BEFORE THE NAME

Performance by Francesca Banchelli
With Jonathan Lahey Dronsfield, Pier Luigi Tazzi, Emiliano Zelada

Dancers: 2

 Duration: 30 min

Before the name is a live performance/shooting inspired by La danse comme métaphore de la pensée (Dance as a Metaphor for Thought), part of the “Handbook of Inaesthetics”, written by the French philosopher Alain Badiou - Alberto Toscano (trans.), Stanford University Press, 2005. Badiou’s presence/absence in Francesca Banchelli’s performance embodies the desire to confront ourselves with the thought of one of the great living philosophers through dance. Via the intensity of movement, sound and words, the happening/event questions the meaning of a collective action, by creating a minimal multilayered connection between artists, thinkers and the public.

Badiou’s thoughts resonate in the form of an echo in the empty space, along with the live music of artist and composer Emiliano Zelada, and the experience of young dancers from different backgrounds responding to the philosopher’s words. They will occupy the space with their movements, trying to reach their own understanding of density levels, engaged with Badiou’s figure. The symmetrical binomial produced by the philosopher’s appearance/disappearance, and the dancers’ visual strength formed by movement and mind, will be cut by a non-narrative perspective introduced and lead by the influential Italian art critic and curator Pier Luigi Tazzi, with the kind help of Kornkrit Jainpinidnan. His presence opens the boundaries of the performance’s territory, transforming it into direct actions. The focus on “dance as metaphor for thought” departs its starting point, only to collide with a real entourage, connected to life and experience. Dance, as a concept, is now dissolved into movement, travel, life, debris, and powerful objects, infinite images. The collective nature of the performance will be ignited by the interventions of artist-philosopher Jonathan Lahey Dronsfield, interacting with Badiou’s words, thus establishing a dialogue in time creating a resonance in the space.

A minimal thread of variants connected to Badiou’s theory will open up the performance territory to one of a debate. The public can affect this tension, modifying the making of the performative territory, following or interfering with the course of its process, carrying it on until the moment when it might be transformed into an “event”. Alain Badiou is a philosopher who has clearly exposed the potentiality of the concept of an “event”, and its importance in an individual’s awareness. This necessity goes beyond art’s and philosophy’s boundaries, touching a newer generation’s desire to regain individual responses and shared languages. Movements, conjectured to intensity of thought and music will be filmed to create a statement connecting artistic practice with philosophy, while engaging with life’s consistency.