Andrea Spaziani

Andrea’s works seems to point in all directions in order to highlight one. She works extensively with text, in research and in practice/production. Her work is feminist and critical of the aestheticized female body, and moves across poles like personal/political, vulnerable/powerful, didactic/impenetrable. In practice, in visual terms, her work often is slow in pace with interjections of speed, involves sustained and sequenced stillnesses, and works at a performance quality that I can best describe as absent emotionality: it is like she is having some feelings somewhere but we’re maybe not invited. With her new group work Silver Venus, Andrea is working at, in her words, “interrogating the archetype of Venus and resisting representation” – a mouthful for a dance work, but is in the structure and the invitation of this work that these ideas become visible. The process itself is generative of the material of the work, lending a procreative nature to the work; how do you deal with feminist representations of the body if you are resisting representation? You create a work that is instead enactive of them. This work shows its ideas by enacting them, and asks you to guess how performers are working for a sense of what they’re working on rather than trying to look for it in the visible.