Mattia Mantellato
University of Udine
Ph.D. candidate
Udine, Italy
The dancing wor(l)d of the Schooner Flight’ by Derek Work, in intersemiotic and multimodal translation.
This speech focuses on the challenges that the encounter of poetry with dancing movements and gestures may ignite in performative intersemiotic translations. In a world where artistic and literary boundaries are becoming increasingly porous, performing praxis can provide a privileged site to carry out experiments and investigations.
Generally, the world of dance, with its physical configurations, articulates its meanings without the use of word(s), while the realm of poetry works within an un-corporeal and imaginative framework. I will focus on the merging of these two creative processes in a recent performative transposition I have choreographed on a selection of stanzas from the poem The Schooner Flight by the Caribbean poet and playwright Derek Walcott where embodied words fuse together with their semiotic meanings and corporeal textures.
Walcott’s poem focuses on the representation of identities, colonial legacies and decolonial perspectives, and questions Western-based assumptions and beliefs. The aim of my production was to bring these issues to the fore, escape canonical and normative frontiers and engage, simultaneously, with Walcott’s attempts to forge a new multimodal theatre. My intersemiotic translation involved a group of scholars, artists, ballet students, video and transmedia professionals from the area of Friuli Venezia Giulia, in Italy, a territory on the “edge”, where ethnic, cultural and environmental heterogeneity come together and which can be put in dialogue with Walcott’s Caribbean, particularly multicultural Trinidad where the protagonist of the poem is from. I have created a hybrid location in which the dancing narrative moves between enclosed and opened-air spaces in the attempt to re-create Walcott’s search for a pluralistic and heterogenous circle of possibilities.
I will demonstrate how my selection of extracts reverberate with my dramaturgical perspective and will also discuss different possibilities for a choreographic structure in line with Walcott’s poem and his work as a whole.
Dancer, choreographer, performing artist & Ph.D. fellow in English language and literature(s) at the University of Udine (Italy), Mattia Mantellato graduated from La Scala Ballet Academy in Milan (2005). For seven seasons, he was part of the ensemble of the National Ballet Theatre of Prague (Czech Republic). He has performed in more than 10 countries in Europe, in China (EXPO 2010), at the Biennale of Venice and at Mittelfest 2013. He graduated in Languages and Literatures at the University of Udine (BA & MA degrees). He currently teaches and researches dance technique, and pursues an interdisciplinary approach to his passions: ballet and literature. His areas of research include World Literatures in English, Postcolonial Literatures, Literary Theory, Performing Studies, Dance Studies, Multimodality, Digital Storytelling and Performing Narratives across Media.
