Mariagiulia Serantoni & Andrea Parolin
Colère (and care) – a counterfigure named hope

Through a collaboration of the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, the Goethe-Institut Montreal and fabrik Potsdam – Internationales Zentrum für Tanz und Bewegungskunst, artists Mariagiulia Serantoni and Andrea Parolin have received a residency in the studios of Circuit-Est centre chorégraphique. This residency allows them to develop further their artistic relationship and explore new avenues of creative collaboration. Mariagiulia and Andrea talk here about their work and their experience in Montreal.

By Caroline Gagnon

Could you say something about your background, how you came to dance and sound? And what decided you to establish yourselves in Germany?

Mariagiulia: After trying out different sports, my mother enrolled me in a small dance school in Bologna. I was nine years old at the time. I fell in love with dance and have never stopped dancing since. I studied for three years at the Paolo Grassi School of Drama for Performing Arts in Milan. Later, while starting to work as a dancer in Milan, I attended workshops in different European cities and spent long periods of time in Berlin, taking classes and enjoying the cultural life. There I saw things that were more in line with my interests: improvisation, completely wild performances that stayed in my mind for a long time, so I decided to move to Berlin, where I first worked as a dancer, and then began creating my own works. The first is called Eutropia and is inspired by Italo Calvino's book Invisible Cities. In it, I combine movement and sound. I then enrolled in a master's program in choreography and research in Montpellier, to then return to Berlin. It was during this period that I began to develop my practice of the electric body.

Andrea: I have always been interested in technology and when I was eleven, I started taking music lessons, classic guitar. I taught myself a lot, until I started studying sound and video engineering in a school of cinema in Milan. With a particular interest in sound design. It was during this period that I met Mariagiulia. When I moved to Berlin, I started working as a sound technician, fascinated by the amount of opportunities and possibilities that the city had to offer. I found a great environment to explore my creativity with sound, which I didn’t have in Milan.

An anger, transmitted from mother to daughter

For the last couple of years, you have been working on a practice for body, voice, and sound that you call « the electric body ». The project you are be working on during the residency has the working title « Colère (and care) - a counterfigure named hope ». Could you tell us more about this project and how the practice of the electric body will help you explore this theme ?

Mariagiulia: The idea for this project was born from a feeling, an instinct: that my anger had been passed down to me by my mother, and perhaps to her by hers—an anger, transmitted from mother to daughter. In the electric body practice, vibrating the body creates energy. This energy stirs up emotions, and those emotions generate even more energy. By exploring these cycles several times, the emotions can change and transform. In this case, this process will allow me to explore anger and transform it into something else, maybe care and hope.

The work on the electric body brought me to create a technique called AGiTA, which means two things in Italian: shake! and to be moved upon. Oscillations and tremors invade the body and allow it to express emotions through voice and movement. The idea in my current project is not so much to represent anger as such, but to create an evocative and transporting landscape where anger, care and hope can take root.

Here are some examples of the materials I work with. I interviewed my mother, and our conversation helped me identify two types of anger: volcanic anger and suppressed anger, which, as my mother so aptly puts it, creates silence in the kitchen.
An important source of inspiration for this project was Marina Valcarenghi's book L'aggressività femminile, published by Bruno Mondadori. In it, the author compares aggressivity to the instinct for self-defense, which has been suppressed for centuries in women by patriarchal society. By regaining their right to aggressivity, and therefore to self-defense, women regain their self-esteem. Another highly inspiring book is Rage Becomes Her by Soraya Chemaly especially for understanding how much rage and expressions of rage are ruled by gender-based stereotypes.

The work of visual artist Germaine Richer also has a powerful appeal for me. Both strong and fragile, her sculptures are, in my opinion, the perfect embodiment of the electric body. And I use them to teach the body to enter into the figures of others. Unlike AGiTA, which was an entirely personal process where I was confronted with myself, this work aims to incorporate the stories of anger from other women across different generations and this is why it is important to me at this stage to work with “someonelse’s figures”.

Based on these sources of inspiration, I want to create a corpus of movements and vocal expressions that the electric body will compose and decompose. Andrea: In this context, we got inspired from the way an outburst of rage is triggered. We decided to work with a contact microphone on the floor, that allows the body to trigger pre-recorded sounds, that I eventually transform and mix with Mariagiulia’s voice to create certain atmospheres that are always strictly connected with the energetic status of the body. It is important to balance the different sounds and keep an equal and reactive interplay between Mariagiulia and myself. This we do by listening to each other rather than instructing the movement with musical patterns.

Colère and care are notions we do not automatically associate with one another. But there must be a link between them. Could you tell us more about it?

The word “care” comes from the Old English “caru,” which meant “sorrow, anxiety, grief.” Today, it refers more to “attention, concern.” By paying attention to “colère” (anger), we allow it to be expressed and we value the people behind that anger. ‘Care’ will be the link between anger and the last theme addressed in this project, namely the notion of “hope.”

The project is in its initial phase. Could you tell us more about the research you have been doing so far in Montreal?

In addition to being able to focus on this project at the Circuit-Est centre chorégraphique studios, we find additional sources of inspiration here. Since our arrival, we have had the opportunity to meet musicians and composers in the field of new music, visit the Indigenous Voices of Today exhibition at the McCord Stewart Museum, and attend an evening of breakdance battles as part of the J.O.A.T. international street dance festival. We found some of the themes we are exploring in our project reflected in this event.

The contemporary dance season will soon begin, and we are eager to discover the work of local artists. The Grande Bibliothèque is also an inexhaustible source of information. We were able to obtain memberships for the duration of our stay and are taking full advantage of the services offered there. In the end, all these possibilities fuel our research work!