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link: https://vimeo.com/1038468815?share=copyJadi Carboni is a dancer, body worker, and practitioner based in Graz. On December 12th, she will hold a lecture/workshop on "Sense of touch and kinesthetic empathy" in DaT Probenhaus. We talked to the artist about the workshop and about her new piece Peaches grow wild along a scenic route. You can watch the trailer above.
Can you tell us about your background and your artistic practice?
Movement and voice practices, including writing, have always been my passion.
I started when I was four year old with circus, but my family changed city, and I began studying ballet and jazz there. When I was 11 years old, a professional dancer advised my mom to let me study at the National Dance Academy in Rome. After two years of preparation, I passed the examination and moved to Rome, where I studied ballet, Graham and composition. At 16, I began working in a contemporary dance company, Danza Ricerca, led by Daniela Capacci. She was inspired by Pina Baucsh’s dance theatre, and, with this experience, I understood that I am not a “ballerina” but a contemporary dancer.
At 19, I won a scholarship to the Biennale Danza of Venice, directed by Carolyn Carlson. The whole world opened up during those months, revealing dance’s infinite possibilities.
Once the scholarship was over, I became intrigued by somatic practices such as Feldenkrais and Tai-Chi, as well as Contact Improvisation. Ivan Wolf, one of the teachers at the Biennale, left me a piece of paper with the words “Stephanie Maher, Prenzlauerberg”; in 2002, I moved to Berlin to study Contact Improvisation and Release Technique with her.
A landscape of various artistic approaches unfolded in front of me: Butoh, Physical theatre, Aikido, and Qi Gong. I also dived particularly into Body Mind Centering and Klein Technique as support practices for Contact Improvisation and Release Technique.
I always had to work alongside my studies, and babysitting the kids of the outstanding dancers I worked with, including Ka Rustler, allowed me to participate in many festivals around Germany.
In 2003, I moved to Amsterdam to study at the School for New Dance Development and continue working in Scotland with Karl Jay Lewin and the Scottish National Theater. In the summer of 2007, I worked in the US with Djalma Primordial Science and then back in Berlin, where I danced for Sasha Waltz between 2013 and 2016.
In 2009, I obtained my certification as a Pilates teacher, followed in 2015 and 2017 by my yoga teacher training.
Finally, in 2020, I obtained my Masters in choreography from the HZT in Berlin. Currently, I am part of the teacher training of Open Source Forms directed by Stephanie Skura in Seattle, US.
Based on the Skinner Releasing technique, this method is what I have been looking for all my life. It integrates somatic and artistic practices, movement, voice, and writing.
I have always practised singing, in addition to my dance career, and since 2017, I have been studying Dhrupad music, a Hindustani classical music genre.
Through my work and experiences, I learned that improvising is essential for me, and I am currently researching and experimenting with this tool in my teachings and compositions.
Improvising allows us to tune in deeply with the present moment and the space where we are.
As a choreographer, it is exciting to learn how to integrate improvisation in the creative process or even create a choreography based on a score, which can be a drawing, a text, or just a few sentences to inspire and guide the play.
Those tools allow the performers to work on common structures, fed by their imagination, relationships, and authentic presence.
They break down the authoritarian barriers and clichés, underlining the dialogue between every human being’s inner and outer space.
What can we expect from your talk/workshop on December 12th? What is “kinesthetic empathy”?
On December 12th, I will share the core of my research about the sense of touch, which began in 2019 during my Masters studies.
The project I developed is called Permeable Touch: a site-specific event performed in Berlin in 20019 and Graz in 2022 and 2023 in different public spaces with dancers and non-dancers.
The event followed a few encounters aiming to raise awareness of the dialogue between inner and outer space through the perception of our skin, the largest of our organs, and the physical border between the self and the world.
We explored how we affect and are affected by the space in a continuous and fundamental dialogue that enables the acknowledgement of the self and the world.
Next Thursday, I will offer some sensorial experiences to raise awareness of the sense of touch: How do we respond to our perceptions? How are we affected by and affect our environment, consciously or unconsciously?
I use the word “touch” to refer to the physical action of touching but also, broadly, to be affected or have an effect on something.
The sense of touch is the first sense to develop in our bodies just after seven weeks of pregnancy, and through it, we get to know our bodies and the environment. The skin is crossed by nerve derivations called proprioceptor system, which is connected to particular cells in our brain called mirror neurons. These neurons fire up when we move and see someone moving, which is how kinaesthetic empathy arises.
Everything in this world vibrates with a particular electrical-energetic charge, which means that when we come in contact with an object or a specific space through tactile or spatial experience, we share with this particular charge, creating kinaesthetic and kinetic responses in the body. When we touch something or someone, our skin enters physical contact with another surface, affecting how we experience ourselves and the object.
While touching, we are being touched.
These are the themes we are going to discuss and experience next Thursday.
Can you tell us about Peaches grow wild along a scenic route? Where does the title originate?
