Università Roma Tre

Alessandra Cristiani
A performative alphabet. Bodily practices and methodologies between East and West: Ephesian Technique, White Butō, Non-ordinary Movement.
Practical proposal is open to all students and professionals ones, who desire to deepen and explore their body language and who are looking for new creative impulses. Different methodologies derive from some familiar working materials learned by historical avant-garde figures of Ankoku , butō in the research field of Steiner Eurythmy and about Seitai discipline. The artistic figures of the following dancers will be introduced from a theoretical and practical point of view: Masaki Iwana for the White Butō, a response to the dance of darkness of Tatsumi Hijikata; Akira Kasai and his Ephesus Technique, a more personal aspect of Rudolf Steiner's Eurythmy and the dancer Yoko Muronoi and her non-ordinary Movement. It is a dance declination of Seitai exercises, a Japanese health practice concerned with spontaneous and regenerating movement of the body. These performative pedagogies can trace a path of awareness for participants, which stimulates their perceptive faculties and draws on the organic mechanisms of human nature, on the primary aspects of corporeal materiality. An alchemy of creative techniques made up of echoes, assonances, contrasts will allow us to cross the various exercise and dance proposals, suggesting and encouraging participants to rely more and more on their most ineffable resources by exploring a possible poetic register of the action nourished and relaunched by an essential source: the invisible, the mysterious, the unknown. Every day meetings will begin with a deep rooting in the body activated with precise breathing techniques to introduce a stretching of meridians, a health practice which awakens and engages the most internal energetic stratifications to bring them back to the surface. Gradually the movement will grow more and more organically in the space and in accordance with the possibilities of each participant. At the beginning the spine and joints will be moved very carefully thanks to the White Butō training methodology, then we will arrive at the dynamics in space proposed by the forms of Eurythmy. Space becomes volume, place and phenomenon. In a full self-presence a work on the voice can be introduced about the vocalization of vowels and some consonants. Ephesus Technique is the experience of a bodily state, its internal activation and its release into the surrounding space, as if by a sort of echo, thanks to a particular emission of sound. The next step will be some vocal formulas: the mantras especially that of the vowel A and that of the consonant L which act respectively on the expansion of a vitality from an inside to an outside and on the spread of energy from the center to the periphery of the body and vice versa. Forms, Mantras, Ephesus Technique, these are interesting equivalences of the bodily states investigated by the creative strategy of the White Butō. The dance exercises such as: Pollen, Fog, Giacometti, Rainbow, Withering, Blooming, a leaf of lotus, Needles and further evolutions such as Medusa, With the corner of the eye, Animal from the back, Coral...translate some bodily attitudes of the human being into a language linked to phenomena in Nature. Partecipants, relating to the organic mechanisms that put them into action, they have to be- from the begining- engaged in a deep dialogue with their own personal imagination, and with a precious and mysterious bodily antenna. You are an author from your first steps. It is important to recognize one’s own body as an inexhaustible creative source. It is in its skeletal, in muscular structures, in the aspect of liquids and masses that life experiences in the past, present and future time, settle themselves in the body and cause of this they can be translated poetically for the scene. This bodily aspect is the key of an important methodology of images, which has its focus in the use of Haiku, short poetic compositions, which become essential tools for digging into the invisible, intuitive resources of the performer. From this point of view, the dancer Yoko Muronoi stated that the true creative source belongs to the organs, the bones and it is not necessary to access them in a direct way. She developed, in her short life, a series of exercises taken from Seitai, which map further roots of the movement: mobile focuses, fixed focuses, the space between the joints. Breathing and the techniques to contact its elusive nature, are the perceptive tool around which discovering a lost body, an absent body for a future dance. This program will not be offered in a schematic way, but in response to the sensibility and performative attitude of every body involved in the working process. In this adventure the body can receive a sort of alphabet, he can awake a lot of impressions, sensations, emotions, desires, memories. People can experience their own dimensions of the body, time and space and share them with others. At the end of the workshop there will be an open day.

As an alternative to the practical part, the performative issues will be treated theoretically through the extrapolation of some key points in work notebooks and in the following texts:
Handouts by the teacher
Akira Kasai. A book called body, edited by Maria Pia D'Orazi, Artdigiland
Itsuo Itsuda, The dialogue of silence, School of breathing, Luni editor
Itsuo Itsuda, Not doing, School of breathing, Luni publishing house