Published my essay on Alberto Spadolini's archive

My essay "Alberto Spadolini's Box: Dance, Silence and the Archive" has been published by Dance Research. Here more details.

How long is a metre? Le scissure del covid review

 

Photo Roberto Frey.

“Le scissure del covid” [The scissures of covid] was a three-days event that took place at La Mole, in Ancona on 18, 19 and 20 August 2020. Created by choreographer, dancer, dance teacher and dance critic Stefania Zepponi, in collaboration with myself and librarian Giorgia Sestilli, it explored the relationship between dance and covid-19. It was part of the call Off-Line launched to promote non-internet-based events at La Mole.

The term ‘scissure’ has to do with fissures and openings, even small ones, and has been used to exemplify the act of looking at the coronavirus through the lenses of dance. It is also the name of a Podcast in Italian on the world seen through dance, that Zepponi, myself and Clementina Verrocchio are publishing every Thursday.

Each day was divided into three parts each set in a specific part of La Mole, which is an ancient construction near the sea: the first part took place at the courtyard where there was a talk given by Zepponi and myself; the second at the OSB wall near the courtyard where a covid line was created together with the audience; the third part at the Sala Boxe, where Zepponi improvised a dance, while Santilli read extracts from an 1837 book on cholera in Ancona. After this last part the audience moved to the next room where I gathered some feed-back.

Dance is about space and bodies in space and that is why it has become particularly relevant during the pandemic. In regard to this I wrote an article titled “Coreografare il presente” [Choreographing the present] which served as the basis for the project.

Photo Ennio Pennacchioni.

This was a participatory event, centred on the interaction with the audience from the beginning. How do you measure the distance of a metre? How did you feel during the lockdown? These were some of the questions we asked during the talk to gain some key words and turn them into gestures for the line.

The line took inspiration from Pina Bausch’s Nelken line, also known as the Season March, as its gestures are inspired by the four seasons. First presented in 1982 in her work Nelken, it has now reached global fame and has brought the Bausch Foundation to launch a Nelken line project where a tutorial has been given to allow everybody to learn and do it.

The last section was the performative moment where the audience could choose whether to look at a tablet or look at the perofrmance of the two women.

The audience gave different feed-back to this event, stating, for example, that the first two parts were liberating while the third, given that it was organised in a closed space that needed     heavier security measures, was oppressive. All were happy to have taken part to it and found it appealing for its focus on space in this difficult time.

We thank La Mole and all its staff for having accepted this project and having helped us to bring it to life.

 

Le scissure del covid project

 On August 18, 19 and 20 I took part to Le scissure del covid [the scissures of covid], an event promoted by La Mole in Ancona, Italy, its own project Presente and its call Off-Line. It was organised by choreographer, dancer, dance teacher and dance critic Stefania Zepponi and her Hexperimenta association, in collaboration with myself and Giorgia Sestilli, librarian at la Casa delle Culture [Culture's House] in Ancona.

It was a project to talk and dance and watch dance in relation to the coronavirus. Here is its website.

 

Choreographing the present

Alberto Spadolini, Tau – L’ultima colonna del tempio, 1960s.
 Courtesy of Marco Travaglini.

 

 

