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There is a beat that crosses all the elements, so that distinct parts are in perfect symbiosis. Rhythm is the basis of every social and natural phenomenon, the essence of every organism, and perhaps of the whole world. A dance without music that combines the frequency of a breath with the vibration of a quartz, the motion of a car with the beating wings of a bat, up to the cosmic motions of the Moon, the Sun and the stars.

We live the same life as everything around us

In the past year we realized, by necessity, that we are primarily bodies. We live in close intimacy with other non-human life forms, with a myriad of organisms that inhabit us. The body is this, the matrix of relationships between us, what is around or inside us, the harmonious vibrations of many forms of life. The physical place of interdependence..  

The radical directors of the twentieth century tell us a many things about our condition. Grotowski and Barba and, before them, Coupeau, Mejerchol’d, Artaud. To train the body and the affective musculature, to observe the deep structures that govern behavior.

During the exercises, concentration was at its peak in the bare and silent rooms. An associative game, that links the mental image and the physical movement that expresses it, arises from the long sessions of observing a cat that wakes up or a flower. Suddenly, almost by a miracle, one of the students turns into a flower: “the whole body lives, trembles, vibrates with the imperious process of flowering […] the feet are the roots, the body is the stem and the hands form the corolla”.

These attitudes go beyond theatrical exercises, they are a practice through which the individual-actor knows the world, trains himself to hear the rhythms without being able to listen to them; he learns to make his own gestures and thoughts alien to himself until recently and becomes aware of his being plural. It is a research on physical actions, the attempt to expand perception, which also acquires meaning in everyday experience.

The 2021 Video Sound Art program aims to explore these relational practices, following the traces they have left in contemporary art and performance, certain of the actuality and transformative power they still possess.


RYTHMÒS 
Video Sound Art festival – XI edizione
18 – 24 september 2021
Museo Civico di Storia Naturale
Civico Planetario Ulrico Hoepli
Milano

GESTUS
15 october 2021 – 15 january 2022
Teatrino di Palazzo Grassi
Venezia

XI edition
Rythmos
18 – 25 september 2021

Venue:
Museo Civico di Storia Naturale
Planetario Ulrico Hoepli

With the contribution of:
Comune di Milano
Fondazione Cariplo

Press release