PHAIDRA – Digital collections

Looking back at the key moments of his eclectic choreographic training, MICHELE DI STEFANO in his interview to ALESSANDRA SINI during the first lockdown in Italy, speaks about the insights into his practice, the encounters and the experimentations that prompted him to develop his choreographic practice since the ‘90s. The emergence of a process-based performance event is a recurring characteristic of Di Stefano’s choreographic work who claims that transmission is a real-time creative process determined by the encounter with the performer. In this process, body knowledge is created and shared as part of a choreographic (eco)system. When asked to reflect on memory and archive, the choreographer reveals his lack of interest in the organization and systematization of the traces of his artistic practice. He underlines that accessing his earlier choreographic creations depends on the possibility of the re-actualisation of the premises that generated it and on what that he defines as “temperatures” created in time rather than on the repetition of the original choreographic gesture. [00:00:18] What is your first personal memory linked to dance that informed your choreographic poetics?

INTERVIEW QUESTIONS:
[00:06:42] When did you start defining yourself as a choreographer?
[00:13:27] During your practice of dance transmission, how do you relate to the memory of your training experience?
[00:22:02] What do you think you have forgotten or lost? Is there anything you would like to forget about your training experience?
[00:27:13] What kind of tools do you use when you work on your choreographic projects?
[00:37:16] What kind of personal memories do the words choreography and pedagogy bring to your mind?
[00:40:04] What kind of knowledge do you hold in your body? Would you like to let go of something?
[00:47:04] When you rework a choreography, what is the relationship between transmission and memory? What tools do you use to transmit your project?
[00:58:39] Do you think you have built your own repertory and what do you mean by repertory?
[01:03:52] Where do you place your work and what are the influences and affinities that you think are most recognizable?
[01:07:55] How does your work integrate the history and memory of dance?
[01:12:39] Do you differentiate dance history from the memory of dance?
[01:13:57] What is your relationship with memory conservation: Have you organised an archive of your creative process?
[01:18:17] How would you draw the memory map of contemporary dance right now?
[01:20:41] How does the presence of the spectator fit into your creative process?
[01:23:44] How do you imagine the possible continuation of the memory of your work?