Flavia

Where my body once was, there will be a dance that embodies the cycle of life and death, but there will be no me anymore.

„The vulnerability of human s soul is a big subject in my dance. and also its strength. My work consists in exploring the limits of mind and body in different states and different places. I like to perform in the streets… and public spaces because it is an insecure space. To find a balance in my mind with a disbalanced body or viceversa. To take the risk to fail while the world continues to be perfect. To endure the trembling of the body until it dissolves into nothing. How to rise up again if nothing is left? To find an aesthetic way of dance where suffering, death, sexuality, sickness, handicap, age, insanity and so on are not excluded.

In my years of making art, I have felt an urgency to enter reality, to feel existence, to exhibit total existence. I work with concepts and techniques that hold space, like Ankoku Butoh dance (which means literally “Dance of Darkness,” or the dance of the hidden body – the unconscious, the dna, the body memory, and the inside of the body), where the history of the world can be told through an almost unmoving body trembling in space. A living body becomes an empty vessel through which generations of the dead enter and expose themselves, to tell the stories of their lives without talking, the play of their life, their loves and crimes, how they died, how their body became food for another, how they became another life.

If I enter intimate space I enter the space of vulnerability. That s why maybe it s more easy to live intimacy in dance than in real life…“

Flavia Ghisalberti is a multi-disciplinary artist, director and choreographer of Italian and Swiss descent. She had periodic exhibitions and created poetry sound performances with self made instruments from 1994-1996. Since 1998 she has worked intensively with Butoh dance. Flavia’s art explores the limits of the body and the mind and what they are willing to endure. Her butoh style is primarily independent of a particular butoh school or master. She co-founded the Butoh group In Between in 2003 and founded the international project Limits in 2008. She is director of the bi-annual festival Butoh-Off since 2010 which is now a trinational project with Freiburg and Strasbourg. She performs and teaches throughout Europe, Russia and the United States.

http://www.facebook.com/fleuvie
http://www.inbetweenbutoh.com