Body To Be 2023

Body To Be

project Kinkaleri | part of e se ci entrassi dentro? – Pecci Nights | in collaboration with Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, NUB Project Space, OOH-sounds, Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze, spazioK

The new edition of Body To Be explores the performative dimension with three events by international artists, Young Boy Dancing Group, July Weber, Barbara Berti, who build immersive spaces of relationship investigating the physical relationship between singularity and collectivity, human beings and animals, work of art and the body. Created in collaboration with other Tuscan institution interested in contemporary languages, NUB Project Space, OOH-sounds and Pecci Centre, the program offers a series of artistic paths with which to experiment new forms of sharing the perceptive experience of bodies, enriched by two workshops: one dedicated to curatorship in the performance for the students of the Academy of Fine Arts of Florence, the other, public, investigating the interspecies relations.

October 13, 2023, h 22.00 – Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato
Young Boy Dancing Group, 2023
performers Aldo Filardo, He Sun, Kobramulata, Manuel Scheiwiller, Nica Roses, Maria Metsalu | with the support of Pro Helvetia, Fondazione svizzera per la cultura | with the founding of Regione Toscana as part of Toscanaincontemporanea 2023

Young Boy Dancing Group, 2023 is the performance that the group creates specifically for the spaces of Centro Pecci Center after a short residency. YBDG’s creations are transgressive, raw, visceral, queer and blend freely with countercultural forms of dance and club culture, questioning originality and authorship. The collective’s events critically address digital culture, gender performance and methods of artistic production, generating situations where the audience and the group share a time of immersion and freedom.

November 24, 2023, h 21.00 – Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato
July Weber, Duets with abstraction (Italian premiere)
performance/costumes: July Weber | music/lightsi: Emilio Cordero Checa | with the founding of Regione Toscana as part of Toscanaincontemporanea 2023

Duets with abstraction is a performance designed for museum spaces and their collections. On this occasion at Centro Pecci, July Weber collaborates with the musician Emilio Cordero Checa to develop dances in dialogue with the work of Jannis Kounellis (Senza titolo), part of the collection. As a result of a several-day residency in the museum spaces, the chorographical work presents itself as a physical, somatic and sensual examination of the concept of abstraction in the context of the visual arts. The performance creates an environment in which the formality of abstraction collides with an organic body. The impossibility of this fusion creates frictional heat, which becomes the engine of the dance. An inexhaustible energy grows from the never-satisfied longing for union with the work of art.

December 15, 2023, h 21.00 – Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato
Barbara Berti, DOGOD The situation
concept, choreography, performance: Barbara Berti | performer: Claudia Tomasi, Lilli, Aimee, Barbara Berti & Chichina

DOGOD The Situation takes on the unpredictable as its statute, that insecure threshold in which the continuous destruction and construction of a place is relational and empathetic. Physicality is a radar, a language to communicate spatially, an expression of a territory and not of identity. The performance brings together humans and dogs in an environment where participants navigate instantaneous and interactive choreographic flows. The performers map and structure space through intimate acts of presence, developing sensory listening systems and blurring the lines between species. The performative action is part of Barbara Berti’s interspecies research in which sensorial and physical contact with animals creates a sort of interpenetration of the other. The practice called “The body of feeling” becomes a tool for questioning our way of perceiving, experiencing and thinking about our relationship with the world.

December 14 – 16, 2023 – spaziok, Prato
Dance of Being
Public workshop for dogs, owners, performers and people of all abilities conducted by Barbara Berti

Dance of Being is a workshop open to all who want to approach interspecies contact and language, exploring the presence of dogs within a group from a physical, sensorial and vibrational point of view. Participants are involved in a subtle listening environment, to work with attention and intersubjectivity to a perspective of inclusion. The practice is based on bodily presence, tactile attention, movement and spoken language which generate possibilities, through which the boundary between the self and the other blurs. A space where non-human animals and human animals could meet in a shared and cohabiting reciprocity of knowledge and exchange.isa e coabitativa di conoscenza e scambio.