Students of Insistence ^{2 0 2 2}

Radicalisation of a voice-oriented premise in Ferlin’s deconstruction of logocentric performance concept, hence developing the relationship between movement and language, is visible in his project Students of Insistence, where the author continues his choreo-research in the direction of discovering new forms of stage approach to classical dramatic text. This time he was relying only on the presence of voice, i.e., an audio score taken from the video-documentation of his Staging a Play: Antigone. Somatic images once created by the performer’s body, during an actual staging of the play, accompanied by the sound images of the text/voice/recording, were treated here as an auditive score - as though lingering inside of the specific musical partiture – loosely tuned with fourteen performers, obliged to improvise on it. What looks as re-enactment is actually “scored” as an interesting misperformance, where Antigone’s voice-recording, even though imposed, functions as a framework for different choreographic strategies of re-interpretation. Moreover, although preconditioned by an auditive score, performers of this project inscribe their gestures into the sphere of “action”, but set apart from dancing, acting, or even making something. Antigone’s recording leaves a trace that actually creates an impulse for a gesture. In other words: “What characterizes gesture is that in it nothing is being produced or acted, but rather something is being endured and supported. The gesture, in other words, opens the sphere of ethos as the more proper sphere of that which is human” (Agamben 2000: 57). In this project, which arises from the system of para-quotations in dance and/or theatre practices, gestures of the young performers cannot be subsumed to a pragmatic mode of moving bodies through space, or solving a distance, or, on the other hand, to an aestheticized dance genre of a separate and superior sphere of gesture-movement. On the contrary, gesture is visible only insofar it pre-exists in a specific kind of mediality, stubbornly differing from its content to its own language. Requestioning politics of quotation and representation, this performance offers the new logic of staging, interconnected with imaging (or imagination) in the purest sense of the word. Fourteen performers on the stage pursue their own comprehension of the language coming from the speakers, as though they are playing with their primordial mother tongue, trying not to react on auditive language impulses, but rather to perceive it as zero of the signified. Researching and/or generating choreographic material from this linguistic excess is therefore based more on strategies of quoting or transposing image templates from art history into performance gestures, combined with a detailed structured improvisational score, then on interpreting it as complete performance score, a procedure later to be employed in Ferlin’s Canti di prigionia (Songs from Captivity, 2023) where the auditive score is, again, being pseudo-translated in visual imagery. Performative task of the Students of Insistence project ultimately results with a precise and stratified stage intersemiotics, moreover, transforming dance-like gestures into integuments for creative questions and possibilities, overcharged with complex structures that are neither theatre nor dance. A problem that arises here is of quite obvious nature, of whether they are performing tragedy of just “dancing” on a precise performative score.