Orchestrating spaces | Giovanna Rovedo, Sharon Estacio

As dance artists with backgrounds in anthropology and holistic health, we consider the body as agent, observer and soundboard of its context. The bigger questions we ask ourselves stem from daily existence, how physical tendencies are shaped by our environment and, in turn, how these patterns affect our artistic moving.

We find constant dialogue in our diversity: a Filipino-American and an Italian, two people living in Italy – one in Friuli, one in Tuscany. One person originating from
a European country, one from two countries colonized by Europeans … through this discourse we are shaping a performative work that will allow us to ask the big questions that have marked our artistic path.

We actively engage our own bodies in this research in an attempt to “perform” the
continuous evolution of identity related to the geographical and cultural borders in which we live. The verb abitare in Italian means “living” but also suggests behaviour, clothing and the intimacy of a home; the home is a place humans created and constructed with their hands so they wouldn’t feel lost. It can therefore be said that the construction of the house supports the construction of identity.

In Orchestrating Spaces we travel across a multitude of spaces and paths and ways of living – from the body’s skin to the walls of a house, driving to work or journeying across the world, sitting in a boardroom or floating on a screen in a virtual meeting place. We strive to understand how all this transformation translates through our movement.