collective dynamics
Maria F. Scaroni | AADK

Who is watching? Who is being watched? The act of performance is a ritualized action, a shared experience, a peculiar act of mutual witnessing, a voyeuristic disposition, an exhibition or display of possibilities. It's also omnipresent or non-existent, a chimera, depending on how far we stretch its definition. In any case, we are always on both sides, bound to the chiasmic relationship that the act of looking implies, since when we stare at "the other" we seek self-recognition. This is true for all the senses.This workshop will invite a practice and reflection of the body as material: We need to gain profound knowledge around its organic functions and also cultural implications in order to create with it. A parcours will be proposed to explore a range of physicalities by installing, observing and experiencing the body. We will use journeys and duration to flirt with the notion of ritual and personal/collective transformation, relying on exhaustion, boredom and contemplation as tactics.We will also watch, review and document physical events, via verbal and non-verbal means.The goal is to come to an understanding or a state of questioning the body's borders, acknowledging it as a multiple: It is individual and collective, it is the room itself, it is an object. We are people in spaces, and none is neutral. We carry inscribed cultural codes, while trying to elevate ourselves to an extra ordinary experience, and at the same time seeking intimacy. We venture through intellectual speculations with the necessary distance, and at the same time acknowledge that reflection is a privilege. We surrender to being selfish, self referential and even onanistic. This could be summarized in one question: what are the facets of affect?

The specific bodywork regards the body primarily as material: energetic, physical and emotional. The nature of the training is eclectic and sources from chi-cultivation techniques such as Qi Gong and Pranayama, spine and limbs pattern explorations, hands-on work and different practices of improvisation.The participants will be invited into devised journeys-like experiences, allowing the body to surrender to a state of presence, stressing the transformational potential of bodily matter and the proximity of the idea of the body as an ever-changing-device with the nature of the performance practice. Duration, boredom and exertion are recurring tactics, whereas architecture and tracking of concrete as well as immaterial structures are insisted upon to reach a more precise readability of space.

The premise of such exploration is an expanded notion of body and performance. It is critical to address the dancer body not only within the symbolic order of art making, but as well as citizen and individuum, located in the present time. The artistic process that each person ventures through, sources on one side from personal sensorial acquisitions, but is necessarily implicated in several other layers of significance: We belong to the physical dimension, and are part of economical structures and negotiate our material and spiritual sense of belonging. Journeying using body states and the actual bodily structures serves to stimulate reflection of the social formations we attempt to belong to and converse with. How do we change? How do we alter reality? What are possible tactics? Dance has the advantage to be a social form, because we learn about it by sharing a space with other people.The focus of this module is to learn the underlying dynamics of co-existence, putting exclusion, dependence, affiliation, and resistance under observation.These logics operate within one's own body as an enclosed system, as well as within society. We perform physical actions together, but 'together' is uneven, controversial and paradoxically and can still contain solipsis. The 3rd week will depend on the dynamic of the group as a collective.


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Maria F.Scaroni did not formally train as a dancer. Moving and performing was at first a process of self- discovery and idiotic play in corners of her house, and later a remote fantasy. She started taking dance classes, focusing on jazz dance, and ended up being picked for television, performing both on national TV and for Berlusconi's private channels. Maria quit for political reasons and spent five years with a local company, training in release-based techniques with Manuela Bondavalli, and earning a Masters degree in Modern Literature and Media at the University of Brescia.

Her "euro trash" life begun in 2004 when she met Jess Curtis, with whom she trained, taught and performed, between Berlin and San Francisco until 2011. His company Gravity was dealing with various, very physical body practices, ranging from contact improvisation to acrobatics, via mixed ability contexts and theory. Maria got to know Jess' lineage in San Francisco and understood how, during the '80s and '90, a certain way of thinking around political theater and body politics had emerged. She plugged into this lineage and studied and performed with Sara Shelton Mann, a master, pioneer and visionary, Keith Hennessy - a radical queer activist and charismatic provocateur - and Stephanie Maher, whose active, punk disposition led her to move to Germany and initiate independent spaces and practices, landing in a project, Ponderosa/P.O.R.C.H. where she participates as teacher and collaborating artist.

In collaboration with Jess Curtis, Maria co-created
The Symmetry Project (2007/2011), a mutable performance/ installation/media project based in a symmetrical and homologous movement practice. Highly affected by both dance and meditation, the SP marked Maria's discovery of duration, exhaustion and play with altered states of presence. By breaking away from strictly theatrical settings, addressing intimacy, sexuality, community and perception she met other artists and practices and in 2010 became part of AADK Berlin, an artistic network initiated by Vania Rovisco, Abraham Hurtado and Jochen Arbeit. Working with Vania Rovisco Maria developed another long-term project called The State of Things, in which the body and its materiality are the focal point (in this case, particularly the female body and its regimes of representation). As a performer Maria has been in works by Juli Reinartz, Friederike Plafki, Hanna Hegenscheidt, Wilhelm Groener.

Most recently she has been working with Meg Stuart/ Damaged Goods (the Politics of Ecstasy (2009), Auf den Tisch! (2011), Built To Last (2102)). She is as well performer in Tino Sehgal's This Variation (Documenta13). Maria has developed a teaching practice of her own, teaching at festivals, dance - and public schools and universities (i.e. HZT Berlin, Poznan, Ponderosa/ P.O.R.C.H. ) Besides dancing, Maria almost always had another job.

website
www.aadk.org

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Photos:
Paul Green
Anders Bigum
Leslie Seiters
Marc Saestaedt
Elisa Duca