Lecture demonstration (2019)
Third chapter of Practical Encyclopeadia

Ballad is the third chapter of Practical Encyclopaedia. In this lecture demonstration, Lenio Kaklea regards our gestures as a moving landscape and as a reflexive practice enabling emancipation. Indeed, in our rationalized and technocratic culture the body is still placed within the persistent ideologies that perceive it out of the conventions of discourse and, thus, treating it as always pre-linguistic. Through an autobiographical and sociological dance narrative, the choreographer addresses her background as a dancer; her dance education, pertaining to the modernist tradition, the undertones implied by certain bodily aesthetics, but mainly the thoroughgoing consideration of the body as an analytical category for questioning stereotypes and biases. She also invites us to consider the utopias at the premise of modern dance, the conviction that despite the peripheral status of dance as an art form, it has so often become the tool for engagement and participation in social transformations that the developments of capitalism have rendered necessary.

Ballad received the Dance Prize from the Hermès Italia Foundation and the Milan Triennale in 2019. The lecture demonstration exists in English and in French.

Duration: 55 minutes