In front of the supermarket you need to take a number to stand on line. Then inside another number will be given to us, on a yellow laminated card. Sometimes this card does not have a number. A number which is not a number. About two weeks have passed from the last time I went shopping and I did not know about the line outside, least of all about the numbers. I wait. I start noticing that when people arrive, they directly go to the little machine that dispense the numbers. It is the same that is usually used to queue at the counter where cold cuts, ready-made food ad bread are. In front of the supermarket there is a wide rectangular area so that (so that?) people do not stand in a line but are spread here and there. The metre is between us. One metre distance. Minimal security measure. How long is a metre? I need to visualise space. Margaret Atwood has shared the image that Health Canada recommends, a moose that is two metres long [1]. And in Italy? In Italy we are left with the abostraction of metres. However, in the area, there are those who do not care about it or are not fully aware of it and walk too closely to people waiting in order to reach the machine dispensing numbers. Everybody wears masks and gloves, except for me. They are mainly disposable masks. There is a great talking about masks. I ask myself whether those worn by these people are sufficient to protect them, to protect us. I keep the distance placing myself a bit outside the group. Two men are too close and are chatting. Why? Distance, what distance? Masks and security? Space. The body. Bodies. Years ago I read somewhere (or maye I listened to) a choreographer, maybe Mark Morris, complaining about the fact that in the underground people do not have a sense of space, that is of their body in space. Dance, I think, teaches this. Can teach this. The awareness of the body and bodies in space. Rudolf Laban, theorist of the early twentieth century, talked of the kinesphere, “the personal space” [2], that we occupy with our body and that surrounds it. That is the one that, while standing, we can occupy extending our limbs, like arms and legs. Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man comes to mind and also the new Vitruvian Woman Rosi Braidotti talks about [3]. This space could exceed the metre if, for example, we opened both our arms laterally at the height of our shoulders. Well, we could not go around with our arms open. O could we?

Health Canada image twitted by Margaret Atwood.

 

Another person arrives, without a mask. She goes straight to the number machine even though close by there is a woman. Why? I recall the famous pas de quatre of the cygnets from Swan Lake (1875-95) where four ballerinas dance holding their hands [4]. It requires coordination ad syncronicity and it is an example of kinesphere sharing, that today is not possible. When I studied dance (centuries ago, now I write about dance, which means nothing to most people), I remember I had to be careful about the distance between me and the people near me, because I could have kicked them or hit them with my arms. Even though at the time I did not know Laban, I was nevertheless beginning to know my kinesphere. 

 

At this point I understood that I need to take a number, otherwise I will never enter the supermarket. To be sure, I ask the man closest to me. He confirms it. Then I ask how can I reach the number machine if clsose-by there are two people. He shrugs and adivises me to go around them, making a long round and passing outside the group to reach the machine from behind. It is an excellent choreographic intuition that I immediately put into practice. Then I go back to my position. Still, standing, in place. The queue which is not a queue looks like a choreography of standing in place. It could look a very limiting posture, but it is not so. For Martha Graham, posture recalls stillness only on the surface, as “the body is poised for most intense, most sublte action” [5]. If I decide to stay still with my legs, I can move my arms, hands, shoulders, neck, head, torso and so on. It is what Linda Rickett-Young defines as gesture [6]. If there is no shift of weight, our body can still move a lot. And I think of Virgilio Sieni’s hands and arms in Nudità [nudity] (2018) [7], of his art of gestures. If I then decide to move my legs, a set of kinetic possibilities opens while standing in place.

 

The cygnets' pas de quatre, Swan Lake, Royal Ballet

The first that comes to my mind, due to my education, is flamenco. I could slightly bend my knees and have my calves go to hit the floor, dancing a zapateado with my planta, punta y taco. I do not do it. They would think I am crazy. And then I think that in this absurd period, we would absurdly need some choreographers to deal with, teach and coordinate people’ movement. And I think of all the dance teachers who have been hardly hit by the pandemic [8]. They are used to deal with moving groups of people (children included) and if they usually do it to get ready for their final year shows, they could do it also on the streets and in closed places and most of all they could teach and transmit this form of knowledge to those who do not have it. We need a choreographic sense of space, we cannot expect people to have sporadic choreographic intuitions each of us can already have. I know, it sounds absurd. Precisely.

Dance scholar Alessandro Pontremoli, talking of body techniques, points out, quoting Eugenio Barba, that we can consider the movements we do every day, like getting up and walking, as “daily body techniques” [9] and the movements that go beyond this range, as lifting one leg upwards, as “extra-daily techniques” [10]. With the coronavirus, people are implicitly asked to reconfigure one’s own daily technques in extra-daily techniques, as standing in palce in an area at the distance of at least one metre (?) in front of a supermarket and walk that bit that allows the queue which is not a queue to proceed, always keeping said distance.

