LOVEEEE a conference with exercises on grace

concept and performance Cristina Rizzo and Lucia Amara + special guests
supported by XING
www.liveartsweek.it
Live Arts Week has produced the e-book Loveeee - journal. Download at: www.xing.it/liveartsweek/Loveeee_journal.pdf

LOVEEEE follows the wake of the choreographic project Dance N°3, which consisted in the transit of a bodily scripture. It was activated by the choreographer Cristina Rizzo and the scholar Lucia Amara and develo- ped in three performative acts entitled JUNGLE IN, between 2008 and 2009. Already in that occasion, the research of the writing of a possible choreographic score lead the live experience to focus on the shared attendance with the audience of an ideal and protected place, where the movement of a thought and the writing of a body were simultaneously trained.
An exhibited and willingly fragile result.

The starting point for this new project is the deployment of an open performative dispositive between theo- ry and practice, entitled LOVEEEE, focused on the theme of 'grace' understood as an attitude, as a possible policy of the body, a triggerer of an economy of beauty in direct drive with the reality of the contemporary world.

Far from the theological instance, grace concerns a certain drive of the work (but also of the individual) to- wards the outside and also towards the norm. Characterized by a certain effective organization of strength and of freedom to answer to pre-constituted hierarchies, it indicates a more intimate democracy. Grace, already recognized by Bergson as a parabola of the instable, is a borderline category, distant from the safe and static perfection of Beauty.
It is not only beauty in movement, but the paradoxical encounter of a saving, of an abandonment of the revelation of potency that surprises and surpasses our expectations, according to the principles of an aes- thetics of over abundance, of the miraculous success, of risk, of a leap and of the unexpected. Grace operates, it shows itself when everything crumbles apart and disappears in a contrary order to ef- fort.
No economy is graced but there is an economy of grace. Rarefaction of power.. Torsion. Generation of the possible. Parabola with power. Grace is policy of dissimula- tion, it is able of changing the technical deeds and the domain of demands by pointing out a disappearance of systems.

The 3-days project for Xing Live Arts Week (Bologna 25,26,27 April 2012) will be developed through three performances/lectures entitled LOVEEEE that will present a series of theoretical materials and performative practices shared by Cristina Rizzo and Lucia Amara alongside with the presence of:
Robert Stejin, Christine De Smedt, Mattin. Along the construction, choreographers, visual artistis, sociologists, perfoing arts theoreticians, sound artists, architects, programmers...will be requested to intervene in an autonomous way in relation to specific thematic inputs.

LOVEEE has been tested in 2 occasions: Bologna (june 2011) and Forlì (Crisalide, september 2011).

Beyond developing a performative format of experimentation between theory and practice, the project will outline a publication, a workbook, which will collect different voices that crossed it in its theoretical and practical instances, in an attempt to produce discourse.
EXERCISE Find a case in which, between the doctrine of grace and the aesthetic of easiness, there is an absence of coincidence and give meaning to this event.





EXTRACT The swan realizes and completes the aesthethics of the continuum in its relationship with the water that surrounds it, by the dual rhythm of the water that flows around it and by its sliding in the water. In the same manner the 'swallow', the bearer of a secular grace, evokes «the vibrant and double image of instantaneous and reduction» in the immediacy of its cry and in the impalpable inconsistency of its body. In the elastic and silent movement of the animal lies a secret aesthetic modulation that renders animal walking superior to any perfected machine.
Finally, water finds its triumph of grace in the image of waterfall: the musical continuity of flowing water is in fact punctuated by a few decisive moments, such as the resumption of power after the obstacle, the point of delay, the momentum of the jump or event between two obstacles that seems to metaphorically represent the discontinuous and discrete musical rhythms.





DIALOGUE Augustine: So, given that 'feeling' is moving the body against the motion that is produced in it, don't you think that for this reason we feel nothing when cutting bones, nails or hair, not because these things do not live completely in us - otherwise they would not preserve, feed, grow or would not even show their strength in breeding and regenerating - but because they are stimulated by something aerial, a mobile element, less free than that one which causes motion to come from the soul when we say we are experiencing a sensa- tion? As we know that this life is found in trees and other plants, we cannot put it before our life, which is superior for the use of reason, but also to the life of the beasts. One thing is not to feel anything as a total lack of sensitivity, another is not to feel anything as a total body health. In the first case what is lacking are the organs that react to the passions of the body, in the second are the passions of the body.
Student: I approve and agree.





