with Jonathan Lahey Dronsfield, Emiliano Zelada, Pier Luigi Tazzi, Piedad Albarracin Sequier, Harry Alexander
Before the name is a performance inspired by the text of Alain Badiou, La danse comme métaphore de la pensée, part of the "Petit manuel d'inesthétique" written by the French philosopher in 1998, which considers the relationship between dance and thought in its germinal and revolutionary phase, associated to the event. It is a choral performance formed by dancers, storytellers and musicians, whose encounter and sharing of space and time, organised within a tight script, generates a series of events. The movement collides with a real entourage of tensions, connected to life and experience: dance, as a concept, dissolves into travel, life, debris, objects, images, teaching and meeting, in its closer aspects to becoming, and its transitionary state between body and mind. In the various versions of the performance and in the drawings / study of the work, there is always the presence of a sculptural object that recalls both a mountain and an abstract element; this element embodies the ambivalence within which the event resides, that is, the existence between what is named, the mountain, and what is still unnamed, matter. "Dance plays out the event before the event's nomination." cit. Alain Badiou. Both the central figures, the narrator and the dancer can be first matter, then mountain, first form and then soul, first body and then intellect, first name and then nothing. While the dance, until their last extreme, and only alluded, metamorphosis.
Before the name is a performance inspired by Alain Badiou’s text, ‘Dance as a Metaphor for Thought’, part of the ‘Petit manuel d’inesthétique’ written by the French philosopher in 1998 – (Handbook of Inaesthetics, A.Toscano trans., Stanford University Press., 2005), which considers the relationship between thought and dance. The work is a collective performance that interlaces languages and contributions from dancers, thinkers, musicians, and the figure of the French philosopher. Using video projections, Badiou’s thoughts resonate in the space along with the live music of artist and composer Emiliano Zelada, and the movements of two dancers from the Michael Clark Company of London. They occupy the whole space, trying to reach their own understanding of density level, generating tension for the entire length of the performance.
The collective nature of the performance is ignited by the interventions of the artist-philosopher Jonathan Lahey Dronsfield interacting with Badiou’s words, and establishing a dialogue in time with the dancers. The symmetrical binomial produced by the philosopher’s appearance/disappearance, and the dancers’ language that engages movement with mind, is cut by non-theoretical perspectives described by the Italian art critic and curator Pier Luigi Tazzi. Tazzi’s contributions open the boundaries of the performance’s territory, using direct actions, life’s memories, and a tributes. The focus on “Dance as a Metaphor for Thought” departs from its starting point, only to collide with a real entourage, connected to life and experience. Dance, as a concept, is now dissolved into movement, travel, life, debris, powerful objects and images.