INSIDE PORTRAIT 1998

HOMAGE to CAROLYN CARLSON
and to the company of the
TEATRO DANZA LA FENICE (Venice, Italy)

Photography exhibit by LUISA CASIRAGHI

The photos that I present encompass the four years of residency of the Italian Dance Company “Teatro Danza La Fenice”, directed by Carolyn Carlson from 1980 to 1984 in Venice, with the guidance of Larrio Ekson, her elected partner.
These represent an intimate journey and unique experience in contemporary dance, the rehersals, tours and life of the Company.

The particularity and uniqueness of these photos derives from my point of view as both dancer and photographer, ever present in my atistic evolution, that I have united into one vision, to give life to an essentially “human” and not merely artistic story, convinced that the artist is first of all a “person”, whose authenticity and inner integrity give birth to their “truth” on stage.

I have focused on this authenticity-integrity in each photo, with discretion, delicacy and constancy, the repect and sincerity of who, like me, was a member of the Company, shared each moment and situation, difficulties, the complexity and fragility of such a delicate path.
With a “focus” born of concrete experience, I have tried to freeze, wherever possibile, in photograms of “immediateness” and sincronicity, gathering moments that are otherwise lost to the ‘outside’.

All this gives life to “Inside Portraits”, of Carolina and the entire Company,
taken far from the performance lights, imerged in a suspended and rare dimension of research and creation; a true “interior portrait”, a filigree as diaphanous as the private universe of the protagonists, where each image is ,for me, a homage to the artistic value of each, to their singular way of “being” and to the undecipherable “essence” within each of us and that I have tried to capture in each expresion and single, simple gesture.
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At the same time “Inside Portrait” is a research and personal reflexion on the relationship between the stage and personal truth. An interogation on exterior image and interior reality. A “testimonial”, limited but sincere, of the eternal conflict between the two, that overturns and measures one’s endeavor to “be oneself” on stage but above all, in life.
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Actually, the “surprised” moments are only “tremors”, “fractions”, “traces” of that interior space where every definition is useless, space only for the uniqueness of the moment, the immediateness of feeling alive and putting yourself in play in a complex alchemy of personalities, creative and technical potential, poetry, capacity to improvise that have always characterized Carolyn Carlson’s world.

Her poetical research obligates one on a continuous adventure within the unknown, of change, constant questioning and risking with one’s movement, body, heart, mind, on stage and behind the scene in that space where life experience, immagination, intuition unite with technique, in one moment, and become a game in the present.
Fraction-suspension-materialization of a flow.

The photos exude the atmosphere of that “unique” space, in which even the fragility of certain moments could transform itself into lightness, inventing and surprising itself, behind the wings, the playful looks that gave ‘breath’ to a rehersal; a gesture slipped out of a choreography; the pause within a glance; the ‘solitude’ that anticipated one’s entrance on the stage.
Also the restlessness of a movement, whlie we try to give form to that which for us is indispensible;
its tension towards completeness, lyricism;
it’s surrender to the fluidity of the soul.
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The stern glance , the technical difficulties, the effort, the emotional tension in giving oneself that Carolyn’s work entailed also brings to mind the irony and “playfulnesss” that exorcized everything, and represents her simple, direct humanity which rendered the company a unity, a single entity, unique in the history of italian dance at that time.
In the shadow of her presence, full of expectation,
that transformed all and swept away with her.
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To dance with her I had to strip myself of all that was superfluous,
enter into the moment, clothe myself in silence and wait for her poetry, detached from all, to return to all.
To take these photographs, I had to stop,
gather the moment in my eyes, and let it go to my heart.
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This exhibit narrates, with simplicity, the deep and delicate story of this ‘filigree of the soul’.

I dedicate it to Her,,
to her partner and priceless assistant Larrio Ekson,
to Yorma Uotinen,
to Malou Airaudo.
And to all of my companions of that period:
Michele Abbondanza, Francesca Bertolli,
Roberto Castello, Roberto Cocconi, Agnès Dravet, Raffaella Giordano
Jim Lepore, Elena Mainoni, Giorgio Rossi, Caterina Sagna.

Luisa Casiraghi >>      Info copyright