On August 27th, we presented the piece Raio de Ti / Installation, by Rita Vilhena, at the International Theater Festival in Setúbal.
Raio de Ti is a piece that seeks to reflect on artistic appropriation while at the same time raising issues related to experience, memory and representation that are specific to this project: life history and place of speech.
Here, the emancipation and power of women's artistic creation is revealed.
The dancer appropriates images from the film, which was never completed, "Nether Ballerina of Rottingdam", which had as its creative motive exchanges and tensions between two worlds: that of filmmaker Demetri Estdelacropolis and the then young contemporary dancer Rita Vilhena. The filmmaker's camera lens explored the image of the highly eroticised young woman, in mundane tasks such as doing her personal hygiene, sleeping or waking up, and at the other extreme in scenes of masturbation, in precarious jobs that the young dancer performed in order to survive as an artist or doing domestic work without underwear. All these micro-narratives emphasised the image of the ballerina as an eroticised character.
From the collection of around 150 hours of filmed images, the dancer now re-edits this period of her life to give way to a new reading of the rays that the film-maker left in her.
With this work, the dancer undertakes a creative exercise in self-representation in order to gain mastery over her own life story, her own identity and, distancing herself from the denouncing tone of second wave feminist performances, to carry out a healing work by constructing a new reality with the retelling of this story.
Between the images of the past and the movements of her present body, the dancer transforms the gesture of the film into a new dance, giving it a new meaning.
MULTIRISING THE OTHER IN I, more than a reckoning with the past, is a new poetic-sensitive discourse on what the construction of memory can be and, successively, the possibility of contaminating a freer and more inclusive future.