As it was for the alchemists engaging in their philosophical quest, a collective performance opera, likewise the co-creative process that shapes it, is for those who trust in change. It springs from scanning into the flesh of dream matter to search for spaces of hidden beauty\u2014the fragments of our violated landscapes that stagnate inside and outside the Self to give it a new trajectory, a face, a luminous form.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n A performance opera addresses the overstretched global body searching for a home or that has embarked on a pilgrimage with no end. On the one hand, it is a collective gathering to dance on the margins hand in hand, perform, leave imperceptible traces, and take action because each of us has unique stories to tell. On the other hand, it is a nomadism aiming to structure temporary autonomous zones of co-creation to empower one\u2019s art and openness moving through generative inquiry, thus letting collective imageries and counter-imageries flow and fuse into one another after having clashed and collided so far.<\/span><\/p>\n Also, a performance opera is for those to whom the surreal is familiar\u2014visionary poets, artists and performers driven by the urgency to reconcile with the mystery where all things coexist, for anything that remains alone is just nothing per se. It is for those whose journey through visible and invisible places is ceaseless; for those who listen, seek to express and not to impress, understanding that the concept of success is now surpassed. Eventually, it is for those who take risks to seek new live images, dynamic and transient as they may be.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Our definition of \u2018performance opera\u2019 stems from the etymon of the terms \u2019performance\u2019 and \u2018opera\u2019. The term \u2019performance\u2019 derives from the verb <\/span>perform<\/span><\/i> (c. 1300), meaning: \u2018to carry into effect, fulfil, discharge\u2019, via Anglo-French <\/span>performer<\/span><\/i>, altered (by the influence of Old French <\/span>forme\u00a0 <\/span><\/i>\u2018form,\u2019 from Latin <\/span>forma<\/span><\/i>) from Old French <\/span>parfornir <\/span><\/i>\u2018to do, carry out, finish, accomplish\u2019 from <\/span>par-<\/span><\/i> \u2018completely\u2019 (see<\/span> per-<\/span><\/i>) + <\/span>fornir<\/span><\/i> \u2018to provide\u2019 (see <\/span>furnish<\/span><\/i>).<\/span><\/p>\n The Latin preposition <\/span>per-<\/span><\/i> indicates \u2018passing through a space and extending or spreading over and around.\u2019 As a prefix to a word, it functions as a superlative, complement or continuation.<\/span><\/p>\n The Latin noun <\/span>forma<\/span><\/i> origins from the Greek <\/span>phor\u0113sis<\/span><\/i>, \u2018the act of carrying\u2019, from <\/span>phorein<\/span><\/i>, \u2018to carry, wear\u2019, frequentative of <\/span>pherein,<\/span><\/i> \u2018the action to bring\u2019, in the same way that it means \u2018bearing\u2019, \u2018posture\u2019 and seemingly \u2018aspect\u2019, \u2018resemblance\u2019 and \u2018image\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n The Latin <\/span>for-ma<\/span><\/i> also connects to the Sanskrit root <\/span>-dhar<\/span><\/i>, which means \u2018holding, supporting, containing\u2019, and desinence Sanskrit <\/span>ma<\/span><\/i>. <\/span>Dharma<\/span><\/i> means \u2018stationary, fixed\u2019 (<\/span>in Hinduism<\/span>, the<\/span> eternal law of the cosmos, inherent in the very nature of things).<\/span> However, <\/span>for-ma<\/span><\/i> is a term that responds to the Sanskrit term <\/span>dhar-i-man<\/span><\/i>, meaning \u2018form, shape, figure and image\u2019, and also \u2018the choice and the way to dispose of a matter, whatever it is, in the human labour.\u2019 Therefore, according to the etymological derivations, the meaning of the word \u2018performance\u2019 can be said to be \u2018acting in support of the image.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n The Latin noun <\/span>opera<\/span><\/i> means \u2018labour, work.\u2019 It also implies the idea of <\/span>opus<\/span><\/i> in alchemy. In XVII century Italy, <\/span>opera<\/span><\/i> was defined as \u2018the labour that a person accomplishes in a day\u2019, referring only to \u2018manual labour\u2019, and later to ethical and moral action and intellectual, artistic and scientific labour. <\/span>Io opero<\/span><\/i> (literally, \u2018I operate\u2019 or \u2018I work\u2019) is a more refined Italian expression than the simple <\/span>io lavoro,<\/span><\/i> \u2018I work\u2019. Eventually, according to the etymological definition of the two terms, \u2018performance opera\u2019 can mean \u2018a work that functions in support of the image\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n Still, with the expression \u2018performance opera\u2019, we do not intend to define performances mainly choreographed or structured <\/span>a priori<\/span><\/i> in every part. For us, a performance opera should always remain open to the unpredictability of the process, even though methodologically well-organized.<\/span> When we perform, we create live images, producing meanings.