Corpo-grafie di donna: un matri-archivio del corpo danzante, pensante, migrante
Female Corpo-graphies: A Matri-Archive of the Dancing, Thinking, Migrant Body

Summary/Abstract: Ballet is the language that is most representative of dance culture in Italy, with its famous male librettists and choreographers, the archons of its knowledge. This academic tradition is closely connected to the aesthetic representation of the ethereal image of the female body – and the way she must be, without “weight”. By proposing a “matri-archival” methodology, this paper aims to interrogate the roles and the values that have been “choreographed” into the representation of women inside and beyond the Italian theatre-dance scene. The purpose is to discuss the choreographic experimentations where, instead, women dance and make dance themselves through their body- writing – here proposed as corpo-graphy. I select, in the form of fragments, practices of art of the lives of women and pioneers of western Dance History in order to trace the principles of “repetition and destruction” – which are always at play in every archiving act (Derrida, 1996) – of a specific force and quality of movement: “gravity”. Conceptually and metaphorically, “gravity” is conceived here as both the “weight” of the body and of the choreographic “thinking” that supports it. Following this way of thinking, I recall fragments of dance, theatre-dance, and video-dance, briefly referring to the corporeal stories of women and archons who rewrote the representative memory of the ethereal body transmitted through ballet – women who embody, dance, and think the research of a political and poetical protest. I conclude with an example of female corpo-graphy that hosts, on and with a woman’s own corporeality, the experience of contemporary migration.

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