Trans-figura
Year: 2005
Conception and direction: Ornella D'Agostino
Dance: Rita Spadola, Ornella D'Agostino
Music productions: Simon Balestrazzi, Henning Frimann
Video: Elisabetta Saiu
Lighting: Loic Hamelin
Length: 55 min
The body is a trans-place, a border where barriers collapse to open different states of consciousness and different perceptive worlds. Then the body undergoes a metamorphosis, it is trans-figured to cross the landscape between the extremities of human life: birth and death, male and female, reality and imagination, past and future, theatre and insanity, alone and with everybody.
If the body is the place and the dance is the journey, to manifest the paths that transfigure the bodily image is like to give voice to the sea. Words are not enough to find our bearings in the existential journey. We expose ourselves to the instability of the unpredictable changes of a wandering soul that crashes against the limits of language, of judgement and of the need to communicate secret spaces.
Trans-figura represent the meeting point of different artistic paths. The artists involved in this project open border spaces sprouting from the interaction between art and science: dance, music, visual arts, anthropological sciences. The piece, that touches the innermost strings of existence, faces different forms of identity transformation, a theme on which Ornella D'Agostino experiments in the light of 15 years of research on the identity in Sardinia and in other cultures of the Mediterranean area.
The dance and the body are thus the means to travel through cultures, individual stories and memories. The project found its cues in the carnival rites of Bosa, an ancient village on the north-western coast of Sardinia. Here the human body, disguised by a mask, undergoes a transformation in gender and role, thus allowing what nature had reserved to women. The excesses and the equivoques of the Bosan Mardi gras have distant propitiatory and liberating origins; sexual taboos are disrupted like in the Dionysian cult or in ancient fertility rites.
The objective of Trans-figura is to look for the link between archaic Sardinian traditions and their possible creative outcome applied to contemporary languages such as dance and video art. In this regard the projects aims to touch upon cultural, generational and sociological aspects connected to maternity and metamorphosis.
An intense and successful analysis of feminine relationships, a search for identity in the otherness between mother and daughter, two sisters, or two friends... It presents the dynamics of the private and unique world of women, with the mixture of joy and irony, of playfulness and eroticism that makes it inimitable and unpredictable...
Francesca Falchi, L'Unione Sarda