<\/span><\/p>\n Our<\/span> view of performance as an artistic practice is based on the idea that life is an inclusive space to demolish prejudices of all kinds. We perform collaboratively to state that a person is truly free when they recognize that all other people are free as well, echoing the Russian anarchist philosopher <\/span>Mikhail Bakunin, <\/span>who wrote in his unfinished manuscript (published posthumously in 1882) <\/span>God and the State<\/span><\/i>, \u201cEvery enslavement of men is, at the same time, a limit on my own freedom. I am a free man only so far as I recognize the humanity and liberty of all men around me. In respecting their humanity, I respect my own\u201d (1970, xi).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n We perform with our performance collective \u2014 artist friends \u2014 to relate to each other using the performative space to identify a chance to enable us and the audience to do something we could not previously imagine, whose contours are freedom, liberty, empowerment, and love, at last. Thus, we attempt to promote a eutopian gaze and a protopic attitude towards reality by performing.<\/span><\/p>\n Eutopia means \u201cgood place\u201d, from Greek: \u03b5\u1f56, \u2018good\u2019 or \u2018well\u2019, and \u03c4\u03cc\u03c0\u03bf\u03c2, \u2018place\u2019. Protopia is a term coined by Kevin Kelly (2011), founder and executive director of Wired magazine. It clusters the idea of a better future and, therefore, visions of possible, attainable, alternative realities, not that they cannot exist or are static. It is an idea that underscores places where human society comprises people who are not in constant conflict but invite each other to feel free to confront their capacity for transformation, male, female, trans, or anything else. These are places where people can unblock themselves from the impasse caused by recurring patterns of suffering and where everyone can actively work for the well-being of others.<\/span><\/p>\n From this perspective, our performance operas can be read as dreams of social transformation. They do not state that everything will suit everyone or that, conversely, a crisis is irreversible. They focus on possibility as a shared fact to move in mutually desirable directions where everyone\u2019s freedom can increase exponentially. However, like dreams, which are fleeting and unrepeatable, each of our performance operas is <\/span>presented publicly only once.<\/span><\/p>\n Conceptually, we conceive our performance operas driving inspiration from what Theodor <\/span>Adorno says <\/span>about Gustav Mahler\u2019s music\u2014quarrelling against reality, sometimes imitating it, but that becomes protest in the moments it breaks through it. For Adorno, Mahler\u2019s music never mends the fracture between the subject and the object. Still, rather than pretending a conciliation, it prefers to shatter itself into pieces: \u201cThe prevailing ideology of the true, beautiful, and good, with which Mahler\u2019s music first made common cause, is inverted into valid protest\u201d (Adorno, 1992, p. 46).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n For Mahler, the protest is self-conscious\u2014a self-aware poetic act of resistance and revolt, as later <\/span>Andr\u00e9 Gide unfolds in his <\/span>Po\u00e9tique<\/span><\/i> (1949) and Albert Camus in his essay <\/span>The Myth of Sisyphus<\/span><\/i> (1979). <\/span>The aesthetic rupture that a performance opera lets emerge originates from beyond the performers\u2019 intrinsic actions. It seems to intervene from the outside but is also latent in the content of the performance opera itself.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Indeed, we perform collaboratively as an artist duo and with our performance collective to tell about human struggles. Indeed, for us, \u2018performance\u2019 is the restless movement an artist accomplishes to stay alive and find an existential way out. From this stance, any attempt to square the word \u2018performance\u2019 through general definitions is nothing but the straitjacket of that scientific ratio, which has already reduced nature to the simple object of exploitation.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In a performance opera, if one knows how to do something skillfully, they may realize that it can become something else when they venture out of their comfort zone to aside their performance companions. Consequently, performance operas are undoubtedly hybrid works, but for this very reason, they liberate the performers as they do not submit to classically understood artistic canons. On the contrary, they challenge them.<\/span><\/p>\n Hence, <\/span>a performance opera inevitably includes aesthetic errors and ruptures, not only because the different performance techniques that concur to create it sometimes do not harmonize with each other but also because the performers voluntarily de-disciplined their performative languages and styles by contaminating them.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n We understand these errors and ruptures as diversified phenomena that similarly pervade many areas of daily life. In the co-creation processes, we take on errors and ruptures by going beyond their destructive element. We welcome them as opportunities to penetrate the configuration of reality, things, and systems, explore their mechanisms from different perspectives, and translate them into performance.