PHAIDRA – Collezioni digitali

MARCO D’AGOSTIN is a promising Italian dancer, performer and dance maker who has already received several awards at a young age. In his conversation with dance scholar Susanne Franco, he describes his encounters with Nigel Charnock and Susan Klein as crucial in shaping the foundations of his performance aesthetic and the individuality of his choreographic voice. His relation to memory is very peculiar as memory is a constant strategy for moving the body in every choreographic work that he creates. He considers his choreographies as capsules of time, small scale representations of the world through the artist’s perspective. Marco has systematized the practice of engaging memory as a performative action that unfolds through three levels of time: the one that unravels on stage and the ones that have occurred in our and our ancestors lives. Short-term memory, biographical memory, and imaginative memory, respectively, bring, as he explains, both performer and spectator into the electric state of intense presence and heightened attention, which constitute two highly political premises. The silences between these levels of memory, the oblivions as he exemplifies, become conditions to discover something new about the self, the world and the other.

INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

[00:00:31] Which are your first memories related to dance?
[00:04:25] What kind of dance techniques have you explored?
[00:08:48] Which forms of transmission have you experienced as a dancer?
[00:15:56] Do you apply the principles of transmission that you have experienced as a dancer in your own work?
[00:26:23] Could you elaborate further on the role of autobiographical memory in your creative process?
[00:33:46] Which role does oblivion play in your creative process?
[00:38:48] Could you explain the use of correspondence letters as a tool to connect past, present and future in your work?
[00:44:49] What is political about accessing and performing memory?
[00:52:21] Where do you position your work today?