UGO
Ugo is a collective project aimed at stimulating the audience’s perception through a combination of dance, drawing, music and text. It goes without saying that any performance will stimulate an audience’s perception, since a performance does not exist without being perceived. Our goal is to make the audience conscious of its perception and of the different ways it can interpret and be touched by the work. We have brought together four different artistic mediums, each stamped with the distinctive character of its maker, to ask the audience to find the links we have worked on creating. Ugo is an open invitation to the audience’s senses and, particularly, to its interpretation.
Initially, those of us involved in the project agreed on a series of key words that would guide our work with perception. We then proceeded to work separately for several months – writing, drawing, dancing and composing. In early November 2006, we came together in Berlin to share the material we had developed individually. It was immediately evident that our greatest challenge would be to find the way our four elements could fit together, to find a balance in which the audience could make its own path but sense that each element belonged. We were fascinated to discover that each of us could arrive with a completely different response to the same concept and set of key words. As became clear in the course of structured improvisations, our differences were not simply due to the variety of media we employed, but to our distinctive artistic personalities. The next step of the work involved finding the unity in our independent approaches, the way to be true to our individual visions while shifting away from fragmentation towards the collective vision.
Ugo is not being performed on a stage or in a typical theater space. The audience is guided into the space by a structure of drawings placed on the floor while the dancer performs a structured improvisation based on physical qualities exploring perception of space and linking rhythmically and energetically to the pre-recorded text and music. The text features a simple narrative but also fuses with the sound design to function as pure sound.
Concept, choreography and dance: Raffaella Galdi
Sound composition: Emre Sevindik
Light design: Lutz Deppe and Tomek Ness
Text and voice: Nicholas Elliott
Drawings: Floriano Secciani
Costume: Christophe Linérè
Produced by Raffaella Galdi, artblau Tanzwerkstatt Braunschweig in collaboration with Tanztage Festival Berlin.
Financial support from the Italian Institution of Culture in Berlin.
Premier: 12th January 2007, Sophiensaelle, Berlin, as part of the Tanztage Festival 2007.
Dance Performance Installation - 2007 - 40 minutes
