In the Winter 2017, we started an artistic collaborative journey out of a common interest and sincere desire to reconnect to the stories, sensuous history and the "more than human” voices that still whisper to us in the places we inhabit. We also shared a commitment to rediscover and echo the chthonic and ethereal memories that live in the deepest tissues of the human body. This unfolding process we call EARTHBODYPLACE.
There is… a common sensibility shared by persons who have, in Robbinson Jeffer’s phrase ‘’fallen in love outward’ with the world around them. As their compassion for the land deepens, they rejuvenate their senses by entering into reciprocity with the sensuous surroundings.
-David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous
Film by Ragnar Freidank
An Invitation to Pause and Listen…
We ‘Dance’ in an attempt to most directly explore our deep ancestral memories, these that may be distant, even foreign to our personal dramas, to our intellectual and psychological make-ups. We are interested in a migratory voyage in the mythical landscapes of the body-mind, perhaps to remember the forgotten stories of migrations that seem to have dismembered us, to have exploded us into oblivion… Dancing becomes a way of remembering.
Our process starts with a series of engagements in the History and Mythology of a particular place, we let these 'cook', we allow some dreaming time… Then the dancer’s spontaneously responds to the ‘felt’, inherent memory of the place.
We create a context in which we hope to most directly listen and respond to the place we are engaging with. We usually work in the outdoors of the place, where the senses are mostly stimulated outwards, to fine tune, listen and embody. Then we move indoors to internalize the process and move towards the shaping of a dance, the choreographed memory of an essence…
As these two parallel processes deepen, a narrative framework starts to appear inside of which it is possible to (re)cognize where we are in relation to the bigger story of the place. Images, gestures, mythological creatures, particular rhythms and qualities start to emerge and need to be carefully assembled, as to tell the story. Eventually these engagements lead to an event/a performance, where the normal assumption goes away: Once in relationship with Place, once open to the sensations that arise in this particular place at this particular time, the participants become a part of the show they are coming to see.
The story becomes a possible meeting place for the dismembered communities and people of this rapidly changing world where in our state of emergency, we cannot hold on to anything, particularly our sense of being ness…
Alongside this creative living process, is offered a series opportunities for the community to directly engage. These offerings are part of our desire/mission, both as artists and educators to engage in a more sustainable dialogue between the human and more than human fields. They live under the Substratum umbrella of earthbodyplace.
PRESENTING EARTHBODYPLACE AT YOUR VENUE
The nature of our work is such that we can adapt and create performance offerings tailored to any particular Place, may this place be a performance venue, an art gallery, a promenade event, a public gathering, an outdoor festival… Creative residential time leading to a performance depends upon the length of the performance, the length of the research period prior to the performance, the scale of the venue, the number of performers involved (from your community and/or from our own network), and the number of performances, all of which are open to consideration and discussion.
Our basic requirement for consideration is to have transportation, accommodation and per diem costs covered for two artists, access to a technical support/stage manager person, as well as means and authorization to document our work in its entirety on film. Our basic fee for two movement artists is commensurate to the means of the host venue.
For more information, email Camille at camillelitalien@gmail.com
Past Performances
Sânziene
was presented as part of an ongoing offering of the earthbodyplace project, specifically created and performed for and in collaboration with the Arboretum of Connecticut College, in the context of "Open Space” between the human and "more than human" intelligences that exist (though perhaps forgotten or unheard) as the very land on which we stand. We invite the audience to actively engage in a creative, contemplative and actual dialogue with the living sensuous Earth which holds, nourishes and envelopes each one of us within and without.
"Sanziene night (June 24th) is considered a mystical moment, when Nature is at her peak and displays her most vital force. The traditional belief is that magic can happen during Sanziene night, when the skies can open…." From Wikipedia.
Incandescence of Fireflies
was presented as part of an ongoing offering of the earthbodyplace project, specifically created and performed at the Chateau de la Bretesche, near Nantes, France, as part of the three-day Conference on Franco-American Theatre Collaborations, curated by Hugh O' Gorman and funded by the Borchard Foundation.
This project illustrates our working processes as a living form, that breathes and adapts to the particular place of artistic residency we are invited to.
The theme of returning, re-membering, coming (back) home, is inherent to our collaborative process and it is uncanny that in our first 2 years of working together, we found ourselves unintendedly invited to return to the birthplace of our dance journeys. Last year, we were invited to share our work in Connecticut, the place where Peter started dancing professionally some decades ago, to present Sanziene; this year, we find ourselves invited at the Chateau de la Bretesche near Nantes, where Camille first started dancing professionally some decades ago, to present Incandescence of Fireflies...
There is a phantom language in my mouth.
A tongue beneath my tongue.
Will I ever
Remember what
I sound
like.
Will I ever come home.
-African American i
Nayyirah Waheed
Camille: Inherent to our work is the ‘felt’ understanding of our displacement, that we are all refugees. As the grand-daughter of a well-known colonial doctor in Africa, whose sons were born and raised on the African continent with African nurses and maids, I saw the devastation in my father, the guilt, the tyranny of an imposed colonial past, extracted from any sense of family or belonging to a place. Together with the newly-revived slave past of the city of Nantes, I saw my family falling in love with West African men and women, desperate to re-connect to a distant past…Myself French migrant in the UK, then the US, I am only recently able to articulate the reasons behind an acute need, if not desperation, to dance. I dance, as I bring back my ‘exploded’ body together, to re-member my body and its role in the bigger story…
Incandescence of Fireflies