Virgilio Sieni in Nudità.

In phase one we would have already needed experts in choreography (absurd, what am I talking about?), think of phase two where a lot more people will be around. Will they/we be capable of self-organising? I do not think so, because, contrary to what Gia Kourlas provocatively says [11], we are not all dancers, but perhaps we should all become dancers. There are probably other body practices (!), I talk about dance because this is what I know a bit. If it is true that it is now a question of life and death (rhetoric sometimes helps) to keep a certain distance, then developing an awareness of the body in space and therefore the ability not just to keep the distance of at least one metre (?!), but also to keep this distance while we move (in the supermarket, for example) becomes a fundamental requirement. And ignoring (in the sense precisely of not knowing) this aspect could continue to bring people infringing this ethereal distance to take the damned number and enter the circle of queues which are not queues. We cannot give this kinetic knowledge for granted. Many people will have it, many others will not. Kourlas herself, and in this I agree with her, quoting choreographer Ori Flomin, affirms that those who deal with dance, deal precisely with this, organising “people in space” [12].

It comes to my mind the enigmantic painting Tau – L’ultima colonna del tempio by Alberto Spadolini, an almost unknown painter and dancer, who has tansformed many of his paintings in oneiric choreographies. The depicted figures are all at a certain distance. At the centre a man, maybe a dancer with his back to the viewer, in one of his hands a mask (a mask?). The atmoshere is rearefied and surreal. Is it the way we will live now? Maybe. But if we have to reinvent the way we stay together, we have to do it also in choreographic terms (et voilà, I have said it) and not only that. As the architecture scholar, Marta Magagnini has highlighted, “let’s invent new jobs in this covid-19 times! We have many experts 'walking' inside their houses!!!” [13]

I stay standing, feet together, firm and nervous. I ask who has the number before mine, but nobody replies. Maybe somebody has given up. The queue which is not a queue slowly moves with people entering and people standing and taking their place in the front line before the entrance. It is almost a magnetic, funnel movement, where the entrance constitutes the magnet toward which each of us is attracted. Apart from the two men chatting too close to each other, the others are all silent. A woman has a terrified look as if this standing like this, keeping the distance, were still something incomprehensible and nonsensical. And it is. I am terrified.

When Graham was on a small unstable plane, she said to have rehearsed in her mind her choreography, Errand into the Maze (1947) to placate fear [14]. It is a choreography where a woman fights against her demons. Inspired by the Theseus and Ariadne myth, it concentrates on the female figure (Ariadne? Ariadne and Theseus) who fights against the Minotaur, called the Creature of Fear. It has a technical and interpretative depth, alternating the protagonist’s solos and her duets with the Creature. I rethink of its beginning: the dancer stands in place at the back of the stage, her look downward and her hands crossed on her womb. And she breathes. She breatheees. The movement of the inhaling and exhaling torso has inspired Graham in the development of her technique based on contraction and release. If I think about it, a mixture of bitter, very bitter irony grips my stomach. Now that many, too many people are dying of resporatory disease. I think about all this horror that could be avoided and was not [15]. It is an unbearable situation. I do not know if I will be able to stand still, in place, in balance on this labyrinthine present.

It is my turn to enter. I am about to when the person with the number prior to mine appears from the side street. Another choreographic intuition. I take some steps backward and let him pass. 

