“In terms of the re-appropriation of the city, public spaces are those spatial nodes through which the metropolis can return to a critical space of politics.” With this thought Stavros StavridisGreek architect and activist, the new edition of the festival Le Alleanze dei Corpi is presented.
This year’s theme is exactly that Common Space: a place that absorbs the energy of bodies and forms around them, where we can rethink relationships in a new sense of community.
After all, what are the places where we feel freer in the city, if not the public spaces?
The aim of the festival, conceived as a transformative workshop divided into a program of participatory paths, relational practices, performances, exhibitions, symposia that connect the area with the cultural bodies of the city, is to offer food for thought about the urgency to start from these places to reimagine the city.
And if we think of Milan, where public space is gradually being swallowed up by private capital, a festival like Le Alleanze dei Corpi stimulates a reflection that is as timely as it is urgent. All through the liberating language of dance. After all, we don’t need words to claim the right to space, to breathe.
The festival program focuses on some critical issues: the public space as a culture of the city and the common good, decolonization as a founding practice of recognizing the city by its inhabitants, radical ecologies as a social perspective for new forms of human relationship and alive for new social and collaborative ecologies.
The project hosts and productively engages artists, performers and choreographers engaged with work in regions and with reflection on the body in the public sphere, through workshops, performances, expanded choreography, radical pedagogies, rewriting the urban landscape, recognizing dance as important engagement tool for new generations.
The festival opens on September 14 steam factory, with a day of meetings and performances on the theme of the relationship between cities, cultural institutions and common goods entitled Public space – Common space. The Greek architect, sociologist and activist will be present Stavros Stavridis (University of Athens, author of Towards the Cities of Thresholds and Spazio Comune – recently published in Italy by Agenzia Annalisa Metta (professor of Landscape Architecture, Roma3 University, author The landscape is a monster. Wild cities and hybrid natures), Emanuele Braga (researcher, activist and artist), Elisabetta Consonni (choreographer), Marco Minoha (Directorate of Culture of the Municipality of Milan), Alessandro Bollo (cultural planner).
Monitors its performance Ariella Vidach Connective bodyYes, a choral work to rethink the body as both singular and plural. The aim of the project is to encourage exchanges and relationships between people through a spontaneous and instinctive language in the creation of a movement and a collective body.
The program continues on September 16 with EXOSODIESa series of performances in which queer poetics, politics of desire, bodies and landscapes in transition converge, through open and irregular shapes.
His new work will be presented on September 17 Jacopo Miliani Flowerflexion, which draws attention to certain stereotypes associated with the form of the human body as a container of forces, while on September 20 the opening of the exhibition will take place BLOOM ROOM (open until September 28) at DiDstudio, a construction site open to new forms of dance and performance, where the installation Jacopo Miliani Anthologyand the Queer Ecology of Dogyorke (Yuri S. D’Ostuni) 17 L.
On the 21st the festival then moves west, between QT8 and San Siro, with a double program dedicated to the theme of radical and acoustic ecologies. Musicians at Bosco in Città Attila Faravelli and Nicola Ratti present QW. 10 forestryedited by Claudia D’Alonzoa performative path dedicated to the auditory experience, as a collective ecosystemic exploratory practice, an invitation to turn attention and understand the constant transformations of the spaces we inhabit, through the creation of simple sound events and listening to what comes from them.
The workshop and symposium will be held on the same day at Kinlab Climate Justice League Super hero of new worlds for climate justice edited by Emanuele Braga, a path of activism and speculative thinking to imagine the imaginaries of climate justice and to subvert and radicalize, from a situationist perspective, the imaginaries of struggle. The workshop and symposium launch the next voyage on October 12-15, the Art for Radical Ecologies Manifesto, an anti-species, fossil-free and post-anthropocentric platform created by the Institute of Radical Imagination.
On September 22 Le Alleanze dei Corpi crosses the Parco Lambro with BODY FARM Of Silvia Rampelli / Habillé d’eau, already the UBU prize in 2018. The project is nominally inspired by the research centers Body Farms – Forensic Anthropology, created in the United States to study the decomposition of bodies – recording the resonance of certain proportions of language: the invitation to donate the body to science seems to guide the actor in delivering it to the gaze. Immersed in the open space, the user finds himself in the situation of having to look for a measure, a focus, an order. Body Farm is the necessarily unique experiment of a phenomenal event and its perceptual swarm.
Finally, on September 23 and 24, it starts at the Trotter Park pool, in the neighborhood where Le Alleanze dei Corpi is historically located, HOW TO DECOLONIZE CONTEMPORARY DANCE Practices and Rituals of Decolonizing Public Spacea performative symposium in which they can converge and share practices and theories on the subject of the body in the contemporary world, on the contents and aesthetics it conveys and on how these are refracted in the artistic forms of the present.
Some projects develop around the two days: on the 23rd, at the Cascina Biblioteca, the workshop begins Shinea two-voice broadcast project hosted by Marta Bellu and Laura Lucioli, dancer with down syndrome, arising from the urgent need to search within language for new choreographies of words to share the dance with.