Luzzana’s lecture is a performance suspended between the real and the virtual, between corporeality and dematerialisation. This is an inclusive performance where the spectator’s multisensory perception takes center stage, as the artist intended.
The senses of those watching, engaging vision and touch, end up crossing the line between the self and the world. Then the distance between seats and stage diminishes, almost disappearing, staging an exploration of new relational forms.
Many bright blue lights indicate the presence of as many spectators intent on reading the essay on their phones while watching the dance.
Spectators connect to the web with their smartphones and use this to read the essay proposed by the artist, interacting with some key words while the performer, Sofia Casprini, also moves in a space halfway between the tangible and the apparent.
Attention then sways, wavers: the eye moves between the small screen, the stage and the audience. The inability to perceive and embrace the whole is, at the same time, destabilising. Is this the intended aim of the performance?
How do you inhabit a post-digital space? Maybe using skin first, then vision. Touch, the father of the senses, places spectators in the world, in their space.
But the touch of the screen generates and activates a changing reality that is difficult to comprehend in its entirety and mutability.
The touch-screen manifests itself in its paradox: a technology powerful enough to amplify reality, without ever making it palpable.
How real is the non-tangible?
(Alessandra Gabriele)
AUDIENCE ON STAGE is the fourth edition of BACKSTAGE / ONSTAGE, a multimedia editorial project realised in a partnership between the Rome Fine Art Academy, Romaeuropa Festival and Arshake.
For the 2021 edition, BACKSTAGE / ONSTAGE, has moved its focus to concentrate on the spectators of the Romaeuropa Festival, their behaviour and way of relating to the performances, their interest and the effect that this produces. The survey was carried out transversally, covering the different performance genres at the festival, from dance to drama and music. AUDIENCE ON STAGE examined the entrances, lobbies and corridors of theatres, stalls, boxes, mobile phones and online event screens, searching for the gaze of the so-called emancipated spectator, i.e. he or she who finds a new kind of contact and closeness with others in the theatre, but also discovers a new connection with their own active existence.
The article and the video were realised on occasion of the performance Object Oriented Choreography by Francesco Luzzana on September 26, 2021 at Mattatoio in Rome within Romaeuropa Festival Digitalive21, curated by Federica Patti.
Winner of the second edition of RE: Humanism Art Prize, Luzzana presented a lecture/performance suspended between the real and the virtual.
Backstage / Onstage: progetto nato da una partnership tra Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma, Romaeuropa Festival e Arshake
Crediti 2021- AUDIENCE ON STAGE: Video: Walter Maiorino, Eleonora Mattozzi, Alessia Muti, Francesca Paganelli; Eleonora Scarponi. Testi: Chiara Amici, Domiziana Febbi, Alessandra Gabriele, Martina Macchia, Alessia Mutti.
