Questo è il mio corpo (un’altra Ofelia)

by Giada Vailati and Francesco Sacco
with Giada Vailati
original score Francesco Sacco
production Cult of Magic
with the support of Tagli, Museo Novecento – Firenze
duration 20 minutes

Questo è il mio corpo (un’altra Ofelia) is a performance born from a research on Ophelia’s character, whose life and death suggest a specific connection with the possession of the body, destined for the atonement for others’ sins. Her body, like the one of every young girl of her time, belongs to the father, until a husband comes whom it will pass to. The collision between Ophelia’s perspective and the world around her creates a kind of predestination that invests her death with sacrifice, connecting in this way the character to the figure of Christ: purity, in a contaminated world (by human sins or by the “rotten in the state of Denmark”) causes both of them the loss of the body, which ceases to belong to the father – biologic for Ophelia, heavenly for Christ – and becomes a sacrificial lamb, so public. The topic of the neglect of the body is suggested by Hamlet himself, who induces Ophelia to go to the convent to avoid to give birth to other sinners and asks her to remember him in her prayers. *
The property of our bodies related to an ethic, sometimes sacrificial dimension, is a daily theme: do our bodies belong us?
Questo è il mio corpo (un’altra Ofelia) stages a reappropriation ritual through loss: sound and movement are based on repetition, creating a loop where the performer’s body from being an acting subject becomes acted. The body loses will and aim and starts to exist exclusively inside the cage of the repetitive movement, destined to retrace a potentially eternal cycle. The dance comes from simple actions repeated with an increasing dynamic and is played on a loop which at the same time is compulsion and liberation, loss and reappropriation of control, reaching and overcoming of the limits of physical endurance.
Are sacrifice and the Christian exemplum reconcilable with a humanism of the body? Are we still leaving sceneries where body and virtue can conflict? Do our bodies belong us?

* ”Get thee to a nunnery. Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners? I am myself indifferent honest, but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me.”
(Hamlet, Act III, scene 1)
* “Nymph, in thy orisons Be all my sins remember’d.”
(Hamlet, Act III, scene 1)
“This is My body, which is [offered as a sacrifice] for you.”
(Corinthians, 11:23)

ph. Lucrezia Testa Iannilli