Dicksonia

A score for body and voice.

Dicksonia is the name of a tree fern. It is an ancient plant that continues to live on Earth. The choreography of the performance of the same name grew out of research, which the authors call "action analysis of movement." Movements are created and conceptualized through three basic somatic principles – pull, push, release. We may say that these meta-actions are manifested in the movement of all living things. “When creating choreographic scores, we record not the form, but the types of actions and their local sources in the body. When we practice such a dance, we feel something vegetable, liquid, mineral in ourselves; our attention is connected to what has always been and what now lives inside us,” say Alberts Alberts and Alexandra Konnikova, the directors and participants in Dicksonia. To create the scores for a voice, composer Vladimir Gorlinsky, together with vocalists Arina Zvereva and Olga Rossini, plunged into the study of the same principles in the field of sound. The common entryway to this study was the joint bodily practices of all the participants.

The fabric of the performance is the interpenetration of dance and vocal scores, the transformation and alteration of different states of an ecosystem in which sounds and movements coexist, just as it happens in nature, where minerals, plants and animals live in natural interchange. The content of the performance and the method of work are reflected in each other. This is a "natural" and ecological approach to working with the body, movement, and sound that inevitably affects the relationships within the team, and how Dicksonia communicates with the audience. 

This is a joint project of the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre and Boris Yukhananov's Studio of Individual Directing.