Brief notes from Lucia and Cristina around grace
What interest us around grace is the possibility to investigate some modes of being, we are interested in the verification 'of' grace and not 'on' grace. Due to its singular and particular relationship with habitability (oikos) and norm (nomos), grace establishes and installs new economies.
Overtaking democracy and demagogy. Grace owns the right to live in an incredibly extensive way. Without citizenship. Sans papiers. (Lovers always have plain rights).
Grace's relation with the world, which is something very important, is defined by 'taking hold' (or pren- sione). This 'taking hold' is expressed in a tiny little space (the minum). But it is corpulent, massive, free and it is able of passing through very tight transmigrations.
Being so, grace – claiming a past agreement or a never happened conciliation with the divine – outlines a sort of cosmic economy where power hierarchies are non considered. Grace knows how to identify insolvency in the objects of power. 'object of power'.
The syntax is that of an 'occasional temporary framework'. We do not know where grace installs itself, probably where there is food and water. (To insert unknown instants in the flux of DURATION). (To combine together what does not resemble).
Fragility is wanted, but in the virtuosity. Asthenia with tonicity. Feebleness with prowess. Intimacy in exhibition (spectacular). Control of the halt. Flux of the impetus. Nervousness without future. Languor where everything fades away. Praise of the serpentine line.
Abandonment. Wastage. Showing of flexibility. Torsion. Twisting. Grace is a matter of balancing structures.
For this reason it is associated with efficiency, tonicity, virtuosity, technique.. But always with the design of a curve, constantly generating a movement of re-curvature, outlining and indicating infinite ways to reproduce a new balance (sometimes from a fall) and to always establish a new theory, a 'generation of possibles'.
Differently from breaking up, grace makes itself available. Grace is what loves and what is lovable. Apparently Grace loves and only for this reason it is loved. Grace knows all the techniques of simulation and dissimulation. Sometimes it is almost falling and re-curving itself, physiologically arresting its dominions, (for physiology can very easily be connected to grace, to the feeble weakness of beauty without power).
Formally, grace is an acrobatic and spectacular torsion. A diaphanous state of prodigy.





LOVEEEE
a report by Tihana Maravic for Culture Teatrali 18.6.2011
...LOVEEEE / a conference + exercises on grace by Lucia Amara and Cristina Rizzo, takes place in a room full of tables with green tablecloths, usually used by the members of the circolo of elders to play cards. Several posters with the text "A CIVIL PERSON DOESN'T SWEAR " hang on the walls. In this "relatively playful" ambient the audience is invited, from around midnight to 1am to attend to a lesson on the theme of grace. The event is articulated by four exercises performed by Rizzo (the first one on the organ of the tongue, the second on the hair, the third on rhetoric, and the forth is the interpretation of a silent music score from the project 'The Sonic Body' by Brandon Labelle) preceded by the theoretical introductions of Lucia Amara. The content of the theoretical exposition is high, complex and refined (among the different readings, the most important is "L'esthétique de la grâce" by Raymond Bayer) and I am not sure if the late time was helpful or not for the audience intellectual reception.
In any case, I believe I found what I was unconsciously looking for in the stellar night of PerAspera: an attempt to reach the perfect un-balance between the playfulness and be seriousness in the exercise of the mind and body, allowing the grave tones to predominate, as required by any conference. The moment of grace in this hour of work, has certainly coincided with the 'Dance of the Hair', a moment when Cristina Rizzo, between the green tables and the signs " A CIVIL PERSON DOESN'T SWEAR", makes her hair dance to a Scarlatti Sonata: it was beautiful! A pragmatic example of grace. Here the spectator can really be aroused and loose her/himself.
Testing theory and practice, Amara/Rizzo, with generosity and curiosity, open the doors of a place usually reserved to their privileged dialogue, intimate and artistic, and in doing so they give the possibility to the audience to participate in the development of a discourse around a theme that, as we discover at the end, concerns everyday life.