 

 

 

NOTES

[1] Margaret Atwood, “Proper Social Distancing” Tweet posted on 28 March 2020.
[2] Rudolf Laban, Choreutics, edited by Lisa Ullman [1966] (Alton: Dance Books, 2011), p. 10.
[3] Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), p. 21.
[4] Swan Lake, chor. Marius Petipa, Lev Ivanov, music Pëtr Il’ič Čajkovskij revised by Riccardo Drigo, dancers Pierina Legnani, Pavel Gerdt and the Imperial Ballet (Saint Petersburgh: Mariinskij Theatre, 27 January 1875). 
[5] Martha Graham, “A Modern Dancer’s Prime for Action” in Dance – A Basic Educational Technique, edited by Frederick Rand Rogers (New York: MacMillan Company, 1941), p. 181.  I already talked of postures and the act, even political, of standing in 2013. See https://storiadelladanza.blogspot.com/2013/08/stare-in-piedi.html (in Italian) 15 August 2013, (accessed on 22 August 2020).

[6] Linda Rickett-Young, Essential Guide to Dance (Londra: Hodder&Stoughton, 1996), p. 75.
[7] Nudità, chor. and interpretation Mimmo Cuticchio,Virgilio Sieni (Firenze: Teatro Niccolini, 11 October 2018). For more information: http://www.virgiliosieni.it/schede/nudita-2/ (accessed on 13 April 2020).
[8] See the plea made by Alessandra Celentano: “Covid19, Alessandra Celentano lancia l’allarme: ‘Il settore danza è al collasso’”, giornaledelladanza.com, 15 April 2020 (accessed on 16 April 2020).
[9] Alessandro Pontremoli, La danza – Storia, teoria, estetica nel Novecento (Bari: Laterza, 2004), p. xviii.
[10] Ibidem.
[11] Gia Kourlas, “HowWe Use Our Bodies to Navigate a Pandemic”, The New York Times, 31 March 2020 (accessed on 13 April 2020). See also the article by Jason Kottke, “We Are All Dancers Now – Mindful Movement is key to Social Distancing”, in Kottke.org, 2 April 2020 (accessed on 16 April 2020).

The new Vitruvian woman.

 

 

[12] Ibidem.
[13] Marta Magagnini, Post on facebook, 16 aprile 2020.
[14] Martha Graham, Blood Memory – An Autobiography (New York: Washington Square Press, 1991), p. 267. Errand into the Maze, chor. Martha Graham, set Isamu Noguchi, music Giancarlo Menotti, costumes Martha Graham, lights Jean Rosenthal, dancers Martha Graham, Mark Ryder (New York: Ziegfield Theatre, 28 Febuary1947).
[15] See for example the video investigative report “Il virus è un boomerang”, Indovina chi viene a cena, edited by Sabrina Giannini (Rai 3, 29 March 2020), available for now on RaiPlay  (accessed on 13 April 2020). Or also the “Video conferenza con Emanuele Leonardi”, edited by XRItaly, 5 April 2020 (accessed on 10 April 2020).

 

This is the English translation of the article I published on 19 April 2020, here.

 

 

Alberto Spadolini - Galeotto fu il lenzuolo review

Marco Travaglini, Alberto Spadolini - Galeotto fu il lenzuolo. Arte, amore e spionaggio nella Parigi Anni Trenta, Youcanprint, 2019. 

It is not easy to write about Alberto Spadolini: his archive includes heterogeneous documents, such as articles in different languages (among them French and Flemish) and photographs that it is difficult to place within his career. Marco Travaglini, his nephew and biographer, has uncovered material on his uncle since 1978 and has been studying it at least since 2004. Thanks to him Spadolini’s life has emerged from the fogs of oblivion. Alberto Spadolini - Galeotto fu il lenzuolo. Arte, amore e spionaggio nella Parigi Anni Trenta [Alberto Spadolini – It all started with a sheet. Art, love, espionage in 1930s Paris] is Travaglini’s latest book, a novel mostly based on documents. The title refers to Spadolini’s 1932 debut as a dancer. As he did not have a costume to wear, he chose a sheet which was valued for its originality. In many photographs, included Dora Maar’s refined portrait that has been chosen for the book cover, Spadolini wears various kinds of draped fabric (scarves, cloaks, etc.) as ornament, maybe as a memory of that debut.

