REBECCA MARTA D’ANDREA
I dance to go beyond my sense of self as a separate entity.
I dance to recognize the vast belonging I have to homeland.
Home as ‘cosmic relationship’.
Homeland as a state of mind, as much as a landscape.
Where I can land at any time.
Inner landing through the pathways of Imagination.
Artist Statement
I am a movement artist interested in the role of perception in shaping and being shaped by the ongoing dialogue between our inner and outer landscape
Photo © Shinigami/Vendemini
“I land inside myself, welcoming
archetypal energies within and without.
The more subtle and the more material dimension meet in the realm of inner and outer touch, as ancestral, primordial, yet present memories.
I flow into a continuous dissolution of all expectations,
to engage in a direct encounter with reality and let myself be surprised by its unfolding”
(Diaro di Bordo 2022)
Photo ©Andrea Macchia.
Photo© Shinigami/Vendemini
My research practice is rooted in the field of ecosomatics. In particular I am interested in how an ecosomatic practice can reveal deeper insights and bridge what we know about the human-nature relationship, fostering the development of a creatively driven eco-awareness that decentres the human experience and foregrounds nature.
I like to devise creative ways to dismantle disfunctional social structures, while building alternatives and shift consciousness by enabling an understanding that is grounded in the body. I am interested to engage in processes to awaken a “creative state of mind” as defined by scientist David Bohm (On Creativity,1995) as a way of opening a creative dialogue with our environment that can implement ‘new’ perspectives and trigger new processes of knowing and communicating knowledge, beyond habituated patterns of understanding. I see art and science as complementary in this sense, as in dialogue they can mutually support each other combining a more intuitive with a more rational and matter of fact approach to knowledge and understanding.
I have developed my practice-based artistic research through the use of video, writing, drawing, moving, performing labbing, often in collaboration with other artists. I am particularly interested to investigate how creativity can unravel cultural patterns embedded in our way of relating to space. If the space that lives outside of us, lives also inside of us, how can we truly engage in a sustainable dialogue with it ? Is our inner health in mutual relationship with the health of our planet? How can I better understand this dynamic interaction?
I am inspired by the words of choregrapher Hubert Godard who defines the embodiment of space as a ‘gradient of perspective’ which is filtered by our personal and cultural history, and that produces a series of expectations, that can be shifted and repatterned through creativity.
“Where our mind travels in the body, there it generates movement” (Nita Little 2022, Relational Intelligence Online Classes)
I have experience in a variety of contexts working with children, adults, professionals, and people with learning disabilities. I am really interested in how creativity can bridge gaps in communication and promote integration between different languages.
Relationship with the audience,examples of previous work
My first choreographic practice after graduation in 2006 started by investigating the audience-performer relationship in improvised urban perfomance. I have always been very interested in what triggers our attention, and where audience and performer meet on a mutual ground of choice. I later developed partecipatory art installations focussed on engaging the public in actively reimagining and perceving their environment through embodying memories, sounds and stimuli from the environment.
In ‘Punti di Svista’ (Lago Film Fest 2011) I created an interactive performance where visitors to the Festival could be taken on a tour to public spaces through a sensorial exploration with hidden choreographies immersed in the urbanscape. In 2011 I have investigated the concept of Void in Quantum physics as a starting point for improvisation, the documentation of the three months residency has been written as a online blog, to be available as resource for other practioners.My focus has been how the process in its unfolding could create transformative dialogues, both through the creation of a performative event and its unfolding as research. Later in 2015 In ‘Body as a Context for Reconnection’ for Reconnecting Bristol I have produced a written map of people’s memories of sounds of abandoned areas of the city of Bristol, which was presented both as an interactive installation and as a performance. In (Intrecci, Lago PulsArt,Lago Film Festival,2015) I worked with the inhabitants of Lago (TV) to map the public areas of the town with memories of their childhood.This became an installation as well as an interactive performance, where the audience was guided on a tour betweeen past,present and future. I conducted a series of ‘Kinaesthetic Body Walks (Open Senses festival, London, 2016-Fun Palaces Bristol) exploring the act of walking as a way of reorienting the collective body in the cityscape, and repercieve our outerspace through enhancing and diminishing some of our sensorial patterns. Other interactions with public spaces where through the MA project Tracing Invisible Identities (London ,2016); Stanza Della memoria (Installation,Mapping Memories of the city,Here4,Cavallerizza Irreale ,2019), and during the site specific project Dreamtime (Mutonia wasteland, Sant’Arcangelo di Romagna,Bussana Vecchia(Dream time Project,2020).
