ECOSOMATIC PERSEPHONE
The Earthly Spaces of Theatre
Raffaele Rufo (Humanitas Mundi Teatro, Rome), raffaele.rufo@gmail.com
Flavia Gallo (Humanitas Mundi Teatro, Rome), flaviagallo.teatro@gmail.com
Performance-lecture presented at the 9th Conference of the International Platform for Performer Training (IPPT)
Fondazione Orizzonti d’Arte – Chiusi (Italy), 12-15 January 2023
DESCRIPTION:
This performance lecture presents a theoretical and practical dialogue between ecosomatic and dramaturgical practices. Working on the Greek myth of Persephone, we explore the thresholds between the dancing body and the dance of words to reveal the wounds of separation from the nonhuman and the inability to grieve for anthropogenic ecological disasters. Drawing on the relational and decolonising tensions in Peter Brook’s philosophy, we propose that theatre can be approached as an immersive ecology of non-anthropocentric spaces and training practices. This ecology integrates the sacredness of trees, rocks, sand, and other earthly forces through processes of crossing, assembling, and remembering our neurobiological heritage.
Why interweave the myth of Persephone between dramaturgy and ecosomatics? She is the mistress of the threshold between life and death, moving fate through words and touch. Her dramatic passage to the underworld - Cora becoming Persephone - exposes death as the most scandalous separation for the mind while revealing traces of the human within the nonhuman. Engaged as a metamorphic source, the myth softens the grip of our patterning instinct and takes us into the imaginal spaces between sensing and naming. Borrowing Brook’s terminology, the emptiness of these spaces has the quality of an intensified haptic presence. We are faced with a kind of naming which defies cognitive-linguistic abstraction to reclaim the more-than-human healing power of vulnerability.
TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS:
The performance lecture (50min) is imagined for a dance studio or a performance space with no stage (around 100 square metres would work well but we can adapt). This should be a space where the audience can be immersed in the performance lecture rather than sitting on the other side of the stage as in a conventional theatre setting. Viewers will be invited to sit on the floor (possibly a wooden floor) or on chairs, cushions, small benches, stools, etc. scattered across the space to make their presence comfortable. We will bring with us materic and acoustic traces of our encounter with nonhuman life from the territory of the State Natural Reserve of the Roman Coast. We ask you to kindly provide two lecterns. We would love the possibility of some spotlights. We will need a sound system, not an audiovisual system.
Raffaele Rufo is an artist-scholar in the fields of somatics, dance and performance. In 2020 he was awarded a PhD by Deakin University (Melbourne) for the study of touch in Tango. His research on improvisation was published internationally. After travelling across Europe, Africa and Australia, Raffaele lives in the Natural Reserve of the Roman Coast (Italy). He explores the more-than-human ecologies of embodiment in collaboration with the theatre ensemble Humanitas Mundi. www.raffaelerufo.com
Flavia Gallo is a dramatist, lecturer in Theatre and Education and research fellow in Pedagogy of Expression at Roma Tre University. She is the author of numerous prize-winning plays awarded by, among others, Sipario Prize and European Prize for Theater and Dramaturgy Tragos, Piccolo Teatro di Milano. In 2022 she was selected as playwright for the Biennale Theatre Authors in Venice. She co-founded Humanitas Mundi Teatro, ensemble of performance research and dramaturgical cooperation in Rome.
For references and quotes from the text of this page, cite Raffaele Rufo, 2022, ‘Ecosomatic Pershephone: The Earthly Spaces of Theatre’, https://www.raffaelerufo.com/improv-performance/ecosomatic-persephone-performance-lecture