BABY FLOWER

Baby Flower is a Butoh performance and the second chapter of a research project on family myth and emotion that began with Medusa.

Baby Flower is a hunchbacked old lady who, on her birthday, retraces all the steps she has taken in life one by one. In this journey through memory, different women's faces, masks, life stories and emotions appear on stage, one after the other.

Baby Flower is a conversation between words and movement, an encounter that takes place on stage. Rather than being an improvisation, it is a shared dialogue that requires mutual listening.

How can dialogue be found between words and movement, two different modes of communication?

What form does this dialogue take?

When and how do words free themselves from their meaning and become sound, rhythm, emotion?

How does this dialogue manifest itself in the body of the performer?

The answers as always are on stage. Butoh allows us to build a bridge of memory, a bridge between the worlds of the visible and the invisible, between darkness and light, between yesterday and today. This bridge is supported by the audience, by the words of Mariangela Gualtieri and the by deep voice of Alexandra Jane Wynne who articulates them...

Once I was small, I was without words. I was small and without words. Once I was very light, I weighed a few kilos. Once there were only three or four kilos of me, only a few kilos of me, only a few kilos had my name.

Fuoco Centrale and other poems for the theatre by Mariangela Gualtieri

The project is inspired by the work of Jean-Daniel Fricker and Céline Angèle, both Butoh dancers and masters at working with words and making sounds move.

Baby Flower was presented during a "Friday Performance" at the Himalayan SubBody Center for Art, McLeodGanj (IN) and in a private performance at the Uppezzinghi Tower in the province of Pisa (IT) in 2019.