Jacopo Baboni Schilingi and Agathe Vidal
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Rhizomatics is an open work that takes shape anew with each residency. Conceived by composer Jacopo Baboni Schilingi and performer Agathe Vidal, it brings movement, breathing, sound and technology into a reciprocal dialogue. Additional artists are invited to become co-authors, transforming the work through their own practices.
On stage, Vidal explores movement through wearable sensors while Baboni Schilingi shapes sound through tactile and gestural interfaces. Breathing, muscular contractions and movements become musical impulses. Sound, in turn, changes the dancer's gestures. Neither performer simply follows the other: the performance develops through an evolving exchange between composition and choreography, structured trajectories and unforeseen events.
Body, sound and technology
The audience enters a space already inhabited by the performers. In subdued light, amplified breathing gradually gives way to gestures, movement and sound. Minute bodily actions can become perceptible musical events, extending the body's expressive range without reducing it to a set of technological commands.
Six models provide the work's dramaturgical foundation: attraction, cyclicity, corruptibility, constructivity, destructivity and excitability. Drawing on the idea of the open work and the rhizome, Rhizomatics creates connections that can be reorganised rather than following a single fixed narrative.
Consubstantial art
The project embodies Baboni Schilingi's conception of consubstantial art: bodies and machines coexist and interact while retaining their own nature. Technology does not replace the performer or erase bodily singularity. It becomes a partner through which breath, gesture and musical thought acquire new forms of expression.
The performance also explores an individual repertoire of gestures that cannot be substituted for one another. These distinctive movements resist the standardisation of the body and affirm the expressive specificity of each performer.
Florence, 2022
A first version was presented in Florence in March 2022, produced by MAD in collaboration with the city's Academy of Fine Arts. Three young artists contributed distinct versions, each exploring the tension between imposed representations of femininity and the reclamation of one's own body.
Michela Anna Pinto created a life-size clay bust imagining Vidal in old age. Its destruction, followed by the use of clay and water to redraw the performer's body, turned a fixed representation into an act of transformation.
Elisa Pietracito developed a canvas covered with newspaper. Tearing away its surface revealed a red woven drawing; the detached canvas then became a garment, shifting between image, barrier and bodily extension.
Benedetta Danti created a restrictive white suit and a large helmet covered with glass. Movement, running and falling culminated in the destruction of these constraints.
Artistic and technical team
Conception and performance: Jacopo Baboni Schilingi and Agathe Vidal
Computing and programming: Léo Baqué
Sensor construction: Guillaume Bertrand
Lighting: Éric Cordier
Muscle and facial sensor prototypes: collectif 3615 Señor, Besançon
Photographs
