Dance beyond dance

The point of view of Dr. Simona Vigo, philosopher and transpersonal counselor on meeting Lorella Formica, colleague and ex-dancer of the Teatro alla Scala in Milan.

Fragility and strength in a dance gesture

How a dance movement can grasp the essence of life has always been a mysterious revelation to me.

Dance is the condensation of an innumerable variety of contents. An extraordinarily complex variety made up of concepts, emotions, private and universal experiences.

Billions of words can be replaced in a flash by a gesture of the body that allows us to grasp the synchrony of events, snatching life from the linear succession of moments and restoring it to a circular eternity: an instant of immortality.

I am amazed and moved by how the body can materialize in an instant, an admirable synthesis of quality.

A body that vibrates with music is always an enigma overflowing with surprises. Because it does without the layering of everyday, material and psychological masks.

A dancing body becomes an archetypal body, essential, without history: a nothing full of movement, saturated with imaginative possibilities.

The dancer's body is like an "empty cortex" ready to welcome and interpret the indications of the transpersonal field that surrounds it. An "emptiness" as the ancient oriental sages understand it: not the annihilation of a personality, on the contrary, the emptiness of the individual ego that leaves room for the manifestation of the transpersonal self in the becoming of being.

Thus, for example, the body of a dancer who wraps around itself in a choreography does not represent the fear or loneliness or beauty of those who dance but becomes Fear, Loneliness, Beauty in an archetypal sense.

Depending on the positions it takes and the images it creates, it becomes those same images. A scream of rage, a stifled cry, the withdrawal in on itself as if it wanted to disappear or the enthusiastic opening to life.

A continuous metamorphosis, almost a transmutation from one matter to another, from heavy to subtle. A human being whose weight seems to concentrate all in contact with the earth and then become rarefied in the air, transfiguring itself into the gentle lightness of a dragonfly.

The fingers of the hands clenched in a fist in an almost convulsive way open and become delicate and harmonious fairy hands. Centripetal and centrifugal body movements alternate, without jerking or jerking or annoying jaggedness.

Harmony always seems to reign in a continuous fluidity in which one captures the passage from pain to pleasure, from tears to laughter, from despair to amazement, from loss to discovery. Like a dance between Eros and Thanatos. Eros: principle of life, centrifugal. Thanatos: principle of death, centripetal.

Eros is expansion, tension towards the outside: a dancer becomes a fairy who opens her body to the softness and welcome of life.

Thanatos is the tendency to regress to a state of total immobility: a dancer curls up on himself, hugging himself as if to go back to being an egg. Life and Death, there is not one without the other.

There is no light without darkness, no movement without stillness. With life we ​​celebrate death, with death we honor life. The ancients said that life is an exercise in death: an eternal passage from movement to stillness and from stillness to movement.

Who dances takes positions in space, static, dynamic and makes that instant sacred: a possibility of accessing those transpersonal spaces of the soul in the cosmic energies are revealed in their blinding nouminosity.

In dance I find the universal alternation of those primordial forces that express the fullness of feminine and masculine qualities as the gods of ancient tradition could embody them. (in Biotransenergetics the reference is to the Orixà of the Afro-Brazilian tradition, archetypal elemental forces).

I see the fierce determination of Ogun (Metal), the dynamic combativeness of Jansà, the devastating fury of Xangò (Fire), the sensual seductiveness of Oxum (Acque dolci), the warm generosity of Iemanjà (Salty waters), the austere spirituality of Oxalà (Christic force), the nourishing force of Nanà (mother earth), the chameleon-like transformation of Oxumaré (rainbow).

I see the bond and the dependence but also the freedom and the lightness, the strength of the muscles contracted in a spasm of rebellion, but also the sensual harmony of surrender and receptivity.

I see the tenacity and stubbornness in holding the object of desire to oneself and I see letting go, opening one's arms and smiling at something useless and indispensable on tiptoe.

I see tears held in all the fibers of the body, the proud look of those who do not give up and the tired look of those who can no longer take it.

But I also see the beauty of the incessant movement of imaginary veils and intoxicating perfumes, the awakening of the senses in spring and the opening of the heart.

In those gestures, the one who "sees" becomes the one who "feels" and the one who "acts" by opening up to the ecstatic experience of contact with the transpersonal dimension of consciousness.

This article was inspired by a comparison with Lorella Ant, ex-Scala dancer and transpersonal counselor, coordinator in charge of UNIT ITI DANCE, who in turn expresses her own vision of dance in this other article: click on ITI DANCE to read it.

Lorella Formica proposes a Cycle of 5 Meetings di Ground Bar, Dance Beyond Dance, for everyonea method of its elaboration during decades of career, teaching and applying the ballet technique, born mainly as a preparatory course for dancers and then developed into a much broader approach to physical movement, choreographic and otherwise, which works in depth on the individual, the body and all levels of his being.

The first meeting will take place on Friday 17 May from 20:30 to 22:30. Click HERE to find out more and sign up.


Leave A Comment

No products in the cart.