clothes in the performance of this act, we choose to see more than a rejection of the feminine, an attempt to re-enchant masculinity.
