Interview with Silvia Calderoni

By Emma-Kate Wilson

From the 16th till the 18th March 2017, Silvia Calderoni is coming to Carriageworks for Australia’s first viewing of the performance: MDLSX. Calderoni has collaborated with Motus to tell a story with performance, art monologue and a DJ set with music from The Smiths, Vampire Weekend and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. The story that Calderoni controls on stage is set to conflict any ideas and linear we may try to make. The narrative comes from an ambiguous place resting between truth and fiction, our own interpretations of the performance will be different depending out our backgrounds. The audience will develop their own perceptions of the performance, but Calderoni and Motus pose to us: rather than trying to understand anything, the show is best to be enjoyed with simplicity. To enjoy the music and the collaboration between literature and the movements of Calderoni in the dynamic settings of Carriageworks. The performance, like Calderoni, resists classification and allows the audience member to consider androgyny, gender fluidity and sexual ambiguity.

How did the performance MDLSX first come together? Is the literary element (from Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex) important to understanding the show?

During the last few years the two Motus directors Enrico and Daniela, asked me several times to play characters in between, with undefined sexuality like Ariel in Shakespeare’s The Tempest or Antigone. Then in Middlesex, we found, among the many characters, the incredible, fascinating story of Calliope (Call), the protagonist. This time was different, no armour or shield, it was me! Daniela as a playwright, found among the many pages of the novel some suggestions that fit my story and my appearance and we mixed these suggestions with some essential writings in gender studies, and my true story, with the support of some videos, shot during my childhood and adolescence… MDLSX was born!

Eugenides’ novel inspired us. It was a good starting point to go deeper and deeper in intimate but at the same time universal matters. We like to define the work as post-biographic. The limit between my biography and Calliope’s is rare, vague, confused. The re-writing we made plays exactly on this. The audience leaves the theatre wondering how much of it is fiction and how much reality. And we like leaving the audience free to hypothesise, believe, overturn. All of this to say I don’t think knowing the literature we used as inspiration is essential to understand the show. It stands on its own, it speaks by itself. Of course, knowing the literary elements can give other insights, but not knowing them could let the spectator completely free…It’s like watching the performance with two different pairs of glasses.

What message do you want to get out to the audience?

We (speaking for myself and the two Motus’ directors Enrico and Daniela) see the performance as a hymn to joy, to freedom to be what you want to be, no limits, no categories, no prejudices… only roads to travel by hitchhiking aimlessly just for the fun of going and meet the other and meet yourself. What we want to leave to the audience is this feeling of positivity and freedom, the best would be if every person got out of the theatre a bit more open and keen to welcome the world in all its wonderful variety, however quaint it may be.

What elements of your own identities and bodies are you exploring? Through this question, I also wonder how do you want the audience to contemplate their own identities?

MDLSX is a work I am moved by every time I perform it. The videos projected during the show are private family videos.

Having them every night on stage with me is an extreme emotional exercise, but without them probably this biographical shift would not be created. Their presence there brings me to travel through my emotional life and personal experience. The story I act every night is not mine on the events level, but it is mine on the level of feelings. This means I am exploring/exposing almost all of myself. To me, the stage is a place where I have always exposed. Nudity, tears, thoughts, images…Everything is material that can be used to compose writings, travels, decisions. The critical point is that they should not be gratuitous signs, but part of one only dramaturgy.

I hope this journey leaves every member of the audience wanting to explore and know his/her own self in total freedom and honesty, without borders of any kind. I don’t think that one individual could be the same as another. We are unique! And for this reason, it makes no sense that there are labels like races or genders…for me, there are 7 billion races and genders as many as the world’s population. I would like for this message to get to the audience, for them to apply it to others and just as much to themselves.

Does dance allow you to construct a different image of your body? How does the energy feel when you're on stage telling your stories, combined with the music?

Dance and movement allow me to become different things, although always keeping that core of truth that is the foundation of who I am and that still works at a deep level in every performance I stage. I am a very physical person and believe I can communicate much better through movements than through words.

MDLSX requires a lot of energy in general, but it flows very differently during the performance, it can vary considerably from performance to performance as well, depending on the relationship that is established with the audience. The music I launch is very evocative and meaningful for me, being somehow the soundtrack of my teenage and thus being part of who I am. It is tough to explain what happens energetically inside me, maybe the best is to come and see. As I said, my body speaks better than my words.

What I do is not exactly dance, but it can’t be said that it isn’t either. I see it more as a flow that is expressed through movement, without being formalised in a precise form as often happens with dance.

Motus website https://www.motusonline.com/en... and Silvia Calderoni’s Instagram: @silviacalderoni

Originally published on The Ladies Network, February 23, 2017: http://theladiesnetwork.com.au...