What does it mean for you to inhabit a space during a residency period?
First of all, disorientation, a sort of disorientation which is nonetheless necessary to allow an opening for possibilities, reconfigurations and questions. On the other hand, if I had everything at hand I could have also stayed home.
To me, living the residency space has to do with relating to something other, thus with paying attention to where and how I place myself, what I put on and what not. This ongoing questioning is a fundamental tool not to fall victim of my own narratives. What light this place puts me in, at this moment, with these people? How do I place myself in here?
If usually a space should receive and welcome what happens inside, in this case it is the work that receives the space that it is inhabiting. LOOK MA, NO HANDS_a way to go (working title) is at its first iteration, and it goes without saying that it is absorbing much from the Pelanda space. The place where a work is born is always special, as you begin to settle you seize the consistency of the floor, the tone of the black curtains, Ilaria and Paola’s looks, the air temperature. For instance, this work is already very much attached to the black carpet in Theater 1.
How would you define the space of your work and research? What will you investigate on this occasion?
The space in LOOK MA, NO HANDS_a way to go (working title) is the privileged channel we relate ourselves with, while getting in contact with our body and our being. The solo format has always been frightening for me, and to give myself the right time to locate and perceive any surface I encounter has been a way to find a strong relationship within “solitude.”
In this work, the space allows us to continuously rebalance the attention we place on things and to enter a non-hierarchical and predefined perceptual state, yet as much as possible scattered in the relationships the body’s presence inscribes in the environment. We don't try to move in here, we try to move from here. We don't try to stay in a relationship, we try to be part of it. We try to settle in this space to give ourselves the opportunity to question our premises and discover something starting from the meeting itself; we try to pose a question and allow openness toward the possible relationships that the light, the acoustics, our presence, and the people who inhabit this space allow.
During this residence we first took a moment to come back and become familiar with the body again, to feel how we were and to give ourselves the time to settle down. From there we built a state for the body to do the job. An open, receptive state where we could make space between the body surfaces and the environment, to stretch the ear to perceive what is happening. A state to welcome the coming wave and transform it into something else. A space to feel free to say yes and no, to do and not to do.
Define “care” in three words
involvement, intention, do not take anything for granted
Marina Donatone was born in Rome in 1993 and trained at the Budapest Contemporary Dance Academy.
As a dancer she has been working in Italy and abroad with artists and choreographers including Virgilio Sieni, Jacopo Miliani and Csaba Molnár.
In her work she seeks a body in becoming that gives itself to the choreographic system as an active matter, which works and is worked starting from the relationships in which it is embedded, carrying along its own irreducible composition.
As an author she has realized performances for the theatre and for unconventional spaces such as Museo Civico in Bassano del Grappa and Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan. Her work LOOK MA, NO HANDS is a finalist at DNAppunti coreografici 2018 within the Romaeuropa Festival and it is presented at Short Theatre festival 2019 within Panorama Roma.
She is one of the founders of Jennifer Beals, a many-sided project on performing arts in Rome.
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