Concept, choreography: Francesco Scavetta
Created in collaboration with the dancers: Carl Aquilizan, Robin Haghi, Anika Edström Kawaji, Gry Kipperberg, Thomas Vantuycom
Music and sound design: Kim Myhr
Dramaturge: Sasa Bozic
Scenography: Francesco Scavetta, Luciano Goizueta
Light design: Stefano Stacchini
Costume design: Maren Saedi
Costume assistant: Mari Ballangrud
Carpenter: Anders Hamre
Production: Wee
Co-production: Dansens Hus Oslo, Vitlycke-Centre for Performing Arts
Supported by: Arts Council Norway, Fond for lyd og bilde, Fund for Performing Artists, Oslo Kommune
“Home is where one start from”. T.S. Eliot
“Home Movie” deals with our emotional responses to the connotation of “home” as a place of warmth, comfort and affection. Home as a metaphor for identity, of domestic bliss, conflicts and routines. The place where to welcome and where to close the door and be by ourselves. Where we feel safe and where dishes can pile up. The utopian emotional location we recollect with nostalgia. When talking about home, we often regress to childhood and refer to the place we grew up.
In its most simplified gesture, the home is a microcosm of the world where are constantly traced thresholds and broken boundaries.
The audience in this project is more exposed, and present, than in other performances. “Home Movie” in a sort of rite of passage invites the public to explore and become familiar with the performing space, that construct and deconstructs rooms within the room. The gate, the corridor, the inner walls of the house, the blueprint, the maquette; its rooms continuously keep suggesting narratives and associations. And the audience, by locating, and relocating themselves, through proximity and changes of view point, might shift between being the guests at some weird event, or a bizarre family party, or the witnesses of recollection of private fictional memories. The five dancers on stage rediscover daily rituals embodying a physical cartography that keeps transforming in front of our eyes: the sense of ‘everyday’ experienced during a lifetime. The gesture of welcoming becomes an iconic forgotten language, connecting and rejecting at the same time, in a short circuit of contradictions. And the exploration of the architecture of the space itself, exposes different ways of becoming familiar with that environment, with each other and with the audience.
The image of the house becomes the topography of our intimate being: people need houses in order to dream, in order to imagine. A politic of the gaze, contra posed to the impression of the glance: epiphanic and restless. “Home Movie” is calling for understanding of a house as universe of intimacy and immensity.
The collection “Pictures from Home” by photographer Larry Sultan has been a key source of inspiration. Pictures from Home collects an accumulation of snapshots of his parents, as part of a family album that date from 1982 to 1992. While documenting a family life, as a collection, the images evoke critical issues of aging and relationships. It’s an intimate record of everyday events taking place “at home”. The camera function as the family’s primary instrument of self-representation by which, apparently, memory perpetuates. The images produced helps also in defining the term “family” and his cultural myth, attesting a common desire for a tale of domestic happiness. The images give just the illusion of being a simple transcription of the real. The staging of the photographs acts as framing a daydream: how things ought to be. Everything is constructed in the images and seemingly daily and comforting.
“Home Movie” is in the line of Wee’s exploration of a visceral scenic language blending theatre and contemporary dance, creating immersive works constructed by audio-visual idiosyncrasies and gathering an international group of renowned artists from Norway, Sweden, Belgium, Croatia, Italy and Costa Rica.