Spadolini (1907-1972) was a famous music-hall dancer in 1930s Paris and, after that, an appreciated painter both in France and abroad. He was also decorator, singer, actor, restorer and director.

Travaglini opens the book quoting another novel on Spadolini, Il Gioco di Spadò [Spadò’s Game] by Augusto Scano, published in 2015. Spadolini is dying in a hospital and somebody (Death? A friend?) asks him to dance and invites him to do so as he has never done before. This is a significant introduction because, as I stated in 2007, dance represents a fil rouge in Spadolini’s career, even after he stopped dancing, in that it constantly returns in his paintings.

The narrative is divided into two main threads: one set in 2015 and dedicated to the fictitious character of Dora, an Italian American PhD in Renaissance art who is given the task to write a book about 1930s dance in Paris; the other is centred on Spadolini’s life that spans from the 1920s to the 1970s. Dora’s publishing house asks her to find “a key, a protagonist, something or somebody who can become the subject for a book”. Surprised, Dora discovers the exhistence of an unknown figure who has her same surname, “‘Josephine Baker and...Spadolini?’ But it is my same surname!”. Thus begins her adventure in search of Spadolini that will bring her to Italy and France in the company of archivist Maurizio.

Spadolini’s life flows through the pages thanks to recurrent flash-blacks that move the action to when the artist met Gabriele D’Annunzio and Anton Giulio Bragaglia in 1920s Italy, when he became a famous dancer in 1930s France, when he danced in front of Hitler in 1940, when he performed with Walter Chiari in Italy after the Second World War and so on till his last years.

Many of these flash-backs stand out for their historical interest. For example, the Spadolini-D’Annunzio connection poses some reflexions. On the one hand, historian Giordano Bruno Guerri considers it a possibility, on the other, he highlights the fact that there are no documents about it. In truth there are, but they do not come from the period during which they met, that is the 1920s [1] but from a lot later, 1971, when Philippe Jullian published his biography on the Italian poet. Maybe Guerri refers to the lack of primary sources (precisely those closer to the period of the event) and not to the presence of secondary sources as Jullian’s book is. A debate on sources would imply a long digression, but we can briefly analyse this one.

Jullian thanks Spadolini in the acknowledgment page but does not name him in the episode about his encounter with the poet at the Vittoriale. One wonders why. Did Spadolini explicitly ask for his name to be omitted? Why would he do that? Jullian was not an amateur writer: born as illustrator, he wrote some novels to then focus on art history and biographical studies. His book on Symboism, Esthètes et Magiciens [translated into English as Dreamers of Decadence] contributed to the rediscovery of that art movement. Some of his books, including his biography of D’Annunzio, have been translated into Italian. Jullian dedicates a couple of pages to the encounter between Spadolini and D’Annunzio, pages that do neither represent a fundamental aspect of the poet’s life nor a considerable portion of the book itself: he could have simply taken them away, but did not. Furthermore, as Travaglini has specified, this source has been confirmed by Patrick Oger who knew Spadolini well.

Considering Jullian from another perspective, we could look at what he actually does not say. In fact, when he thanks Spadolini, he calls him “the famous dancer” without saying anything about his paintings. Why? Exhibitions on Spadolini’s work had been organised since the 1940s, why did he omit this aspect? At present it is not clear, but we know that Spadolini had been deeply attached to his paintings since the 1920s, when he was studying art in Rome.

One of his first notable paintings was a San Francis he completed in 1925. At that time he could not keep it safe at his place in Rome and left it in Ancona, at his parents’ house. Unfortunately, his father Angelo, who had refused to join the Fascist Party, lost his job and decided to sell it. When he discovered it, Spadolini became very angry. He tried to recover his work and discovered that it had been sold to a church in Bradford, New York, USA. When he went on tour to the States, he hired a photographer to have a picture taken of his painting and this is all we have of it today. His attachment also emerges from his decision to join the Third Order of San Francis, probably after the Second World War. Travaglini dedicates an intense page to his uncle’s devotion for the saint, quoting his own words: “Francis has taught me to give for the joy of giving, to be happy with what I have, to consider the rich as the real poor because they are often poor in their spirit and soul”.

