Swan
- 2023
- by Gaetano Palermo
- with Rita di Leo
- sound design Luca Gallio
- prosthetics Crea Fx
- production La Biennale di Venezia
- 40’
Swan is a performance inspired by the dance solo “Death of the Swan”, by Michel Fokine. The work goes beyond the traditional definitions of dance and theatre and makes use of the sports practice by thematizing it both formally and conceptually. This is an ordinary scene: a young girl is training on skates and is listening to music on her headphones. As if she were closed into a bubble, she hovers in returning elliptical trajectories with passionate obstinacy. The athletic exercise reflects its typical paradoxical solipsism: the intimate relationship with her body is exhibited together with her own possibilities, thus with the vulnerability of her limits. Existence as insistence: the action is reiterated in increasingly daring poses, becoming a test of endurance, that is physical and existential. The subject is the fall, the wound, a muscular tear of a humanity fleeing from itself, narcissistically spinning on its axis in search of a spectrum of identity and affirmation. Swan is indeed a portrait of life in all the tragic banality of repetition compulsion; the glimmer of light of an ever-sprouting still life which reflects the existence as a grotesque exercise of death beyond any idea of salvation. The viewer can only try to catch a glimpse of the last breath, their very own.
Swan is a performance inspired by the dance solo “Death of the Swan”, by Michel Fokine. The work goes beyond the traditional definitions of dance and theatre and makes use of the sports practice by thematizing it both formally and conceptually. This is an ordinary scene: a young girl is training on skates and is listening to music on her headphones. As if she were closed into a bubble, she hovers in returning elliptical trajectories with passionate obstinacy. The athletic exercise reflects its typical paradoxical solipsism: the intimate relationship with her body is exhibited together with her own possibilities, thus with the vulnerability of her limits. Existence as insistence: the action is reiterated in increasingly daring poses, becoming a test of endurance, that is physical and existential. The subject is the fall, the wound, a muscular tear of a humanity fleeing from itself, narcissistically spinning on its axis in search of a spectrum of identity and affirmation. Swan is indeed a portrait of life in all the tragic banality of repetition compulsion; the glimmer of light of an ever-sprouting still life which reflects the existence as a grotesque exercise of death beyond any idea of salvation. The viewer can only try to catch a glimpse of the last breath, their very own.