Simbiosi

Vetrina della giovane danza d’autore

choreography Roberto Tedesco
dancers Laila Lovino e Melissa Bortolotti
music Rival Consoles, Senking, Pan-American, Raime
production KLM- Kinkaleri/Le supplici/mk
in collaboration with Fondazione Teatro Comunale Città di Vicenza – Festival Danza in Rete, Fondazione Teatro Comunale di Ferrara – Festival di Danza Contemporanea, Scenario Pubblico Centro di Rilevante Interesse Nazionale
sustained by supportER, azione di Anticorpi – Rete di rassegne, festival e residenze creative dell’Emilia Romagna
duration 35 minutes

“Those two are really in symbiosis.” So many times I have used these words to define two people who in my eyes are made for each other, who understand each other about everything, and who above all are happy together.
Upon research and investigation done, contrary to what I always believed, I find that applied to human relationships, the term Symbiosis has a negative connotation for many psychologists. Symbiotic relationships are considered negative forms of development, inhibiting individual development. The main characteristic of a symbiotic couple is the reciprocal dependence between the partners and the poor definition of interpersonal boundaries, to the point that rather than a meeting between two individuals, the construction of a single psychic body takes place. These couples do not know quarrelling, diversity and contrasting individual opinions and desires. In fact, the two act as if one person is always making decisions. Seemingly unbreakable, enviable, they always act as if they have just met, share everything, and therefore feel lost when their partner is away. Many believe that this is true love.
This kind of relationship, however, keeps both partners in a perpetual pre-adolescent stage, where the other’s growth or freedom is perceived as a threat. In a famous aphorism, Freud ironically states, “When in a couple, the two partners always agree on everything, one of them is thinking for both.” This means that in a symbiotic relationship there is no space for two people, but for only one, either one of the two partners or their own fusion. From the psychological literature dealing with the topic, it appears that in the lives of affectively dependent people, one sometimes finds overprotective families or parents who are not sufficently capable in meeting the authentic needs of their children. Often these various family situations can lead the adult to establish a symbiotic relationship with his or her partner. The man or woman, following the loss of the symbiotic affective relationship they had in early childhood with parental figures, subsequently seeks to reproduce that affective relationship with substitute parental figures. At the point when the couple remains fixed in fusionality, there is no longer evolution but rather exhaustion. This is a effectively static couple in which possessive jealousy dominates, the desire to pilot the other’s life and make it what we want it to be, since we experience the other not as “other than ourselves to be loved” but as our appendage to be preserved at all costs.

“…Stand together, but not too close:
Because the temple has distant pillars,
and the oak and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.”
from The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran

ph. Emilio Gilberti