Manuela Lucia Tessi – The Weight of Words
In this residency I will re-work and dive deeper into a project I created here during a long residency at Lake Studios in 2015, and I will be collaborating with visual artist Sarah Hermanutz, with whom I created the Weight of Words originally, and writer Tamara van Ijperen.
The Weight of Words (TWOW) was initially conceived as a performance-installation of the duration of two hours with a pool of collaborating writers and movers. The core element was improvisation. Ten years later I felt the need to recreate this piece in a shorter format as a performance with a clear beginning and ending. The Weight of Words is a performance that exists at the meeting point of projected text and the moving body. On the walls behind and next to the dancer some text appears and disappears, sliding along in different directions, shrinking and enlarging, interacting with the dancer’s movement as a sort of instant scenography. The text is composed by the writer who is in the same room, and rearranged by the visual artist through a computer program. As the words are projected the dancer is responding and relating to them in real time. This was creating a feedback loop between text and body which emphasizes the materiality and ephemerality of each.
I want to dive deeper into the relationship of text, movement and visuals, and get to the core of why making this piece fascinates me so much. I wish to create something that wants to both contrast the overabundance of visual and sound stimuli to which the viewer is constantly exposed in daily life, and awaken sensitivity in perception of image and language. Together with my collaborators, I am interested in guiding the audience through a sensory journey that will stimulate different areas of perception, enriching the spectator’s receptiveness and imagination.
