This evening, Teatro Astra in Vicenza (where I happen to be at the moment) presented a dance performance by Naturalis Labor, a local dance troupe. Called "Chicken," the piece featured two dancers, Silvia Bertoncelli and Marta Bevilacqua.
The dance began with the women showcasing the possibilities for modern dance based on chicken behavior. Although entertaining, I wasn't totally convinced: why, I kept thinking, would anyone want to confine themselves to chicken-hood? A chicken, after all, is not a lion or a wolf or an antelope; an aspirational animal it isn't.
After documenting clucking, pecking and fluttering, the dancers depicted other limitations: flightlessness, cantankerousness, violent temperament, bloody claws. And egg laying. As one of the dancers ecstatically laid eggs around the stage, the other woman emerged from the wings clothed as a peasant woman. First, she gathered the eggs. Then, she began cracking and beating them manically, faster and faster, until the other dancer (who'd fled before the egg holocaust) reentered the stage, also dressed as a peasant woman, and carrying two trays of eggs. A "peasant egg dance" ensued.
Truthfully, I still didn't get where the dance was going. Peasant women, I thought. How kitch.
But "Chicken" had bigger eggs to fry, and when the dancers yanked away a feather-covered cloth, their political agenda became impossible to ignore: across the back of the stage stretched several metal cabinets featuring props from the industrial processing of chickens. Gone were the soft feathers and gentle clucking or indignant squawking of the farm-raised chickens; in their place, rubber, skinny, squeaky and dead, were caged chicken carcasses.
Possibly, the dance was about vegetarianism. More likely, it had a "slow food" subtext. But most definitely, the dance was not primarily about chickens: it was about women.
The situation of women in today's society bears uncomfortable comparison to industrially processed chickens, parallels that "Chicken" took pains to elucidate. Clothed, first, in padded leotards and, second, in dresses that appeared to be made from sacks for transporting agricultural products, the dancers in the final part of "Chicken" illustrated that brutal, provincial and pre-modern can look pretty good, if the other option is the organized violence of industrialized modernity.
Women, like chickens, are mass produced: packaged, stripped to their skin until the maximum level of conformity is attained. The women's/chickens' connection to nature: broken. The striving for flight: forgotten. The ecstasies of egg laying: eradicated. As the chicken goes, so goes our females.
Personally, I'm sanguine. The darkness and shock of "Chicken" are both alien to my outlook. And men, as well as women, suffer from the severing of relations between humans and nature, and from the industrialization of the process of putting meat-on-the-plate.
But despite the atavism and inflexibility of its politics, and regardless of the pedantic quality of some of its choreography, "Chicken" made its argument more compellingly, and entertainingly,
than I've seen in a long time. The performance deserves a bigger
audience than its getting at Teatro Astra in Vicenza.
This evening, Teatro Astra in Vicenza (where I happen to be at the moment) presented a dance performance by Naturalis Labor, a local dance troupe. Called "Chicken," the piece featured two dancers, Silvia Bertoncelli and Marta Bevilacqua. 
After documenting clucking, pecking and fluttering, the dancers depicted other limitations: flightlessness, cantankerousness, violent temperament, bloody claws. And egg laying. As one of the dancers ecstatically laid eggs around the stage, the other woman emerged from the wings clothed as a peasant woman. First, she gathered the eggs. Then, she began cracking and beating them manically, faster and faster, until the other dancer (who'd fled before the egg holocaust) reentered the stage, also dressed as a peasant woman, and carrying two trays of eggs. A "peasant egg dance" ensued.
Truthfully, I still didn't get where the dance was going. Peasant women, I thought. How kitch. 
Possibly, the dance was about vegetarianism. More likely, it had a "slow food" subtext. But most definitely, the dance was not primarily about chickens: it was about women.
Women, like chickens, are mass produced: packaged, stripped to their skin until the maximum level of conformity is attained. The women's/chickens' connection to nature: broken. The striving for flight: forgotten. The ecstasies of egg laying: eradicated. As the chicken goes, so goes our females. 
But despite the atavism and inflexibility of its politics, and regardless of the pedantic quality of some of its choreography, "Chicken" made its argument more compellingly, and entertainingly,
than I've seen in a long time. The performance deserves a bigger
audience than its getting at Teatro Astra in Vicenza.
Leave a comment