Korea National Contemporary Dance Company / Luisa Cortesi
MOUSING

European premiere

Think of that movement made by the fingers on the curved back of the mouse.
A movement always indicating a total search on the surface of digital space, a gesture connecting the thinking body to the virtual web machine.
The movement of the fingers is biologically and anthropologically an exercise: physical, ancestral, universal, biological. Access to the virtual world comes about through the movement of the fingers putting together and taking apart imaginary reality, information, real situations or personal constructions.
With a simple movement of one finger we call up images that have crossed time.
A female figure stages her transformation.
It is a small story. Almost a monologue. We search for images and the images search for us.
Everything we see is impressed on time that continues to flow past.
It is a story on memory that crosses present and past.
Every image has a story, it was born, it has loved, it has suffered and then at times it has seemingly fallen asleep and other images have come. The female figure is an image and converses with the images it evokes.
A rose has always been a rose, a goldfish has always been a goldfish and this figure has always been a figure. This figure on stage, this woman represents all the figures in the story.
Crossing throughout time.
Luisa Cortesi

KNCDC artistic direction: Ahn Aesoon
choreography: Luisa Cortesi
visual art: Massimo Barzagli
dancer: Cha Jin-yeob
light design: Kong Yonwha Music
arrangements: Kim Taekyu Stage
manager: Jo Eunjin
costumes: Choi Insook (el.)
production: KNCDC

Luisa Cortesi
ON THE OTHER HAND

Another story. Again, further on and from the other side. If I show what I have in one hand, what do you suppose I have in the other? On stage, a woman and all the women in the world.
On the other hand as reflection, rethinking and the chance of reaction, as a search for individuality and uniqueness but also for relation and dialogue with the chance of sharing. The body on stage outlines images by drawing space with the reaction of the reflex to the world’s conditioning. A woman’s story.
In this time, in this part of the world a woman seeks her own image in the world and in time.
She relates to her inner world and to everything to which she can gain access in the world, she builds a little story made up of reactions and physical, body reflexes.
A story made of movement. A construction of images in movement, in continual transformation.
The creation of a discourse on identity takes shape through the destruction of every image gained and evoked in the choreographic representation. Action made of logical passages, Pindaric flights, rhythmic development processes, interrupted dynamics, needful repetitions, inconclusive notations, non-linear pathways, hesitations, oscillations. A vulnerable, human image and thus paradoxically eternal and universal. Action arrives like an intuition, therefore clear, complete, instantaneous. The story of a dancing soul manifesting itself and trying to make itself visible through movement.
On the other hand came about after the creation of Mousing, a performance conceived for a Korean dancer interpreted by Jin Yeob Cha.
On the other hand is a consequence and an effect of Mousing yet it is also its re-thinking, reflection and reflex. It stands as a comparison and represents the possibility of dialogue in interpreting and dancing the same choreographic intention.

choreography and interpretation: Luisa Cortesi
light design: Mario Mambro
production: Anghiari Dance Hub

«I wander like a madwoman in search of demented females: creative women giving rein to inspiration, expressing themselves through play on words, colours, images, visions. In town, in theatres, in the books I read, in the few “what’s-on” posters on the glass of bar doors. I am seeking sincerity and deep insight, the calling into play and the calling on stage, secrets and lies. […]
Life flashes from part to part of Luisa’s body: every day’s inevitable energy vibrates there, the reading habit, shopping, tickling fingers, the handiness needful for tidying up. Like a crazy mime she massages her buttocks, she hints at the ways of inexistent, inconsistent, unaware males. She gyrates on herself like a self-tapping screw, Medusa-curls flying, a sensual dancing Maenad, ironically she grabs a breast, she communicates through tableaux vivants like stop-motion frames in a cartoon film. She uses repetition to reiterate, to exalt, to liquefy form and to dissolve herself in the bubble made by a black goldfish. The instinctive, powerful repetition of the gesture is accentuated like a mechanism that has jammed, a magic device unable to find its own solution. Watching it, you cannot look away, you cannot concentrate on one single detail, you perceive the regularity, the rhythm, the beat of the movement in its tiniest parts, those swept into corners and forgotten. […]
Willy nilly, we are under her spell, happy slaves in the pleasure of the vision. That is what I want from these demented females: to succumb to ecstatic enjoyment and, overcome by emotion, to close my eyes and straight away remember».
Fabiana Sargentini, Le perfette giocatrici, «Il Manifesto», 30 April 2015