GRACE Gender and Cultural Equalities in Europe
[I’ve Lost You Only To Discover That I Have Gone Missing] has been a great blessing for me. Among other things what it has concretized—and evoked—is the idea of kin/aesthetic healing as a kind of restorative dignity and personal connectedness that the arts do, now and then, in the best instances, bequeath to those who experience it. It was also quite moving to see—as it were—our keynote’s “theory” theatrically enfleshed, and to sense the trajectory of its dramatic movement, which is the slow dissolution of the boundary between carer and sufferer, the “well” lover and the “ill” beloved. As the piece progresses, we understand that the two are slowly and painfully becoming one, at once both suffering and caring, until what we bear witness to is the penultimate image of the dancers linking hands and moving like one scintillant wave, becoming the same finite form, whose common burden—embodiment, which we may also call life—is at once also the common but entirely precious and irreplaceable gift.
J. Neil Garcia, Poet
Dancers: Takeshi Matsumoto, Maria Olga Palliani, Luke Birch, Aneta Zwierzynska
The European Horizon 2020 GRACE consortium invited Beatrice Allegranti Dance Theatre to open the culmination of their event in March 2019. The company were commissioned to develop the dance theatre work-in-porgress I’ve Lost You Only To Discover That I Have Gone Missing which they performed at Utrecht Arts Centre.
Photos: Neil Max Emmanuel
Beatrice Allegranti also gave a keynote on international women’s day. Titled ‘Moving Kinship: Towards Material Equalities’, the lecture discussed the Moving Kinship feminist methodology encompassing participatory dances with families affected by young onset dementia and the dance theatre work I’ve Lost You Only To Discover That I Have Gone Missing – directly informed by the Participatory material. Both the keynote lecture and the dance theatre performance received a formal response from J. Neil Garcia, poet and professor of comparative literature at the University of the Philippines. The full keynote and response will be posted here soon.
Beatrice Allegranti’s publications discuss the Moving Kinship feminist methodology:
Allegranti, B. (2019) ‘Moving Kinship: Between Choreography, Performance and the More-than-Human’. In Prickett, S, and Thomas, H. The Routledge Handbook for Dance Studies. London: Routledge.
Allegranti, B. (forthcoming 2020) ‘Dancing Activism: Choreographing With/In Dementia. ’. In Chaiklin, S. and Wendgrower, H. International Theory, Practice and Research in Dance in Dance/Movement Therapy’. New York: Routledge.
Useful Links: