Premiere co-production "Knot Body" by QUARTO

KNOT BODY
A pragmatic and philosophical research involved with a knotbody.
The body has for centuries been and still is associated with certain fields of history: memory, class, utility, gesture, gender, etc. It is a construction that is linked to a representation of a social order (which strives for functionality as a means for behaving within the norms), that in itself is already an imposition to embody.

Considering that our attention lies in the experimentation between body and a 1000m long rope - rope-body, body-node, empty-body, body-knots - as an attempt to escape from the bodies daily attributes and give it an unsuspected meaning, beyond the understanding of a representative body/object relation. Thereby, what is provoked with the KNOT (the experimentation with the KNOT/entanglement) seems radical for us, because it intends to abandon some recognizable forms, movement and choreography that have been dominant, and points to a path outside the historic domination, while dealing with an object that is one of the oldest and most important inventions of mankind: the rope, the knot.

This ‘empty body’ is revealed in the moment we experience it entangled in the rope, where the limit between body and knot is defuse. Precisely in this place we witness the creative potentiality of the body through liberating it from its social representations, such as gender. The KNOT seeks to produce a space, an image, and a fragment where the body is involved with the rope: winding/unwinding, tangling/untangling, pulling, ravelling and then unravelling it again. This leads us to the driving questions: how do we go beyond the significance previously attributed to the body? What problems appear in this relation? Where can this research lead us when trying to re-signify the relation between body & knot? 

Leando Zappala, Choreographer, Artistic Director & Performer. Sweden.

Anna af Sillén de Mesquita, Choreographer & Performer, Sweden.

Palle Lindqvist, Sound Designer & Technician, Sweden.

Tobias Hallgren, Light Designer, Sweden & UK.

Fredrika Spindler, Philosopher & Lecturer, Sweden & France

www.quartoperformance.com