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KITSCH – Karaoke Is The Supreme Challenge

2024

Concept and Choregraphy: Camilla Giani
Performer: Chiara Casiraghi
Lighting design: Gabriele Termine
External look: Francesca Foscarini/Cosimo Lopalco
Produced by: Compagnia degli Istanti

With the support of Murate Art District
Lenght: 45 min

I am very attracted to the dynamic of Karaoke, in which performers and spectators collaborate, creating a collectivity that participates in an archetypal and ritual function of performance.

 

Karaoke – from the Japanese empty orchestra – is a liberating act that by imitation allows the performative flow associated with an idol to pass through, like an empty vessel.

The show, understood as a tribal act of entrainment and liberation, is abstracted and distorted, bringing out the ritual structure that supports it. Excess reduced to essence. The body of the one who acts this ritual becomes an empty and sacred container, which is transformed by absorbing the archetype of the idol, etymologically understood, to bring it to express unknown parts that may come to light through mimesis, in the failed attempt of the attainment of another condition.

By viewing Karaoke as a form of ancestral rite, we explored the grammar and syntax of the Ritual language. Through this grammar, ritual action marks a difference in the normal flow of time and unveils in the everyday the possibility of change; it is an action that tends to transcend circumstances and contingencies by transfiguring ordinary experience to make it part of a pre-existing, over-ordered, older and deeper narrative. It therefore requires perseverance, effort and a certain amount of courage.

There are three elements that constitute the norm of any ritual action: the body, the symbol and repetition. The first element, the body, is our physicality in space understood as a set of postures, gestures and sounds, including voice. This physicality, accompanied by a sense that goes beyond its concreteness, introduces the element of the symbol (inner and outer) that allows us, through its repetition, to reconnect with spaces and times of dimensions other than the ordinary.

Each of the three elements is indispensable to the other, so for example, repetition and symbol are worthless without action: “It is not from an afterlife that divinity operates in man’s inner hole, or in his soul, mysteriously united with it. It is at one with the world. It stands before man from the things of the world, when he is on the way and participates in the vital ferment of the world. Man experiences the divine not through a withdrawal into himself, but through an outward movement.” ( W. F. Otto, Le Dieux de la Grèce, Payot, Paris 1981)