Maria Ferreira Silva - WILD EXPLOSION OF RADICAL SOFTNESS
FR/EN
Wild Explosion of Radical Softness is a solo that leans towards the collective and rests its attention on the interdependency between audience and performer. Using her body as a craft material and a piece of textile as its partner, Maria invites the collective imaginary to resonate through the force of a singular body, challenging fixed notions of time, self, space, and relation. Engaging physically with the notions of transformation, explosion, and non-linear time, the dance drafts a choreography of past and future ghosts through a body that can’t escape the here and now and yet, through imagination, can travel across centuries and exist between history and the cosmos.
In her choreographic practice, Maria researches the notion of plasticity to unfold relations between beings and things, inviting movement around and through them. From a philosophical and political perspective and by Catherine Malabou’s theorization plasticity takes a central position in the choreographic and in performative thinking. An open invitation into an awareness of the responsibility “in the double movement of receiving and giving form” and an understanding of its existence between “openness and determination, agency and vulnerability”.
The piece situates itself towards an entanglement of matter – a concept proposed by Karen Barad which challenges the collective understanding of spacetimematter. in a multi-layered inquiry, Maria invokes the concept of plasticity entangled with queer practices. In this intersection, she looks at the heritage of twentieth century dance artists such as Isadora Duncan, Loie Fuller, Martha Graham, Vaslav Nijinsky and Mary Wigman, to unfold an archive through fluidity and friction wishing to displace the center and acknowledge the periphery.
Furthermore, the work challenges its own plasticity from within and is being created to be performed in and out of the black-box context. Wild Explosion of Radical Softness draws influences and support from neuroscience, gender and queer studies, and new-materialism theory using them as fertilizers for cells, bones, muscles, fluids and beyond.