Peaches grow wild along a scenic route is inspired by my experience of being a woman.
Apart from choreographing and performing it, I created the soundtrack, collecting and editing interviews with women of different ages, cultures, and occupations. While interviewing, I noticed how many social issues are shared by many of them differently.
Once upon a time, women cherished the wisdom of the forest, earth, and sky. Acknowledging the reality of being part of Nature and not having supremacy above it. They were learning about the treasures of Nature, generating awareness and connection with their ever-present, often-forgotten significance.
Partially autobiographic, the piece is an emotional journey through the depiction of the female body in society.
The way we represent and speak about the female body has been based for centuries on a male perspective, creating a poisoning imbalance between all human beings beyond age, race and gender.
Starting from historical stereotypes, the piece lets them transform into fantastic or real entities.
Powerful images prompted the audience to empathise and reflect on dormant beliefs and values in their subconscious.
This provocative nature of the performance is a compelling artistic strategy for engaging with socio-political themes.
Can we look at the female body without falling into rules and moral ideas imposed upon her?
Even now that women’s reality has been progressing in most of the world, it is still juggling between unspoken duties, manipulations, unfairness and violence.
Even though the work has been deeply researched and experimented with, I realised what I was missing just after the premiere: how to let the audience plunge into a new space from beginning to end and let them be part of it. Therefore, I understood that a creative process needs to happen in the range of an artistic residency, especially when one is simultaneously the choreographer and the performer.
Apart from exploring movement and gestures, I worked with images to create metaphors and social clichés that facilitated the audience's empathetic responses.
While performing it, I noticed that not all the cliché were necessary and that working with the original, fundamental images and movement material would have been more effective.
It was born as a durational participatory performance. I was planning to perform it in galleries and museums, parallel to other women’s installations or exhibitions, but unfortunately, for practical reasons, it wasn’t possible.
The name comes from associations I made between women and Nature and between the way women have responded, transformed, and positioned themselves throughout history.
In many parts of the world, the courage to assert our truth is growing, becoming louder and more supported by one another, including on the theme of gender diversity.
I don’t believe in supremacy over men, but I wish for parity possibilities, respect and acknowledgement of the importance of differences, which in my view promote, in many cases, completion.
It was a very intensive performative action, which lasted between 60-70 minutes, including participatory events.
Do the “kinesthetic experiences” you promise for Peaches grow wild along a scenic route stand in relation to your concept of “kinesthetic empathy”?
Definitely yes.
The first image of the performance is a doll who sits and responds with restricted movement to the interrupted voices of other women and the noises of the surroundings. Immersed in an ocean of male clothes, she is unable to move, and when she finally breaks through this confined condition, she slips and stumbles until she falls within it. The quality of the movement in the space setting allowed the audience to perceive the frustration following the limited range of action and expression that the character was living, creating sometimes uncomfortable feelings, but also the way to deeply enter this reality and reflect upon it.
The performance is developed with those tools, evoking some of the audience members’ experiences and associated context. Through the presence of the body, its movement, rhythm, pauses and sounds, dance performances that challenge dominant social identities can expand the space where cultural value can be considered. Peaches is one of those performances.
Do you want to share some information about other projects you might have planned?
As I was sharing earlier, I really would like to rework Peaches to let go of some of the unnecessary clihcés, allowing the material to unfold, giving space to images and symbols, which can reveal a more authentic expression of the body. Some scenes have become too explicative for my taste, and I believe working with the essential-core material is more effective and engaging. Apart from refining and editing some scenes, I would like to create a shorter version to perform in dance festivals.
I also have a new solo that I am already rehearsing called Kinesis Semeion. It is inspired by my research about touch and kinaesthetic empathy and by my practice as an improviser. The main spring is the relationship with the space: how movement, expression, and gestures arise and how language develops from the somatic experience. I am working with different tools, including automatic talk, and I would perform it several times, also in the same place, inviting other performers to observe how the atmosphere, the space and the composition change.
Apart from these two projects, I would like to invite a musician-composer from Berlin, Burkhard Beins, to Graz to revisit a project called Adapt/Oppose. This project involves dancers and musicians together and a graphic score that organises their interactions. I am considering enlisting some musicians from the Kunst Uni and some of the dancers of the Grazer scene to connect the scenes a bit more.
I actually have three other pieces in mind. One of those is the first piece I performed and choreographed in Graz: Suspension Study for Trisha Brown. It is a quintet of three dancers, Bruna Diniz Alfonso, Shirin Riesel, and myself, together with two outstanding double bass players, Margarethe Mayerhofer-Lischka and Christopher A. Williams.
I would love to establish a group and apply for artistic funds, but first, I will finish my teacher training and apply for support to rework Peaches Grow Wild along a Scenic Route and to create Kinesis Semeion.
Thank you so much for this opportunity and for caring for and supporting dance as a fundamental artistic practice.