Butoh dance: Kea Tonetti
live music: Tivitavi, with songs by Goran Bregović
duration time: 45’
Wu is a sound that reminds us the vibration of the Earth. In Chinese, Wu is emptiness, while Wu Wei is the way of acting without acting, letting the nature of things and our nature flow, so that it can be shaped in the best possible way, finding harmony in the relation to the Universe. Healers of the spirit capable of making rain, the Wu were shamans of ancient China who danced dressed in bird feathers and rattles. A legacy left to us by the Wu is the Chinese art of acupuncture, dowsing, and meditation.
Wu, the “dancer,” is a traveler who crosses space and opens inner places, tracing paths and creating signs, furrows that awaken ancient memories, timeless archetypes. Through dance, she celebrates the loving union of heaven and earth, receiving the earth’s strength, its depths, and its transformative energy, which destroys in order to recreate. She dances the demons away, becoming the purification and fertility of water. Like a nomad, she migrates: her home is her body, she retraces ancient roads and subtle energy lines, weaves fibers, traces in the void. In her actions, Wu forms her inner maps, meeting points, crossroads, or places to stop and rest, marking the earth to form memory. Traces of Wu remain in the desire to fly and migrate in each of us.
Wu was presented at: Kulturraum Rosenhof Festival, Tegernau – GER (2010), where the performance was staged among the ruins of the burned theater; Trace Becoming Art, Perypezye Urbane, Studio 28, Milan (2010); PAF Performing Art Festival, Meina (NO) – IT (2011).
Photos by Gabriele Seidel, Alessandro Ceccarelli, Andrea Rizzo, Ruggero Caverni.