traveling performance site specific / (Meeting point Stazione dell’Arte, Ulassai).
Where do we start? The muscles tense. One leg is the pillar that supports the upright body. Between heaven and earth. The other is a pendulum that swings from behind. The heel touches the ground. All the weight of the body rolls forward on the forefoot. The big toe takes off, and behold, the weight of the body in delicate balance, shifts again. The legs take turns. It starts with a step, then another, and another, adding up like light beats on a drum, forming a rhythm: the rhythm of walking.
The theme of the performance produced by Campsirago Residenza is walking: walking in the evolution of human history and walking in relation to the present time and contemporary society. The study started from a twenty-year practice and a fundamental text: The History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit, the main attempt to systematically reconstruct the role of walking in Western civilization and culture.
The great anthropologist Andrè Leroi-Gourhan argued that man became man when he freed his hands and mouth from the constraints of the four supports. He essentially became a man when he learned to walk, making the upright position substantial. For Leroi-Gourhan, more than a rational animal, more than a featherless biped, man is the walking being par excellence. “The history of humanity begins with the feet […]. Humanity has been on the move for six million years. In many ways we are sapiens thanks to the ability to move over long distances that has taken us far, to explore our limits from time to time, to cross and incorporate landscapes and then transform them, to ponder our adaptive capacities in ever new environments, to shape a brain that owes its uniqueness to plasticity and flexibility.”
Aristotle had already defined walking as what defines and distinguishes humanity. Being bipedal is not an accidental characteristic, but an essential element of man.
During the experience on the move we will deal with the theme of poetic wandering, of the road as a place of perception of danger, the practice of pilgrimages, marches, demonstrations, pride, to finally arrive at an encounter with the world of meditation and realignment, in the reconnection with one’s own corporeal and spiritual SELF.
