Covid-19 becomes dance.
Diary of a Move (DOAM)
Categorie: Culture and creativity -Music and Performing Arts
‘Diary of a Move (DOAM)’ is a project by Masako Matsushita, an Italian-Japanese dancer and choreographer who lives and works in Italy, created thanks to the collaboration with the OperaEstate Festival of Bassano del Grappa.
In ‘DOAM’, the journals of over sixty participants during the spring 2020 lockdown take shape. Masako invites them to record a movement every day, thus creating a sort of archive of gestures, both real and virtual. The archive will then be donated to Civic Museum, thereby becoming the cultural heritage of the town of Bassano del Grappa and choreographic material to recount a collective experience in times of physical distancing. Thus Covid-19 becomes dance, and involves a community of dancers and non-dancers.
How is memory activated if the focus is on movement? How is body memory activated? How is it transmitted? This is central to the project conceived by Masako Matsushita, a dance artist who deals with choreography and movement analysis and who, after sharing a digital and analogical creative process with about sixty citizens, translated the chronicles into a performance on the border between memories, fleeting moments, between public space and private space.
In such an extraordinary and uncertain historical moment we have to draw strength and move on by thinking about when it will all be over: how we could recount our experience, how to remember so as not to forget! – Masako Matsushita
The documentary ‘Diary of a Move’, directed by Matteo Maffesanti and with screenplay by Beatrice Bresolin, tells about Masako Matsushita’s project and the experience of the artists, participants and organizers of DOAM, and was made specifically for italiana on the initiative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation’s Directorate General for Cultural and Economic Promotion and Innovation. It is an OperaEstate Festival Veneto production.
The director Matteo Maffesanti
Director, filmmaker and social theatre operator, he founded the Elevator Bunker association, with which he undertakes participatory video projects in schools and educational centres. In 2009, in collaboration with the University of Verona, he made ‘Cinquanta di questi giorni’ (Fifty of these days), a short film on sexuality and intellectual disabilities. Since 2012, he has worked as a documentarian in a number of international choreographic research projects promoted by OperaEstate Festival Veneto. He has collaborated with choreographers and artistic collectives including Alessandro Sciarroni, winner of the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement for contemporary dance. In 2014 he met the choreographer Silvia Gribaudi, with whom he struck up an ongoing artistic relationship that would transform into choreographic productions and community projects. In 2019 he was the co-author of the show ‘Humana Vergogna’ alongside Silvia Gribaudi, a project of Matera European Capital of Culture 2019 and of the performance ‘Graces’, finalist of the Rete Critica Award 2019. His documentary ’88 Giorni nelle farm Australiane’ (88 days on Australian farms), a look into the new Italian youth migration to Australia, was screened at the Senate of the Italian Republic. He is currently involved in Silvia Gribaudi’s new creation ‘Les Monjour!’, a Zebra production in co-production with Torino Danza, Teatro Stabile theatre of Turin, and Teatro Nazionale theatre, as part of the Corpo Links Cluster project.
The screenwriter Beatrice Bresolin
Dancer, choreographer and teacher. She creates performances for the stage and for urban, natural and museum contexts, as well as for digital. Her works include: ‘Sfero’ (2020), ‘Borderline’ (2019), and her solo ‘Io e l(‘)oro’ (2018), which became a female community project and in 2020 she won the ‘Città Visibili – Tramandare l’Emancipazione di Scenario Pubblico’ tender. In collaboration with other dancers, she creates site-specific works for the Civic Museums of Bassano del Grappa, the Accademia di Brera in Milan and the Botanical Garden of Padua. She performs, among others, at OperaEstate Festival, Pergine Festival, Performa Festival (CH), Fabbrica Europa, with the support of the CSC Centro per la Scena Contemporanea (Centre for the Contemporary Stage) and Zebra. Alongside Matteo Maffesanti she leads the Con-tatto workshop for high school students, and creates dance videos and documentaries on dance. In 2011 she graduated with honours in Languages and Literature at the Ca’ Foscari University (VE), with a thesis entitled ‘GloBodysation’, in which she addresses issues related to the body through literary text.
The production and the festival
OperaEstate Festival Veneto is a multidisciplinary festival of theatre, dance, opera, music and cinema, organized by the Municipality of Bassano del Grappa, in a network with 20 other Municipalities of the Veneto foothills.
Created in 1981 as a festival of opera, it has been run by the Municipality of Bassano del Grappa since 1991. Every year from July to September it brings the best of the languages of live entertainment in the area, also contributing to the development of local culture and providing a broad panorama of national and international artistic languages. The diversity and breadth of the artistic proposal, in fact, is one of its greatest strengths: the aim of the Festival is to bring the public closer to performing art and live entertainment in all its forms.
The project also develops a programme to promote the most relevant places in the area, by setting show projects in villas, palaces, castles, historical parks, and museums which very often also inspire the show projects they host, and which sometimes have also led to the redevelopment of spaces previously abandoned or not adequately exploited.
Cultural planning and support for performing arts continues throughout the year through the CSC Centro per la Scena Contemporanea (Centre for the Contemporary Stage), engaged in promoting and developing the culture of dance, live entertainment and contemporary international languages and in supporting artists, experimentation, innovation and communication of contemporary languages.
