KATA
Kata, the art of solitary combat in karate, sequences codified movements against imaginary opponents. Twenty-six series of movements, like letters of an alphabet. Exploring its formal and symbolic meanings, Anna Chirescu creates a solo piece shaped by ideas of transmission, imagination, and personal memory. In an attempt to map words and memory, she recalls how her father escaped from Romania’s communist regime in 1980, through martial arts. Blending dance, archives, voice, and costume, she brings the past into the present, where the personal becomes political.
Ordeal by Water
Ordeal by water is a performative action. Four totems are bounding a specific space. These signs are creating a symbolic area, pre-existing any language, which becomes a support to esoteric practices.
The movements realized by the dancer are extracted from a gestural codes repertoire of various domains, like sports and professional indications. They generate a link between fencing refereeing, safety demonstration of flight attendants, or the indications of ramp service agents in airports.
This proposal questions what is given to see. Here, the moments which precede and succeed the sports performance, become acts of representation. Soccer player’s warm-up, stretching routine the classic dancer, gymnast’s iconic salute in olympics. The pursuit of perfect movement faces the collapse. The inadequacy of the equipment shapes a constraint which defeat this ideal. The dancer, on pointe, wearing cleats and a fencing mask, falls.
This project is a 2023 winner of the Fonds Régional pour les Talents Émergents (FoRTE) financed by the Île-de-France Region.
