DANCE PIECE FROM ANDRESSA MIYAZATO AND ALEKSANDER KAPLUN
Music by Moritz Morast
The spider god Anansi is one of the most important figures in West African culture. Somewhere between man, beast and deity, Anansi sets out to build a world of his own. The stories about Anansi and his wife Shi Maria give an insight not only into the difficulties of shaping such a world, but also into the manifold possibilities of things gone wrong.
As a Brazilian, Andressa Miyazato interest in African cultures is deeply rooted in the country´s colonial past. Besides stories among those who had no other means of sharing and continuing a common identity, African culture in Brazil can be found in many performative genres such as Capoeira – a martial art that incorporates the flow of dance.
For the production that premiered at the Landestheater Linz in 2018, Aleksander Kaplun designed geometric objects made from wire and cloth that served as costumes, props as well as stage set and helped the dancers to transform themselves into those animals that symbolized the main characters in the original fable.
By focusing on the Anansi´s wife Shi Maria, it was Miyazato´s choreographic decision to portray the female spider with the help of two dancers. Fusing their bodies with one another as well as with the objects designed to be their corpus, Andressa Miyazato finds a unique language of movement that is unworldly, animalistic and fascinating at the same time. However small She Maria´s body is, she always remains a trickster with a timeless and feminine longing and proves that size is not always equal to the amount of power you own.
Andressa Miyazato 