Human Inhuman Posthuman
Sensitive Geophilosophies
First creation by Monica Barone produced by Lenz Fondazione within the three-year project
Bestiary | Female Animal | Relationship #3
The residential and performative project Human Inhuman Posthuman – Sensitive Geophilosophies – is the first performance entirely written and directed by Monica Barone, produced by Lenz Foundation within PARENTELE. Parentele is the founding path of the Lenz 2022_2024 project Geosophie and Bestiary, BESTIARY | Female Animal, edited by Maria Federica Masters e Francesco Pititto, who intends to seek intellectual and emotional partnerships between artists*, with the aim of exploring new natural-cultural performative models, hybridizing philosophy, mythology, sciences and arts. Human Inhuman Posthuman was presented after two weeks of artistic residency at Lenz Teatro, in a site-specific version within the historical and museum spaces of the Natural History Museum of the University of Parma.
Human Inhuman Posthuman. Sensitive Geophilosophies was selected as the winning project of Open Dialogue Artist Residencies, jointly commissioned by Arts Council England, by the General Directorate for Entertainment of the Ministry of Culture, by the Italian Cultural Institute of London and the British Council.
The choreographic research arises from work on the internal proprioception of the body in space and time, in relation to the outside, structuring dance through the languages of dance theater and contact improvisation. Sensitivity is important in this choreographic work, understood as an attitude of listening, to perception, presence, authorship and the willingness to shed acquired preconceptions about what is possible to do with one's body and what is not, with the aim of going beyond what we know about ourselves and seeking a more authentic and personal code of movement. The work is a process that aims to bring the dancer to overcome the human vision and the mechanistic body by broadening their awareness, experiencing sensitivity understood not as an expression of emotions and feelings, but rather on sensoriality as a source of knowledge.
The prophetic and visionary force of contemporary science fiction is capable of generating reflections on what a human being really is and on which values our concept of civilization is based. This literature manages to penetrate deeply into everyday life and reveal its dynamics but above all, the prospects. Particularly, to act as a reference and suggestion for Human Inhuman Posthuman is the science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick But androids dream of electric sheep? (1982), on which the film Blade Runner was based (1982) directed by director Ridley Scott. Monica Barone's performance distances itself from cinematographic imagery which is oriented towards capturing a superhuman dimension in reference to androids, and remains close to the literary work which seems to refer to a form of underman. An underman buried by a residual matter of lives and objects that are now rubbish because they have become obsolete. An underman with uncommon abilities who has been mentally disabled by the institutions of his time. An underman adrift in an exasperated and inhuman colonialism. An underman who nevertheless manages to recover a humanistic vision of existence, close to the famous expression of Publius Terence “Homo sum, I think that nothing is alien to me as a human being" (165 a.C.), i.e. “I am a human being, I consider nothing human to be alien to me.", showing a profound desire to redeem one's conscience and the power of human nature.
Monica Barone
Dancer and choreographer with a brief past as a visual artist.
His practice starts from research on sacred themes, of esotericism, of the ontology, of speciesism and antispeciesism and on the processes of phylogenesis.
His dance tends to focus on the "person" considered in his physical-mental-emotional-energetic totality and on the connatural intelligences of the body, aiming for authenticity of the movement's codes, and overcome the idea of assimilating and adapting one's body to codified dance languages (from “compliant” bodies). The dynamics of his dance comes from research on the body's internal proprioception in space and time, in relation to the outside, using dance languages such as contact improvisation and dance theatre.
Dancer with a "non-conforming" body, with a physical disability that has a strong impact on the cultural and operational realities of entertainment, it totally questions the working and training practices of dance. These practices are consolidated in the ableist society, they are to be considered disabling practices because they still insist on criteria that make the disabled body appear like a cumbersome exception, forgetting that art is not static, but rather an ongoing and increasingly diversified cultural process.
In this sense, we highlight the work with S.I.I.A.T.E. (Scotland Italy Inclusive Artist, inclusive dance training project, born from the collaboration between Scotland and Italy 2021/2022), for the promotion of practices in favor of professionalization in the dance and live entertainment sector for artists* with disabilities; Furthermore, dal 2023, together with Diana Anselmo, Alessandra Cinque and Riccardo Olivier, works on the show Freak Out!!! which investigates the imaginaries linked to bodies with disabilities in general but above all the relationship between disability and art, between violence and ableism with the related exposures and spectacularisations of bodies with disabilities, from the past to today (for example Freak shows) as well as creative power, aesthetic and poetic of such bodies (and with attention to the aspect of accessibility and usability of the public and the artist).
