RESEARCH NOTES

Homing ends the Choreographic Novel trilogy, co-produced by HangartFest – Festival di Danza Contemporanea – Pesaro between 2018 and 2020.

The topic of inquiry is the concept of migration as ‘going through’ from a point to another, both internally (from wonder to joy) and externally (from your home’s kitchen to Trieste’s beach). The chosen language is contemporary dance: the art of the body involving verbal, sign, and sound gestures.

How do whales, butterflies, birds, and fish orient themselves? How do they manage to return, every year, to the exact place where they were born? And, above all, why do they migrate?

These and other questions have been the object of the endless inquiring enterprise of men’s curious nature. Already in the 4th century B.C., Aristotle noticed that swallows disappeared in winter and came back in spring. Despite the sagacity displayed by his Historia Animalium, he was not really able to solve the mystery. (In fact, he never got even close to the truth). In Aristotle’s time, one widespread opinion was that birds fly up to the moon and come back to Earth in the spring. Others believed that, after alighting among the leafy branches, when leaves fall off, birds lose their feathers and become branches themselves.The origin of migrations is lost in the mists of time. Many migrators travel alone or in small groups. The alternation of seasons, the changing duration of daylight, and hormonal stimuli help the migrators know when it is time to leave. But they also know how to get to their destination. This process of going back home through unknown territories is called HOMING. Migrators find their way by memorizing some particular features—smell, position in the earth’s magnetic field, visually available elements—that mark out their home.

Each of us has a home inside, an intimate one, each of us in a different place. As if driven by a magnetic force, everyone is attracted to a place of their own, has this inner call but does not know what it exactly is. It may be the place where one is born, but it is not always the case. Not for me. It also has to do with dying, not just with living. And sometimes we get lost, we get stuck; we are lost and adrift when the magnetic field is absent. Usually, in solitude. It does not take much to lose ourselves, but it does not take much to find ourselves either. Birds, unlike us, leave when they need to go and come back when it is time to return. Birds do not ask questions. If homing was just looking around and understanding (or knowing) where to go (or return), everything would be fine. The fact is that departure sometimes also carries complicated implications, such as separation, leaving the loved ones, going towards the unknown, and so on. It is easier to deal with all this when you are young, but it gets more complicated as time goes by. Flying is strenuous…

What does it mean for me to go back home? How many homes do I have? Which inner and outer routes will I have to go through to find a known space? What will be my next destination? How will I go through the theme of this work in light of COVID-19?

Throughout this ‘Homing’ process, I will be followed by Daniela Bestetti, a lighting designer with whom I have been working on various creations since 2016. She writes: “Home can be a place where you feel comfortable or uncomfortable, where you are free to be yourself or where you can hide and disappear; an intimate space or an ideal place; a heap of memories, a value to escape from. Lighting design will focus on the creation of different varieties of space to sense various types of relationships with the place: cold and warm areas, narrow and wide spaces, dark and bright spaces, conceived with conventional and unconventional projectors.Direction, intensity, and color temperature are the foundation of the lighting research for Homing.” Her work will be complemented by Stefano Braganolo, video and audio producer. The musician Watta Walter Sguazzin (who graduated from Academy of Music Lizard of Padua. Barklee College of Music – Music Production Ableton Certified Trainer), will take care of music manipulation.