In these posts I will tell you how I experienced Antistatic Festival 2022 and share some impressions and thoughts of the events I followed. To help myself with being concise and creative, I decided to choose for each performance three words that are representative of the work: a noun, an adjective and a verb.
On its second day, Antistatic Festival 2022 presented Strange foreign bodies, by Zufit Simon, in the new location for contemporary art in Sofia “Toplocentrala”, which is situated in Dogs Park, a few minutes from NDK, and has been hosting since a few months lots of exhibitions, performances and workshops. A plus of this space is the bar with terrace upstairs, which allows visitors to socialise while enjoying a drink and the nice view on the park. Here the two dj parties organised by Antistatic festival took place.
The choreography of Strange Foreign Bodies is inspired by the treaty 58 Indices on the Body, by French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, resembling a philosophical list of concepts and notes on the human body. I had heard of Nancy, but didn’t read anything by him, and I was quite curious to see what the link between philosophy and contemporary dance would produce. The performers were two women - the choreographer herself and Clarissa Rêgo - and a man, Cary Shiu. For most of the time they stayed naked and their flesh was visible and exposed under the white lights that never changed during the whole duration of the performance, with light background sounds that gave room to other live noises to come in (as a dog’s barking or the rain).
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| Strange Foreign Bodies. Photo by Oliver Look |
Strange Foreign Bodies turned out to be one of my favourite performances of the festival, and I will tell you about it through the words: different, concentrate, research.
Different
The bodies of the performers were different in height, sex, body structure, hair, skin. The sequences they performed were done all together or, more often than not, in different moments, with each dancer following a specific dynamic or direction. That made me reflect on how the same movement or position can look different, depending on the conditions they are performed in. Some poses - like when they lied with a hand on their hips - looked voyeuristic, some others casual, taken from daily life - like when they sat on one leg and a hand put on a hip, as if they were waiting in a line, for instance. Professor Boyan Manchev, who led the post-show talk, spoke about “an exquisite line of minimalist structure, a mixture of homogeneity and heterogeneity” present in the piece. I agree with these definitions, as I consider the differences or variations of the piece tied together by this “minimalist structure” that made the work smooth and attractive for the whole time.
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| Strange Foreign Bodies. Photo by Teodora Simova for Antistatic Festival |
Concentrate
This structure consisted in an extremely precise choreography, where everything mattered: the alignment of the dancers, their counting the tempo in order to perform a sequence together or one after the other, the shape of their arms. Every single detail seemed to be thought out and necessary, and I wondered how much they were concentrating so as to keep everything perfect the way it was supposed to be, without any rhythmical music that could lead them and for such long sessions. I thought about concentrating also because, at the beginning, Clarissa closed her eyes and reopened them. Maybe she wanted to feel how it is to be watched without watching, to draw the audience’s attention to the act of watching and being watched, but I thought she might also be reserving some moments for herself, to focus and concentrate before the whole piece started.
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| Strange Foreign Bodies. Photo by Teodora Simova for Antistatic Festival |
Research
While watching the piece I often caught myself thinking: “This movement is so simple, yet so unconventional and original, for sure there must have been a lot of research behind it!”. For example, during the middle part of the performance, Zufit and Clarissa put on a shirt and sat on their knees, giving us their back and naked buttocks. Then they started dancing, without getting up: they swung from one side to the other, contracted and released their muscles together or alternating, shaked their flesh. That was beautiful and poetic, and I wondered how much effort, rehearsals and study must have been behind it. This session reminded me of another stunning work I saw in Sofia last November, The power of S, by Aleksandar Georgiev, which won the Ikar award 2022 for contemporary dance. The ass with its power was the focus of that piece, and also in there most movements or positions were remarkable because of a specific approach to the body, a particular research of the taboos and conventions constructed around this organ and how to subvert them.
Coming back to Strange foreign bodies, after the buttocks-dance, it was given room to the back. Cary performed alone, with his back naked and his head on the ground. Just with the alignment and the twists of his back muscles, to my eyes he gave life to various creatures: an alien which wanted to exit his body, an animal that was going to fly away, or a heart that was rhythmically beating. Finally, Zufit came on stage wearing pants and holding her breasts. She moved them in diverse directions, flattened them, squished them, stretched them to the side till the maximum, never letting the nipples be shown. That part of the work for me was quite challenging to watch, as I was feeling the pressure myself - I guess this was a good example of kinesthetic empathy: participating in the movements I observed - and got a bit uncomfortable.
All these examples, in my opinion, showed very refined research towards unexplored, or little explored, possibilities of the body and perspectives which made the work stand out. A type of research that started from studying a philosophical text on the human body, but that didn’t need any textual reference to be experienced and appreciated.
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