LOTUS

Credits

by
Project by Nexus Cultural Association in collaboration with the association Unione dei Tamil d'Italia Choreography Simona Bertozzi
with
Lathika Rajkumar, Sukirmitha Suthan, Aarthie Thevarajah, Dixilee Neelan, Kenisha Junius, Lakshana Sathees, Vaishnavy Sivagnanasundaram, Ashivina Kavithasan, Adsaya Asokaratnam, Laxsika Jeyarajan, Shakithya Jothi, Francesca Uthayakumar, Keerthana Kandasamy, Mathumitha Kunareshan, Aayini Ponnuthirai, Achila Metheus Anandarajan
project
Supported by Almadanza – Academy of choreographic arts – Bologna With the contribution of Best- culture makes its space This initiative is part of the project Migrarti Spettacolo 2017 by Mibact- info: www.migrarti.it Lotus is a performance project by the Simona Bertozzi dance company/Nexus, winner of the competition MigrArti 2017, announced by Mibact. The project involves sixteen young dancers from ages 8 to 16 coming from the association Tamil in Italy.

LOTUS

 

The structural base of the project is the creation of a dialogue between the Bharatanatyam dance, a classical Indian dance that represents the Tamil culture, and the Western contemporary dance vocabulary. The study suggests a crossbreeding of these two techniques. The priority of the work is the understanding of the body as a space of action and collective imagination.

The power of gesture lies in the multitude of its shades, in its dynamic flow.

These gestures can product shapes with tension; they draw stories and generate a multitude of trajectories in space. They create a harmony based on fundamental space relations and orientations: geometry, gravity and contact.

The beauty and grace of this type of work is the capacity to produce movement that is not singular, not a story of an individual. This movement is about a journey from one body to another witch creates a plurality that is almost universal.

The Lotus project is about dialogue, an exchange of bodily experience and gesture towards others and the world. The research and practical work is based on both the Bharatanatyam dance technique and the Western contemporary dance vocabulary, with a particular focus on movement composition and its capacity to create images.

In the Bharatanatyam, the mudra hand gestures can describe anything, terrestrial or divine. In the Western contemporary dance, the anatomic use of the body has a multitude of directional possibilities and therefore an unlimited vocabulary of possible events.

In both techniques, the variety of rhythms are essential to create a grammatical order in the construction of the choreography.

For both dance expressions, the composition relates between the scene and the spectator by the principle of resonance.

Lotus is not about one story; it’s about a combination of actions, micro-narrations, gathered together in a horizontal dialogue. These actions are structured together in search of an ideal space that can create a state of grace throughout the heterogeneity of the bodies in the group.

(S.B.)