Small Talk
Small Talks enquires the liminal and political edge of the human interaction. Working in between dance and performance, it embodies a choreographic research on the deconstruction of the mimic gesture in conversations. By investigating units of movement in non-verbal language, it develops a score of gestures which manifest themselves in the very act of becoming. The body-movement is sonified then with scraps of discourses, voices and actions belonging to the realm of daily western daily communication (whatsapp vocal messages). Building on the theoretical notion of ‘individuation’ as intended by Gilbert Simondon, the performer inhabits a constant attempt of becoming without reaching a form, but dealing with the endless process of relation with language. In this framework, starting from the analysis of gestures belonging to the vocabulary of conversational mimics, the piece looks at choreography as a discipline of writing bodies, investigating movements of a ‘becoming’ that occurs between intention, movement and pronunciation of actions. It embodies a ‘saying as desire’: a desire of expression that, in the moment of becoming an action, undoes itself. Decolonising gestures from intentions, but rather inhabiting movement as such, the performance plays fragments and scraps of discourse, voices and actions retrieved from daily conversations in whatsapp’s chat archives - a uncatalogued, fragmented/exploded archive of epistolary vocal documents - setting up a human and non-human landscape of living and current archaeology.