The choreographer Salvo Lombardo, in his latest work Sport (2023), studies the physical condition of falling in relation to the Western canon of performance and discipline.
In fact, something he said in residency at Lavanderia a Vapore in March 2023 inspired the following – exploring documentation through the lens of falling.
…he said something like „I imagine the Western narrative system that defines these very ideals in a perpetual sunset“ and since that, I have amusingly been thinking about the sun’s gravitational anomaly and about ways in which documentation can act as a thinking companion to try to unlock the sun stuck setting.
With references to competitive sports such as wrestling and gymnastics, the dancers studied the physicality of rising and falling, the motion of recycling energy and motivation. Here, the perpetual sunset becomes a metaphor that refers to Western paradigm of self-performance that keeps its human capital invested in an internalized competition with oneself, circulating between pleasure and dread, infinitely searching for opportunities that would lift the feeling of unaccomplishment. There is an instillment of a terror of falling, of the darkness, of the unknown: what comes after is an unfamiliar and obscure territory.
The documentation performs a disentanglement of the loop by speculating an alternative scenario of the fall. This is not an explicit operation on the anxieties society has infected falling with, but rather a study on the physical possibilities and open-ended continuation of falling by starting from the document as a bodied and fleshy entity that during the following experiment goes through a series of declines: actions that transform it’s chemical consistency to a point of no return. By setting up the conditions of no turning back, the path unearths and examines possible ways forward, rethinking falling not as a motion down but as an opening of other territories.
The de-disciplined potion-making looks at falling as an alchemic strategy, a transformative action which re-imagines falling as a condition without rising, without an end, and not as a motion down but forward.
Where will it take you?
Photo performance by Kadri Sirel, subtitles captured from conversations in the studio between Salvo and the performers.