SILVIA CALDERONI AND ILENIA CALEO | GLIMPSE. GLITTERS GLIMMERS GHOSTS AND OTHER APPARITIONS

Theory lessons

Just how political are bodies today? Performance is a workshop-word that allows us to combine the artistic experimentation which has placed bodies centre stage, revolutionising styles and vocabularies, with the subversive invention of feminism and of queer micro-politics which have put – sexual, unorthodox, non-binary – bodies at the heart of politics. Starting in the 1990s, performance/performative gradually became a paradigm for interpreting the present and the material makeup of bodies and of specific forms of oppression.

Combining the political and artistic dimensions broadens and empowers one’s outlook. We attempt to look at the contemporary performance scene from different angles, as a space for forging a new approach to the body: from subversive, excessive, human and non-human, affective, acting, radical.

Workshop

How can we write about the present, a rift in daily events, how can we redesign an exterior in which we find ourselves living through no fault of our own? How can we dream up and impart new bodies to the future within the apocalypse?

We drum into service whatever we have developed the most in recent years: rhythm, compositional intelligence, stage writing, bodily action, rehearsal, sweat, music, relationships. At the workshop we will be working with the body and the imagination to practice improvisation and stage composition techniques. We will be working on performers’ presence, on the changes in their temperature and intensity, but also on their precision. We will be working on action and happenstance, on writing for the stage, on instant dramaturgy, on the memory of gestures. We will be working on a vision of the theatre: where creation is the search for new styles and vocabularies, where the performer on stage is the author, where emotion is an intensity rather than a psychology, and where the frame unfailingly sets out to smash the performance.

Silvia Calderoni is an actress and performer who began her artistic training at a very young age with choreographer Monica Francia and the Teatro della Valdoca company, for whom she played in several productions including Paesaggio con fratello rotto. Since 2006 she has been an active member of the Motus company and an actress in Rumore Rosa, A place, ICS - racconti crudeli della giovinezza, Crac, Let the sunshine in, Too-late, Iovadovia, Tre atti pubblici, Alexis. Una tragedia greca, nella tempesta, Caliban Cannibal, King Arthur, hosted by numerous national and international festivals. She plays a leading role in The Plot is the Revolution alongside legendary Living Theatre founder Judith Malina. She has been touring the main theatres and international festivals since 2015 with her solo performance MDLSX, for which she also wrote the script in conjunction with Daniela Nicolò. In 2022 she was on stage once again with Valdoca with Enigma. Requiem per Pinocchio.  Ubu Prizewinner for 2009 as best actress under 30, at the cinema she was Kaspar in La leggenda di Kaspar Hauser, a cult film directed by Davide Manuli (2012), and she featured in Last Words (2020) by Jonathan Nossiter with Nick Nolte, Kalipha Touray, Charlotte Rampling, Stellan Skarsgard and Alba Rohrwacher, in the Sky TV series Romolus directed by Matteo Rovere and in Non mi uccidere (2021) by Andrea De Sica. She is an associate artist with the Queering Platform in Hong Kong’s Kowloon Cultural District.

Ilenia Caleo is a performer, activist and independent researcher. Since 2000 she has been working as an actress, performer and scriptwriter for the contemporary stage, working with a variety of different companies and directors. Training as a philosopher, she obtained a PhD in research into the body and performance between performance studies and political philosophy at Rome's La Sapienza University. She concerns herself with corporeality, feminist epistemiologies, experimentation in the performing arts, new institutions and forms of cultural work. She is a research fellow with the IUAV in Venice and the coordinator of the Arts Module in the Master's Degree in Gender Studies and Policies at Roma Tre University and she collaborates with the research group from the five-year project entitled “INCOMMON. In praise of community. Shared creativity in arts and politics in Italy (1959-1979)”, ERC Starting Grant. She has published a book entitled Performance, materia, affetti. Una cartografia femminista, Bulzoni 2021 and co-curated In fiamme. La performance nello spazio delle lotte 1967/1979, b-r-u-n-o 2021. An activist with the Teatro Valle Occupato and in the commons and queer-feminist movements, she grew up both politically and artistically in the underground and social centre counterculture scene.