Performance Art and Action Poetry rightly belong to the most significant events within the panorama of international art research, encouraging cultural exchanges and placing emphasis on the concept of nomadism as a key ingredient in the artist’s work, moving from a linguistic territory to another and offering an opportunity to think about the meaning as well as the design techniques of the plural work.

“If we were not totally different in time, we could again,

yet as we would not be new in time, we could be totally different”

New Poetic Action is supposed to go through interdisciplinary figures and cross over into the tension of total time. The performer/poet releases immense energy; he or she functions as an overwhelming jumble, a flowing river, a relentless interlocutor who can enthusiastically open windows onto new and old worlds.

Poetic performativity holds a variety of synergies. The body becomes expressive matter. In performance art the nontheatrical body as a whole bursts into a new type of dramaturgy, where, from time to time, the space-time barycentre leads it to a different field: moving visual art, environmental installation, living body poetry.

Nowadays Performance Art, as Action Poetry, cannot be defined through one moment of analysis, because aesthetic judgment involves many disciplines; nevertheless, the body, including its language and expression, plays a key role.

Sometimes centrality is close to dance or rituality – for example, provocatively –; some other times it involves sonority, which often includes the text. However, the expressive body steadily heads in two directions: a cold one, conceptually, and a hot one, existentially.

These are the hallmarks of artistic expressiveness, which has become quite popular internationally. Yet, performance art seems to be expressing its poetic energy through nomadic characters, physically, by joining an international circuit, which means moving from a geographical area to another, meeting different cultural contexts, as well as linguistically, by relying on interdisciplinary instruments and modes.

They now tend to assess the message of performance aesthetically, while estimating its poetic energy existentially.

The performer has a mission to fulfil in bringing the energy that comes from the outside into performance. In a way, performance art means a desire to revive something that is outside space-time in action; it means fusing internal and external energy, allowing different elements to harmonize with each other.

“Any work rich with elements is never univocal, although it blends together,

in ‘becoming’ art we borrow time as a legacy,

it is never really closed; it is on hold”

This is the key ingredient of performance, where the artist takes action to catch and shape messages, revising and reviving them, so that each art message eventually loses possession of its maker.

The first stage of each art production should be adjusted to external energy, and poetics is mainly influenced by the wait for the next performance moment.

At the end of any performance, after the dynamic stage of the body, poetic action causes the attraction, overlapping and absorption process to be discontinued; as a result, energy hangs in, thus epitomizing the potential political role of art.

Nicola Frangione

Word expression and voice performance

The rediscovery of the value of the body in the voice is not so new, but it allows one to take into consideration, the emotional and expressive aspect of the new Performance/Poetical, together with the evolution of it as far as the contemporary way of thinking and the integration of languages and artistic communication is concerned.

Not much space is given to this wealth of human potentiality, apart from it being transformed into a representation: however it is infiltrating little by little everywhere, through the animation of dynamic groups and the setting up of laboratories (performances, theatre, dance), not to mention the most recent experiments of therapy combined with art, in the form of monologues and performances based on the analysis of one’s self knowledge and of oneself.

Thanks to this wealth of theoretical in depth studies, of aesthetic experiences and of productive laboratories which give shape to my artistic quest: it can be considered sometimes as being totally Art, or as sonorous poetry, phonetic poetry, Action poetry or Performance-Art.

In the last 40 years, thanks to my own work together with the collaboration of many artists on an international level, intense performances and monologues of Action-Voice have been developed and carried out, with the aim of discovering and developing knowledge: deriving from different geographic realities. Moreover these works have been appreciated and represented in different International Festivals of new dramaturgy, visualization, sonority and thought in movement.

This mechanism represents for me, a continuous and progressive awareness and not so much the result of a pre conceived strategy. Since 1973 the events which promote and organize the field of interdisciplinary artistic performances concerning my activity, like at the Art Action Festival of Monza or in other initiatives and shows around the world; these have brought about a growing valorisation of performance-art and a systematic appreciation and more emphasis as far as its development is concerned.

It is a kind of interpersonal communication which brings out first of all, the value of corporality and of the voice. The more one experiments, the more one can appreciate this, in that they bring in novelty and meaningfulness.

One cannot expect to explain and justify everything with only one interpretation. It is necessary to let the imagination run wild, moving towards diversity and mystery. The public can recognise the importance of an existential approach, it can perceive the energy which is transferred and also appreciate the improvised turn of events and spontaneous poetry.

It is based on this, that in my performances the vocal texts can be cut out, stitched on , moved around, making them more open to different meanings as if they were

purely a musical creation. One is not speaking about pieces sung based on the music, but of pieces like eloquent music; a sort of de contextualized work, totally in synergy with the different contexts of meaningful space, which embrace and integrate the vision, the visual and the sonorous in one sole co-text.

Never like in the last ten years, have we realised that there has been such a tremendous delay in the development and the integration of BodyVoice. Art and psychology have had such an indispensable role not only in the understanding, but also in the development of the personality in its entirety. One cannot ignore the body, one’s consciousness and our total space: but this can be obtained only through the re discovery of one’s BodyVoice and one’s gestural expressiveness.

Repossession of Bodyvoice and all those realities which have roots in oneself, deep inside oneself and externally, one can then regain the emotions, the sentiments, the intuitions, the spontaneity. Like when giving birth, the woman, takes possession of her body and completes the cycle of pregnancy, by taking this as a spontaneous comparison, the Bodyvoice is interpreted as a dynamic and vital totality.

We are like a sensitive seismograph: our organism can manifest a state of tension which exalts and at times holds back essential functions which drive it and thus are essential tools for interpersonal communication. One is speaking about going from the system of “having” to the one of “being”, from the body as an object to the lived in body, from the stupefying mode of “appearing” to the stupefying mode of “being”.

In the body which speaks, we are able to slow down the dominance of discursive and abstract logic , we realise that also the voice has its own way of thinking. And in the performance, it is never objective like a machine, however sophisticated it may be: it is the place where it resounds with the body in totality. It is in one’s body and through it that the being perceives the real.

It is starting from the body, that together with the voice one establishes the primordial language, dividing time and space. From this the sonority is born, lives on and expands: to the top, to the bottom, in front, behind, to the left, to the right, first, during and after the performance.

The BodyVoce in movement combines , thought and language modes in a certain way. In order to move and emphasise the richness of the gesture and its founding role of the primary language. Thought in the expression of the voice does not have pure ideas . Every conscience is gestural, every judgment is interaction.

In the being, the intellect acts on the senses, the reality affects its body and it intervenes in the reality marking it with the expressive force of the totality of its being. Each phrase in every interaction is continuously vibrating from one to the other of those numerous emotional irradiations which are termed and called emotions or “motions” emerging from deep down.

Listening to our body or the one of others help the being of our desire, to be able to understand and build bonds of communication. The experiences of the body are always involved in a kind of interpersonal communication, even when they are denied or forced.

Our voice provides our body with a textual individuality of experience and shows that the perception of itself is changing : it is not easy to foresee if these elements of evolution will disappear in the attempt to recover the path individually collective growth, with a view to greater creativity and poetic autonomy and opening up towards others. We must be on our guard.

Nicola Frangione

Monza – January 2010