Preferring Embodiment Michele Rizzo

After I graduated from SNDO (School for New Dance Development, Amsterdam) in 2012, I met people that introduced me to the night life, at least in a more consistent and structured way than I had been introduced to it before. A word that I reach back to often is ‘enthusiasm.’ Somehow, etymologically speaking, the word enthusiasm refers back to ‘enthous,’ meaning possessed by divinity. I was drawn to this meaning of some kind of other agency taking over your own agency. I relate that idea to the experience of clubbing: the experience of forgetting the borders between yourself and the rest of the space and people. At the same time, it’s an experience that makes you extremely aware of yourself and how you relate to your own body. I feel that what’s happening there is a loss of the self, to dissolve into the rest of the space and context.

Back then I was already using my practice to deal with subjects related to the experience of clubbing, if in a more abstract way. Maybe it was about the act of putting myself outside of myself, and using dance as a language to articulate this act. Being a trained dancer, I was amazed to find an environment outside of a dance school which seemed to be deeply concerned with dance, too. Clubbing became a significant learning experience for me, going far beyond a leisure experience. I learned about the body as a muscular mechanism, about coordination, about the attuning of body and mind, beyond the technical views taught in dance education. In a clubbing environment, movement is practiced, but also relations between people of political significance. You could call it a politics of the dance floor, with the influence of both extremely intimate and extremely social conditions. My background as a dancer definitely put me in that clubbing space with a heightened sensitivity to the potential meaning of dancing. One dance phenomenon that I was very intrigued by were these young guys dancing the so called “rabbit dance,” which has pretty much disappeared by now, but was very popular in those years. In itself, the dance is a derivation of the so-called “Melbourne shuffle,” which in turn is derived from gabber style. These different styles seem to have strongly influenced each other through different generations and in different spaces of club culture. Once while I was dancing at Berghain, a guy came up to me and said: “You dance like Amsterdam.” Although I had studied in the Netherlands, I didn’t even feel that Dutch, so it was interesting to be addressed in this way. The locality of dance is definitely present: styles develop in mysterious ways, but apparently they are clearly recognizable.

I don’t position myself as an authority on clubbing at all, especially because I feel the experience of clubbing is specific to everyone and your experiences accumulate over time. I started to think about an act that could be called a choreographic reflection. I realized that even in these clubbing spaces there were dance styles that could be codified. I wasn’t going to the club with the active intention to turn the experience into a performance piece, but I was genuinely mesmerized by all these people dancing together. It felt so fierce. At one point, I was invited for a short residency at Frascati in Amsterdam, and because I was so passionate about clubbing at the time it naturally became the material for the research. I invited Juan Pablo Camara and Max Goran and we just started playing techno in the dance studio. We soon found out that the experience was completely unsatisfying. It almost felt like a desecration, almost offensive to the experience of clubbing.

It became clear that the work should not be about recreating the clubbing experience in the studio, but about sourcing choreographic material on the dancefloor and then codifying it. This became the research question for the HIGHER performance which we ended up performing internationally in black-box theatres, and which I still get asked to perform. In the performance we developed we dance in unison, which makes the choreographic language more readily visible. Alongside doing the movement research, I had the great opportunity to work with Lorenzo Senni, a highly-respected figure within the music field of trance. I became familiar with Lorenzo’s work through a friend. I knew I didn’t want to use techno music for the performance, exactly because I didn’t have the intention to recreate the club on stage. The whole performance is a product derived from my clubbing experience. Lorenzo has a long history with clubbing but he really comes out of the trance scene. I was drawn to his work because his music is extremely suggestive of his trance origins, but it also defies being classified as one style. To me, it feels like an almost abstract version of trance music.

The work was part of a group show called Freedom of Movement, which had offered a political perspective on how populist parties are rising and challenging the movement of people, between countries but also in their economic positions. I started to imagine a dynamic movement that grows, or an army of dancers, which can inspire just the way a political party does. Dance is political by default, but I its political meaning to be communicated on a visceral level.

Both the museum space and club space allow for moments of introspections, where people are relating to artworks according to their personal process, but at the same time they’re doing this collectively. Everyone can join, it does however take some investment. I’m interested in how these spaces are constructed collectively. I was recently reading the French sociologist Michel Maffesoli’s work on Neo-Tribalism. He proposes that contemporary Western social organization has developed into a neo-tribal structure, where people move between small and potentially temporary groups distinguished by their lifestyles and values. This idea—that we are choosing our communities—also applies to our choice of spaces, and it’s amazing when a club is providing that space for marginalized groups. You could think about the selection at the door as being very discriminatory, but, if you look at it from a different perspective, it actually provides safety. I love to experience the different family structures within a huge crowd of clubbers.

My research isn’t topical, I prefer it to be embodied. When thinking of clubbing, the perception might be that the activity is one of escapism or leisure. I started to look for references that would support the reading of club culture in an alternative way. Instead of using the word “tripping,” which is so present in club culture, I was interested in figuring out if you could also call this state “flowing.” I drew this from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s work, a Hungarian-American psychologist who writes about the deeply focused state of mind he calls the flow. He states that the individual who is in the flow doesn’t even realize they are in it; they realize it only when they are getting out of this state. Julia Kristeva’s work on dance has been influential for me, too. She writes about dance as a language that can transcend. Dance as the voice of the transhuman, which is the result of the emancipation of the human from every kind of identity crisis. When I was dancing in the club, I was experiencing dance as an agent that was molding my identity anew. Molding my kinaesthetic and also my political identity. Dance allows you to think with the body. Clubs provide us with a space to do that. It is where we celebrate, learn, become aware. Potentially, it is the testing ground for how we relate to each other outside of the club space.