During my MA studies in Creative Practice (Trinity Laban,London, 2014-2016) I have been investigating how the body’s archive read and constantly resonates with the surroundings through cultural and personal patterns of understandings.I looked into practices like Tibetan Dream Yoga (2002), Gendlin’s Focussing technique (2003) and Jung’s Active Imagination, as structured ways of physicalizing and receiving a feedback from inner sensations to access a unified field of attention between inner and outer worlds, identified as “transcendent function” (Wasson in Sankary,2012,p.3). From these I developed three main strategies for somatic enquiry into the body and its environment, a ‘Drawing into Movement’ practice, a Silent Walking Practice (Kinaestetic Walks)and a movement and voice exploration(Liminal Body),which I currently teach. In particular I am interested in how the body, can meet the molecularity of the information contained in space-time, to give life to ways of reading, interpreting and communicating free from rational schemes and closer to the immediacy of the language of nature. “Dance is a constant relationship of change that is bodily felt and which is tracked by our nervous system.By remaining present to the constant dialogue between our inner and outer environment, we can create transformation.” I have noticed that by re-establishing a primordial connection with that “magical dialogue with the physical world from which our culture carves us out of and then bids us forget” (Nelson, 2003, Before Your Eyes) the individual and collective body can reorient itself towards an organic flow of communication with its context. Recognizing that every thought, emotion and feeling is a structural pattern that generates movement impulses, I have been looking for ways to make tangible the dynamic interaction between inner and outer perception.
About the Drawing and Walking practice
Silent walking through space is an act of receptive listening, where the inner landscape has the possibility to connect deeply and merge with the environment that surrounds it, be it urban or natural, indoors or outdoors, in a neutral, non-interpretive, welcoming way.
Each step is a continuous fall and landing that supports the creation of a direction, whose goal is outlined in the path itself. Between moments of contemplation and encounter-exchange with the surrounding environment, the body organically expresses its identity.
So is the graphic sign, which perceived as a journey, becomes movement imprinted on paper.
I use color and graphic sign to read the interiority of the body in real time, tracing a score, not necessarily linear.
The trace of auditory, visual and tactile sensations is reworked through a mapping of resonances, giving new life to the sensory memories encountered in the act of walking and transforming them into movement.
I identified in the use of color and graphic sign a way to give shape to the intagibility of body sensations, through a pre-verbal language, a writing that comes from the body.
Somatization and Embodiment
In my movement pratice I refer to Authentic Movement®, Body Mind Centering ® and Contact Improvisation as startegies into body awareness.embodiment and somatization.
Every sensory memory carries information, which the kinesthetic sense perceives as vibratory density.
By re-learning to pay attention to these subtle energies, the body regains the ability to read matter at the molecular level through a resonance process, which allows it to interact and renegotiate flexibility within patterns of understanding, otherwise ‘crystallized’ by rationality for a natural process of identification and habit.
In this path I am interested in paying attention to the space between “sensing” and “making sense” (Lisa Nelson, Before Your Eyes, 2003) as a space of transformation, which allows us to “re-shape” our sense of reality and give it a new voice.
During my practice I rely on ways of creating knowledge and understanding through ‘Cooperative Enquiry’
referring to John Heron’s approachas a ‘Cooperative Inquiry’: a research based on developing understanding and action through a creative collaborative development of knowledge. Heron lists four ways of knowing that needs to be congruent to form new understandings:Experiential Knowing, Presentational knowing,Propositional knowing and Practical Knowing.”Our knowing needs to be grounded in our experience,expressed through our stories and images,understood through theories which make sense to us,and expressed in worth while action in our lives.This kind of knowing is said to create transformation not only in our knowledge but also in our lifes”(Heron&Reason, chapter 16,1980)
Examples form my work: Pulse-video work:Pulse – Rebecca Marta D’Andrea (wordpress.com)Tracing Invisibible Identites -process documentation:Tracing Invisible Identities- the process – Rebecca Marta D’Andrea (wordpress.com)
Liminal Body-workshop documentation:Photo Gallery Festival delle Arti, Giudecca, Venice, September 2019 – Rebecca Marta D’Andrea (wordpress.com)
The Void-research process blog documentation:Research Into the Unknown-The Void 2011 – Rebecca Marta D’Andrea (wordpress.com)
Mutonia Wasteland-photographic collaboration: https://rebeccamartadandrea.wordpress.com/2021/02/16/dreamtime-in-mutonia-wasteland/
Dreamtime in MUTONIA – Rebecca Marta D’Andrea (wordpress.com)
Kinaesthetic Walks-video documentation: https://rebeccamartadandrea.wordpress.com/2023/10/04/passeggiate-cinestetichekinaesthetic-body-walks/
Kinaesthetic Body Walks @Fun Palaces Bristol Documentation – Rebecca Marta D’Andrea (wordpress.com)
Rebecca Marta D'Andrea 