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Zen Fascist (2016), 2016

 

Performance behind doors (45 minutes aprox.)

 

Zen Fascist (2016), 2016 / performance / Arts Santa Mònica – Hangar / photo: Antonio Gagliano

 

Giorgio Agamben says that “to repeat something is to make it possible anew”. After two years I was asked to perform Zen Fascist again. Assuming the impossibility of repetition, I proposed a diverse possibility, a mutation that allowed the piece to be revisited through a slightly shifted focus. Zen Fascist (2014) consisted of research about yoga, control and performance in contemporary capitalism and was presented in a multitude of formats, one of which being a series of 4 performances. Each performance was based on the same source, a script of gestures and text. Gestures were taken from yoga phone App’s such as “yoga on the go” “yoga face” or “airport yoga” and were rearranged to create a score for choreography. The text was based on a mix of sources, from quotes by Federici, Marx, Foucault and Arendt to slogans of big transnational fitness companies and notions of spiritual darwinism comprised in the written research for the Master’s Thesis I presented in 2014.
 
Keeping the gestural and textual materials from the original script, “Zen Fascist (2016)” established a test space based on repetition, memory and transmission. This time, the performance was made for a reduced audience and was not documented, at least using audio or video, allowing the body to be the sole support of documentation. “Zen fascist (2016)” consisted in a choral performance based on a chain reaction; it was announced via e-mail inviting the audience to participate in a performance of maximum 20 people. The participants received a fragment of four movements and sentences extracted from the original script and were asked to memorize and repeat the movements beforehand. Each participant had three unique movements and only one matched; they would only start their sequence once one of their movements was executed by another participant, at first creating a space of observation to later on become one of uncanny entropy. This session reached a high rhythm of repetition and mimesis, but also resulted in audience improvisation after 20 minutes, before slowing down and then ending after 45 minutes.
 
The main focus of “Zen Fascist (2016)” shifted to oral transmission of knowledge and body memory by merging the act of performing with the act of documenting, allowing me to disappear as a performer into the multitude of the audience, making the audience responsible individuals as well as a potential group of agents of distribution. Focusing, then, on body memory as a pre-pre memory –before orality, before language- gesturally suggesting an embodied ideology.

 

→ “Tú y yo, significamos algo” by Alba Mayol Curci – A*Desk (CAST) ?

→ “You and I, we mean something” by Alba Mayol Curci – A*Desk (ENG) ?

 
 

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