Spadolini’s words return in other parts of the book, as in his 1935 article, “Impressions of America”, that Travaglini published also in his 2012 book, Spadò – Il danzatore nudo. Spadolini talks about the United States after coming back from a tour there, “an American city shows itself as a continuous example of human velocity”. He compares the Parisian music-halls with those in the States, highlighting the fame of the French capital, “in general, when the production shows a French label, it is skyrocketing”. He then criticises North American racism, after noticing its “unspeakable repulsion towards the yellow and black races” while dining with black artist Alma Smith.

Dora and Maurizio discover information on Spadolini thanks to this and other documents, commenting them and formulating questions on his life. In this sense, Travaglini’s book is as much about Spadolini as it is abut the complex act of writing a book on him. Connected with this aspect, there is another character, a blogger who publishes superficial articles on Spadolini. His work, inspired by an exhisting book, Ignazio Gori’s Alberto Spadolini – Danzatore, pittore, agente segreto [Alberto Spadolini – Dancer, painter, secret agent], shows the great difference between a fourteen years (and counting) long study, as Travaglini’s book is, and Gori’s work, where Travaglini’s findings are mentioned (beginning with the 1978 box of documents) but never acknowledged. One could recognise its unprofessional approach even only from the book cover, where a beautiful photograph of Spadolini is turned upside down (what are possible readers supposed to think of it? That Spadolini danced that way?). Worse still, the book is described as the ‘study’ that gives back “its right weight” to Spadolini’s work , creating a false idea in those who do not know anything about either Spadolini or his nephew, a very grave and disrespectful act. Through the blogger character, Travaglini questions and deconstructs Gori’s book, reclaiming the respect that his own work and his uncle deserve, “‘Your blogger – vehemently said Dora - ‘alludes to something, but what proofs does he offer?’. ‘None!’, replied Maurizio”.


NOTE

[1] There is an indirect source from that period that attests Duilio Cambellotti’s presence at the Vittoriale. According to Pierfranco Andreani, who wrote a brief biographical introduction on Spadolini in the brochure of his Roman 1967 exhibition, Spadolini became Cambellotti’s apprentice while studying at the Art Academy in Rome. It is therefore plausible to think that Spadolini went with him to the Vittoriale.

Martha Graham's choreosophy - talk

On October 12, 2019, I delivered a talk titled "La coreosofia di Martha Graham" [Martha Graham's choreosophy] at B-Nario in Montecosaro (Macerata), Italy, as part of Sostantivo femminile, a series of events and exhibitions dedicated to women artists. There were some technical problems and an unforseen delay in my talk, but I had some very intersting feed-back from the audience.
On the term 'choreosophy' I have already written about in this blog, see here and in my book on Graham's Letter to the World [the link leads to a detailed synopsis in English, but the actual book is in Italian]. I would like to thank Marco Di Pasquale who organised the event, for having invited me and for his help.

Afrofuturist Degas essay

My essay, "Afrofuturist Degas" has been published on the visual arts magazine Roots - Routes. It is an Afrofuturist analysis of Ken Browar and Deborah Ory' photographs of Misty Copeland posing as Degas's ballerinas, photographs that were published on Harper's Bazaar in 2016.
I had been wanting to write about those photographs for a long time and am very grateful to Roots - Routes for having allowed me to do that. I cover different topics throughout the essay, such as the absence (until fairly recently) of black ballerinas in ballet history, blackface and the notion of both ballet and photography as technologies. I wish I could have explored these aspects a bit further but I could not due to reasons of space.
The essay is available online here.