<\/span><\/p>\n For example, the performance operas <\/span>After the Fear<\/span><\/i> (2017), <\/span>Anam Cara\u2014Dwelling Bodies<\/span><\/i> (2018), and <\/span>UnderScars<\/span><\/i> (2022) <\/span>unfolded as they built on sustained encounters of different artistic research and performance practices: performance art, vocal performance, dance, and experiential music. On these occasions, we gather with our performance collective to unveil unconventionally precious experiences of vulnerabilities, hesitations, fragilities, hopes, and the unspoken we carry under our scars, which we try to heal by performing. We blended our performance practices to communicate to the audience that forging a sense of community and collective care among people is essential to responding to present crises effectively.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n VestAndPage. (2017). After the Fear. KPGT, Belgrade (SRB). Photograph by Mina Sarenac. In the image, Verena Stenke.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n We recounted our memories because we could not forget or hide what we had passed through. We made them strike to the point of rupture, eventually deploying them as experiential, transformative matters to respond poetically to today\u2019s emergencies with passion, enthusiasm, and hope\u2014for to lose hope in the time we are living cannot be an option.<\/span><\/p>\n VestAndPage and the Anam Cara Collective. (2018). Anam Cara \u2013 Dwelling Bodies. ECC, Palazzo Mora, Venice (IT). Photograph by Lorenza Cini. In the image, Sara Simeoni and Verena Stenke.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n VestAndPage and the Anam Cara Collective. (2022). UnderScars. ECC, Palazzo Mora, Venice (IT). Photograph by Lorenza Cini. In the image, Enok Ripley is hand-poking Andrea Pagnes\u2019s skin.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n To produce a performance opera, we usually transform the space where we present it (i.e. an old decaying factory in disuse or a Renaissance palazzo) into a dwelling site of interconnected performance installations. We migrate towards each other to find and draw from a common origin\u2014our bodies engaging in acts of recognition and belonging, cutting across the normative and ossified categories of thought. We set free from constraint to foster companionship because an absolute \u201cI\u201d is unthinkable, for the \u201cI\u201d is social.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n When a collective of artists, musicians and performers gather in the same performance space to share their sensory perception of reality and live it as a felt mutual understanding, the mirror of Narcissus falls into pieces: individual selves become relational and call for the collective, having no more reason to determine their singularity.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In so doing, a performance opera is not a representation but an open space where visions become like threads that intersect with one another in an interweaving of lived experiences, destinies, and auto-ethnographies performed without a preconceived design. The audience is invited to be part of an empirical fabric tailored by performance actions, consisting of a performatic crossover of systems and patterns in an ever-changing reconfiguration of the notion of coexistence. We tackle themes such as abuse, discrimination, patriarchy, capitalism, disability, severe diseases, and addiction through time-based interactions and rituals of kinship and togetherness that follow a non-linear narrative. Eventually, our stories blur and harbour into one, castling under the weft of ephemeral scenic compositions woven of existential paths.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n VestAndPage and the Anam Cara Collective. (2022). UnderScars. Photograph by Alexander Harbaugh. In the image, performance ensemble\/tableaux vivant.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n <\/p>\n REFERENCES (in order of citation)<\/b><\/p>\n Bakunin, M. (1970). <\/span>God and the State.<\/span><\/i> Dover.<\/span><\/p>\n Adorno, T. (1996). <\/span>Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy.<\/span><\/i> University of Chicago Press.<\/span><\/p>\n Gide, A. (1949). \u201cPo\u00e9tique.\u201d In: <\/span>Anthologie de la po\u00e9sie fran\u00e7aise. Par Andr\u00e9 Gide.<\/span><\/i> Gallimard.<\/span><\/p>\n Camus, A. (1979). <\/span>The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays.<\/span><\/i> Penguin.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n INSIGHTS<\/b><\/p>\n UnderScars: <\/span>https:\/\/veniceperformancAeart.org\/the-art-week\/under-scars-2022<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n Anam Cara-Dwelling Bodies: <\/span>https:\/\/veniceperformanceart.org\/the-art-week\/body-matters-anam-cara-2018<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n After the Fear: <\/span>https:\/\/www.vest-and-page.de\/home-cycle-2017<\/span><\/a> (scroll down)<\/span><\/p>\n disley, d. (2018) <\/span>Dissecting Anam Cara: In between the senses, togetherness and the quantum<\/span><\/i>. <\/span>https:\/\/veniceperformanceart.org\/the-art-week\/body-matters-anam-cara-2018\/dissecting-anam-cara<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/loie.com.ar\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/1-vestandpage-after-the-fear.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n\n
\n