The Oriente Occidente Festival in Rovereto revolves around the idea of worlds colliding, an idea that reveals itself through different meetings throughout our three days there. Dancers in Nicola Galli’s piece brush against each other as atoms, the bodies we are used to seeing on stage interact with the bodies of disabled artists. The festival’s artistic director Lanfranco Cis marks Oriente Occidente as a place of ‘aesthetics and ethics’, and in my notebook I offer my own suggestion, a place of ‘emotion and motion’.
Oriente Occidente specialises in bringing performances from different cultures to both historical and modern venues, combating the notion that only the most classical forms are to be performed in prestigious theatres. Since its beginning in 1981, the festival has expanded its programme and the ways different cultures collide with each other through workshops, studios and year-long activities and collaborations with non-theatrical venues such as the MART Museum. One of the important aspects of their work is creating space for accessibility and the inclusion of artists with disabilities, most recently in collaboration with Al.Di.Qua. Artists, the first professional Italian association of artists with disabilities, established in 2020.
Our first stop is a museum performance at MART Museum, which is a culmination of a workshop by Italian choreographer Nicola Galli inspired by the movement of atom particles. In the work Genoma Scenico, the dancers are neatly standing in two lines, wearing white t-shirts and black pants, ready to collide and create the good kind of chaos. The performance is interactive in that audience members are empowered to come up to a platform and select different parameters and combinations (how many dancers, what types of movement they will perform, how long the piece will be and to what type of music) and then proceed to ring a bell to activate the atom-dancers.
When we enter the audience is already smiling at the prospect of being involved and complicit. Instant composition proves to be a lucrative competition as different audience members scurry quickly to the front of the console where they will concoct the next dance. The dancers are clearly present in the same world and in the same movement quality, but with their own interpretations of prompts such as ‘circles’ or ‘twists’. Confined paths and spaces lend themselves to the atoms/dancers making more interesting choices. While the novelty wears off as we see more combinations, we do register a nice anticipation in the audience that makes them feel more like a crowd at a spectacle rather than passive observers. I would have loved the idea of an atom collider to be earnestly explored to add a wildcard element to the performance.
One of the highlights of the festival programme is Self-portrait in 3 Acts, a lecture-performance by Deaf artist and activist Diana Anselmo, framing languages as a place of struggle. They give an effective working definition of stigma during the lecture, honing in on stigma as ‘anything that makes people go “eww” at you’. Anselmo also reveals how and when being disabled discredits you in unexpected ways. They make an important point that whether a disability is visible or invisible is a situational setup. During the lockdowns on Zoom, people using wheelchairs suddenly felt like their disability was invisible and they could ‘pass’. Passing is, in another catchy yet profound definition by Anselmo, a form of ‘gentle fraud’. But for Diana, the covid-regulated use of face masks became the point where they could no longer read the lips of those around them, obscured behind the masks. When they couldn’t lip-read anymore, they had to come out as deaf publicly. Diana speaks about accessibility and representation in an truly accessible way that shortens the distance of ‘otherness’ and gives us food for thought and action.
We touch on the subject with a lecture with Sergio Lo Gatto where we hone in on the power of dance critics to discuss accessibility and social media. One idea that floats through our group of Springback dance writers is how writing is augmenting the work in other ways. A piece of criticism continues its life after its published. What happens when artists share those articles and what do they share in the discourse? When it comes to the performers we see on stage, our language has the power to shape how the audience will perceive the bodies and identities before their eyes. Language can shape how different bodies are celebrated and scrutinised.
In the evening, we watch choreographer Sharon Fridman’s world premiere of Go Figure, a work that explores the diversity of movement through the bodies of dance artists Shmuel Dvir Cohen and Tomer Navot. The two people on stage are slowly feeling their way and each other on stage, surrounded by beautiful beams of white light. Their quest to connect with each other is a beautiful process of exploration that leads to a sense of support between the two bodies where physical disability becomes a source of beauty, of gravitas. The duet articulates in stunning ways ‘lines, centre of gravity and patterns’, the ideas that Fridman offers as his point of obsession in a post-show talk.
Fridman speaks of pure beauty as a pursuit in this work: ‘In each line and in each body, if you make this beauty clear and present it well, you will find beauty.’ There is beauty in working with the landscapes of the stage, visual beauty in the bodies of the dancers as well as the props, including crutches and a mobility scooter that almost have their own life on stage. The meeting of the two bodies perfectly captures the power of Oriente Occidente to explore new meaning through contact.