Attention: tonight’s performance contains clothing

Photo of Aragosta by Camilla Cerea: www.camillacerea.com

Aragosta, choreographed by Moreno Solinas and presented by ASMED/BAlletto di Sardegna is a surrealist piece of dance. It is not a piece about surrealism or about Elsa Schiaparelli and her surrealist affiliations (the company’s stated source of inspiration and artistic exploration). No, it is the equivalent in motion of a Breton poem. And that’s what makes it unique and unlike anything you’ve seen – because form, content, sound, movement, costume, all the elements that one associates with dance and performance as parts of an artistic whole, here they’re broken down, taken apart and put together again in all kinds of unexpected ways.

Aragosta suceeds in two ways: on the level of form, it completely reimagines movement, the notion, need and impulse of movement itself, away from any attempt to beautification. It is movement in its pure form, constructed as we watch, devised and redevised, explored and discovered by dancers and audience simultaneously. In that sense – is it dance? It is and it is not – it is pure dance as a body who does not know dance would start discovering and creating dance.

In the same manner, Aragosta, inverses its source of inspiration – fashion design- to explore with the significance and function of the body in its purest form: the 3 female dancers are bare naked throughout the performance. It is the most in-your-face, unashamed, provocative, beautiful, awkward, natural nakedness. The body lives on stage, it is experienced and explored – the dancers drum the piece’s rhythm against their bodies until their skins turn red, bodies give birth to words, to other bodies, to ideas, shapes and things in a way that is playful, moving, annoying, lyrical or grotesque.

When at the very end of the piece the dancers finally wear clothes, there’s a melancholy attached to it: the vast, unexpected, uncontrollable beauty of the natural body suddenly becomes contained, colored, specified, structured into the familiar shapes and connotations of clothing. It’s an ending, the end of a series of potentialities that one can never return to. Clothing appears for what it is, a structure and a social artifact. The moving body disappears into a beautified, social body. Attention, this performance contains clothing.

(You can catch the final performance of Aragosta on Thu 7/24 at the Wild Project, 195 East 3rd str. www.betweentheseas.org)