Lauren Mackler tracks Annamaria Ajmone’s latest moves

IN THE UNDERLIT BASEMENT SPACE of the Palais de Tokyo, Italian dancer and choreographer Annamaria Ajmone’s La notte è il mio giorno preferito (Night time is My Favourite Day) began with the sound of a deep animal howl, the reverberations of which lent dimension to the darkness and outlined the house of the efficiency, delineating its edges and corners. Within the infrared glow of the overhanging inexperienced lights, a minimal illustration of a forest emerged; a couple of sparse lianas constructed the habitat for the efficiency. All of the sudden, a stealthy, human-animal hybrid determine appeared and started an evasive dance, sliding out and in of view behind columns, into darkish corners, and retaining low to the bottom. Ultimately, this determine discovered itself going through the viewers with a merciless, nearly combative gaze. As she stood there, she coated her tongue with a clay-like substance. Unnaturally lengthy and sharp, it appeared to lunge out of her mouth, go searching cautiously earlier than being laboriously swallowed—performing what Ajmone later described as a “tongue dance.” Throughout this dance, it appeared to own its host’s physique from inside, slithering like tentacles inside her arms, her legs, out of her ass, solely to reemerge forcefully out of her mouth once more moments later. When the 40-minute efficiency was carried out, the viewers emerged, dazed, within the now-lit concrete bowels of the museum surrounded by a couple of hanging vines fabricated from discovered plastics, synthetic crops, and wigs. Within the silence earlier than the viewers dared to clap, the amplified sound of Annamaria’s accelerated breath is all we might hear—and for some time, we listened.

To create this work, Ajmone and her collaborator Stella Succi tracked wolves. They launched into two residencies—one in Val d’Illiez in Switzerland, the opposite within the Jura Mountains—to chart the trail of the massive canines, studying to acknowledge their strides, feces, and kills. By the assistance of movies made with a night-vision digital camera (the radioactive inexperienced gel mild of which is quoted within the first part of the efficiency), Ajmone and Succi studied throughout the day what they may solely hear within the pitch darkness of night time, and the sound of the forest—deconstructed into fragments, mixed with devices—turned the core sonic component in a observe written for the efficiency by composer Flora Yin-Wong. La notte è il mio giorno preferito can be rooted in an essay by French thinker and naturalist Baptiste Morizot, who, impressed by Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s analysis, writes on the methods wherein animal monitoring may be utilized to a philosophical course of. Monitoring, Ajmone advised me, is sort of a dance: “You might be monitoring an animal, however they’re additionally monitoring you. The viewers is monitoring me on stage, however I’m additionally monitoring them.” The ability construction of this sort of trade is egalitarian: Hers is a dance that seeks no climax, a dance wherein nobody dominates—or maybe wherein everyone seems to be dominated equally. It’s a sensual, philosophical meandering.

The frontality of Ajmone’s gaze is a signature side of her model. In earlier items of hers—similar to De La, 2016, or her contribution to Virgilio Sieni’s L’Atlante del Gesto, 2015,—she is confrontational, conscious, responsive. When in gallery areas the place the viewers can flow into freely, she strikes towards them, compelling them to comply with her. She carves an viewers like a sculpture, immediately capturing a person along with her hyper-focused consideration after which, simply as shortly, releasing them again into the anonymity of the group by turning away.  Her actions are visceral and spontaneous, current and receptive. Her dances usually are not precisely improvisations—she provides herself “duties” to perform—however her gestures are by no means mounted or sequenced. She leaves herself a large berth to reply intuitively to the viewers, the context, and the structure of a efficiency; in La notte, her duties are the preliminary “name” within the sound of the forest, the act of monitoring within the darkness, and the tongue dance. And, whereas I’ve advised that her motion is animal in its rawness, there’s something fairly unnatural about it as effectively: It’s inefficient, monstrous, as if from a mirror-world wherein our bodies are tangled and their functions unclear. As she dances, she contorts herself dramatically, disfiguring and mangling her kind, her joints seeming to come out of their sockets. And but, her eye contact—locked and intense—is unnerving and private. Once we speak about embodiment, she tells me, “I’m Annamaria; I’m a human,” explaining that she will not be attempting to be an animal, however reasonably that she underscores her apparent failure to be an animal. She considers sure moments of La notte a form of disguise throughout which she (generally proverbially) “wears” options of the wolves (e.g., a wig to supply a furry layer or motion). Her want is to not be the “Different” (capitalization hers), however reasonably to be taught from the Different’s vantage level, their perspective.

The brand new piece feels completely different than her earlier ones, arguably as a result of it was created for the theater of the Triennale in Milan (the place it was carried out twice previous to the night time I noticed it on the Palais de Tokyo), and due to this fact possesses Ajmone’s ambivalent relationship to the two-dimensionality of the stage, with its restrictive entry to her public. To counterbalance this, she recruited artist Natália Trejbalová and lighting director Giulia Pastore to design and lightweight a “techno-natural” panorama, a set that might correctly host and contextualize their collective meditations on nature and tradition. La notte was in flip recontextualized by the Palais de Tokyo, which introduced her concurrently with the exhibition “Réclamer la Terre (Reclaim the Earth),” showcasing the work of fourteen artists shepherded by two scientific consultants. Billed as a “wake-up name as a lot as a rallying cry,” the exhibition asserts that the present’s artists and their approaches to supplies are catalysts for a heightened ecological consciousness and a decolonized strategy to the world, one which prioritizes indigenous and ancestral information. Whereas not included within the exhibition, the efficiency was genuinely related to its ethos. Instinct is on the crux of the ecofeminist argument, and it’s the tenet of Ajmone’s strategy. Her efficiency felt like a placing and really guttural response from inside to the bold and tough promise of the exhibition, whose objects in the end stay artfully positioned within the gallery house. Her efficiency stood by itself as an embodiment of analysis, and a penetrating sensorial expertise for artist and viewer alike.

Annamaria Ajmone carried out La notte è il mio giorno preferito (Night time is My Favourite Day) on the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, on June 9. She is going to current the piece once more on July 8, 9 and 10 as a part of the Santarcangelo Pageant in Italy.

— Lauren Mackler