Winning creation of the IndipenDanse ’25 call
Carusə is a choreography/performance in solo form, inspired by the silenced dance of tarantism as endorcism — the transformative metabolization of trauma into vital energy. The research explores symbols and generative processes of silenced trance/possession dances (physicality, rhythms, incorporations and excorporations), examining which contemporary symbols, altered by the human/digital/technological condition, might today take on the role once held by older ones in response to contemporary hauntology. The work looks at embodied tensions and traumas, to be generatively endorcized against the loss of bodily vigor, and deepens the reflection on Avgi Saketopoulou’s traumatophilia, transforming wounds into regeneration.
The solo unfolds over approximately 25 minutes, alternating more physical moments with static phases, with the body exposed to concrete symbolic obstacles — wheat spikes, earth, and scenic fabrics — that increase difficulty and render movement unpredictable. The sound texture, composed of dog barks, rain noise, sacred songs, and a possible overture by Connie Converse, creates a disturbing and immersive environment in which the body reacts, adapts, and at times “yields,” making failure and vulnerability an integral part of the scenic material.
Although intended for a general audience, the performance favors non-regulated spaces, where close proxemics amplify tension and make the fragility of bodies visible. The scenic device enacts trauma and transformation, challenging physical limits, perception, and the stability of gesture: the body becomes an active agent of experimentation, vulnerable and unstable, capable of generating collective resonance. In this context, Carusə looks toward an epistemic youth (hauntology: porosity to the “no longer/not yet”), in which the body is configured as a ready poetic technology, where the bite of trauma transforms into resilient and self-regenerating force, turning the solo into a contemporary ritual suspended between myth-symbolic dimensions, the present, and possible futures.
Selected documentation footage:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOTPbOXOPdY
- https:// youtube.com/shorts/W9oMV20MjDE
- https://www.instagram.com/p/DR43IUqDclq
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Carusə | sine Sole sileo
is a choreographic and performative work freely inspired by tarantism and The Land of Remorse by Ernesto De Martino (1961). It brings into the present a past in which collective wounds and desires took shape in danced rituals, investigating how those same urgencies resonate today.
The research focuses on endorcism, a practice that integrates and transforms the hidden forces of the body and the social sphere, in order to explore the forms of a possible contemporary tarantism. Through dance, Carusə restores to the body the capacity to transform melancholy and desire into vital energy, overcoming alienation and opening toward a dimension of regeneration and freedom.
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Carusə | sine Sole sileo is an approximately 25’ performance — work in progress — that reinterprets the silenced dance of tarantism in light of its contemporary resonances. It does not seek to recover a ritual from the past, but to investigate how its tensions — altered, distorted, sublimated — act today upon the body, urging it to produce forms of transformation no longer reduced to silence.
The work proposes a masculine rereading of tarantism, traditionally associated with the female body, opening a queer perspective that recognizes crisis as a space for fluid identities and excessive desires.
The performance assumes youth as an epistemic condition: an age of openness to hauntology, in which the body is a threshold, porous to the presences of the no longer and the not yet, capable of welcoming what traverses it without neutralizing it. Can a very young, male, and queer body become a vehicle for contemporary melancholy and boredom and return them through physicalities born from a silenced dance, while at the same time creating new postures that narrate a contemporary rebirth against alienation and the oppression of bodies today?
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Within this youthful and spectral sensibility, tarantism reveals itself as a possible poetic technology of the present: a means through which the body transforms the bite into vital energy, converting vulnerability and desire into movement.
It is at this juncture that the idea of endorcism emerges: a practice that does not expel what wounds, but integrates it, metabolizes it, and transfigures it into generative power. Carusə thus constructs a performative device that imagines the body as an organism adaptable to its time, capable of transforming memory, trauma, and desire into new forms of freer and more sensitive existence.
Choreographic and dramaturgical notes
The movement develops from research tasks inspired and evoked by the themes of exorcism and endorcism. The choreography, strongly physical, progressively translates into a sign-based language of ritual matrix, at times taking on the character of an actual prayer.
The physical qualities explored and most sought after are repetition, trance, tension, and vibration (shaking): elements that not only represent, but above all evoke the process of transformation and metamorphosis required by the phenomenon of tarantism, up to a possible catharsis. Within this research, particular importance is given to the use of symbolic body parts — eyes, neck, feet — subjected to unusual efforts or forms, as well as specific movement qualities, in order to render the introjection of external (symbolically animal) energy in the evocative process of endorcism.
The scenic space is conceived as a tripartite path:
- a circle of wheat welcoming the body of the Carusə at its beginning;
- a central spiral of earth, the place where the act of exorcism/endorcism is consummated;
- a cross made of white embroidered cushions, where a renewed body rests, sealing the transformation.
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The musical dramaturgy also unfolds across several layers:
- a first track created by the director, a sound environment of noises and recorded voices, capable of evoking a landscape both ancient and ghostly as well as brutally contemporary;
- two tracks by contemporary composers: the first of ritualistic matrix, the second closer to a festive, party-like dimension, restoring the current nature of the energies that substantiate the piece;
- at the opening, as an overture, the performer sings a song by Connie Converse, introducing the audience into an intimate and suspended dimension.
Project status
Carusə | sine Sole sileo is a work in progress, currently in a phase of research and continuous choreographic experimentation — however suitable for public showings in a first-study format. Some rehearsal sessions have already been conducted to explore tasks related to exorcism, endorcism, and the introjection of social energies (haunting) into the body, as well as the dramaturgy of scenic space and musical sequences.
- Expected duration of the performance: 45 minutes
- Number of performers: 1
- Expected debut period: by 2026
- Residencies or workshops held: first study sessions carried out in Lecce at Barrakk’Art space of Koreoproject; opportunities for future residencies are being sought to consolidate dramaturgy and physical development.
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- Immediate objectives: consolidate ritual sequences, refine the physical and sign-based quality of movement, define the musical score and the use of the tripartite scenic space, develop a lighting dramaturgy with theatrical technical support.