Eve 3.0

Who hasn't experienced feelings of addiction, anxiety, depression, obsession, jealousy or paranoia?

The subject of this art project is personality disorders, social traits that affect us far more than we realize. A personality disorder refers to a category of personality traits that are maladaptive to life circumstances involving cognitive and behavioral functions. My creative work is an artistic interpretation of the criteria described in the scientific manual DSM-5, Diagnosis and Statistics of Mental Disorders published by the American Psychiatric Association. Thus, for each disorder and with the help of the psychologist Veronica Boniotti, in collaboration with the Department of Psychology of the University of Trento, we have written six realistic and representative stories of people with six different behavioral disorders. In the creation of Eve 3.0, I was also inspired by the psychiatrist Thomas Fuchs who established the postulate that mental illness is not only mental, but manifests itself in dimensions such as the embodiment of the body and intersubjectivity. From the beginning of this project, my creative drive has been the desire to share the experience of contemporary dance with the public. I see contemporary dance as a way to give voice to the spontaneity and wisdom of the body. The body tells stories, it speaks about us, even without adding words. Therefore, I consider that we can understand others by observing the way they move. I have therefore seized upon the manifestation of mental disorder through the body, which then becomes its tool of representation in movement. In my choreography, the body in movement materializes the psychology of a person, the influence of the sensory and social conditions in which it evolves unconsciously affecting its motor and emotional spheres.

Eve 3.0 is an immersive and interactive multimedia piece that invites the understanding of personality disorders through a mise-en-abyme. It is a story with different levels of interpretation that goes to the meeting of different characters affected by these disorders. I want to make the participants enter the virtual world through Eve's body in a subjective point of view. Through her, everyone travels and explores the souls of the six characters by reading her diary. In this journey, Eve is present both on the real stage and in the virtual stories. She gradually guides the participants from an individual immersion to a collective immersion with the other members of the audience who are in turn invited to dance.

I want the movement of real and virtual bodies, the spread of sensations given by the invitation to dance, music and visual narrative, to be affirmed with the contact between bodies, a physical contact that brings the virtual sphere and reality closer together, but also brings people together in mutual support with the collective experience. The importance of encounter and friendship brings out the central themes of this work: altruism, dialogue, and the engagement of the body. First, Eve, as an intermediary, observes and makes us observe the importance of dialogue and openness to the diversity that surrounds us. Secondly, she dives into the life of a teenager who feels marginalized, and who develops a behavioral physicality in line with his emotional and relational problems. It is in the moment of encounter and dialogue that real emotional and physical change is generated in the stories told: this is an important moment that I want to emphasize with the active participation of the audience, to give them the chance to get excited and explore their creativity in dancing. The physical contact between the performer and the audience, and between the audience themselves, symbolizes the compromise first with one's own body, and then the courage to cross the normative and emotional barriers towards other bodies. The video broadcasts and music on stage create resonances between what happens in the six virtual stories and what the non-active audience sees on stage, through recurring elements such as diaries, colors, melodies. The position of the audience in the room is variable, and it also has a symbolism, so it can generate mutual observation and different visions of the elements of the narrative.

I believe that bodily expression is necessary to realize the full communicative potential of a person, it is an element to be nourished in order to develop the awareness that we have of our own body. In this sense, choreographic creation in contemporary dance creates metaphorical visions and can help us reflect on the diversity of our stories told through the body. The work therefore proposes to live the narrative experience through the body, that is to say, to live the reception of the first person narrative with the movement of the body, guided by the movements of contemporary dance. My motivation for the intervention of choreographic creation in this work is linked to the themes of contemporary dance: an art that involves the body in an expressive, creative and communicative way. The body of the performers in VR becomes the body-transmitter of the message, and the body of the audience-participants becomes the body-receiver of the message, in a common co-creation, where the experience of learning through the body in movement allows for a better understanding of the other and a reflection on otherness.