DANCE | COnteMPORARY PERFORMANCE | CHOREOGRAPHY
Matteo Marziano Graziano (they/them) is a contemporary dance choreographer and a multidisciplinary artist, whose body-based practice is rooted within contemporary body performance and bridges to visual arts, video arts, digital spaces, and music theatre.
THE MIDNIGHT ZONE
THE MIDNIGHT ZONE is a choreographic happening that explores the 'desire for the unknown' and the 'mystical' dimensions of the bodily experience. We understand the 'mystical' as stripped of religious connotations but rather framed as a out-of-the-ordinary bodymind experience provoked by sound waves. The piece delves into a sonic speculation on the oceanic depths of the 'Midnight Zone', that is, submerged zones below 1000 m of depth that receive no sunlight.
THE MIDNIGHT ZONE is currently under development.
DEEP SKY OBJECTS
Part dance piece, part choreographic happening, DEEP SKY OBJECTS is a collective poetic effort to expand the finitude of our bodies by flirting with astronomical distances and loopholes in time. A group of performers surrenders to the felt and imagined forces of an altered field in order to inspect and expose affections, resistances, isolations and solidarities. Matteo Marziano Graziano is fascinated by the overlaps of post-material sciences with paranormal phenomena.
TIERKREIS
TIERKREIS stands for Zodiac. It is a contemporary music theatre performance, departing from the homonymous composition by Karlheinz Stockhausen. The twelve melodies can be played by any instrument, improvised or sung. I staged this piece for 3 dancers, a soprano, violin, acoustic and electric harp, and percussion. It was produced by Dansmakers Amsterdam.
ZERO
ZERO is a solo dance performance, and the commencement of my work as a dance-maker in 2009. It is a philosophical speculation on the number 0 and a search for its embodiment, located at the intersection between the muscular and the nervous system.
It has been produced by ICKamsterdam, where I was invited as artist in residence following two years of collaboration as artistic assistant for the choreographers Emio Greco and Pieter C. Scholten.
Matteo’s practice deals with questions of embodiment in relation to consciousness, the shaping of social relationships, and affects. This leads to moving image making processes and explores the notion of subjectivity within spectatorship. Matteo’s artistic research is informed by quantum physics, bioenergetics, system theory, and deep ecology.
My approach to contemporary performance is multidisciplinary, with use of media such as: movement, sound, text both spoken and written, and moving images. I focus on the agency of presence: how bodies - single bodies and collective bodies - perform their liveness and bend the behavioural codes of their own environment, whether this is the stage, the frame of the screen, or the public space. My topics of work are desire and disobedience. My artistic practice deals with somatic resonance, touch, visual contemplation, affect negotiation, vibrational exchange, and relational complexity. I explore the physics and the metaphysics of the contemporary moving body. I question its existential properties, connected with the cultural and political implications of being 21st century citizens.
UNDER TWO LIGHTS
Collaboration with photographer Chih-Chien Wang
A gallery-specific duet performance, held within the homonymous photographic exhibit by Chih-Chien Wang at Künstlerhaus Bethanien Berlin. Created in collaboration with Prof. William Wheeler, it aims to embody the invisible architectural tensions that exist between artworks in a gallery space through the body. A perceptive choreographic score connects movement and pictures, and the affective negotiations that exist between spectator and artwork.
ORBIS TERTIUS
Large-scale participatory and immersive installation
ORBIS TERTIUS is an immersive sound walk through the architectural complex of Aufbau Haus in Berlin Kreuzberg. It is inspired by the short story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius by Jorge Luis Borges. Audience is invited in a labyrinthine journey, encountering situations and characters which seem to bend the laws of Reality, and the perception of them.