the buto dancE COMPANY
IN_BETWEEN
SOMETHING IN BETWEEN
Dance
performance, freely inspired by “In praise of Folly” by Erasmus of Rotterdam
Literature
“When the soul, having broken its fetters, it
endeavors to get loose and assays, as it were,
a flight out of that prison that holds it in, they call it
madness.
When the mind strives to
rove from its body and does not rightly use its own organs,
without doubt you may say ’tis downright madness and not be mistake”
Erasmus of Rotterdam
Desiderius
Erasmus ( Rotterdam 1469 – Basel 1536 ) became the most famous humanist of the
northern
Renaissance
and led the humanist reform in theology, education, rhetoric and classic
studies.
In the
masterpiece of Desiderius Erasmus “The Praise of Folly”, written in 1509, there
is the strong consciousness
of
the folly as an essential element of the man.
He
turned out also like insipiens that man of whom the literature of
humanistic-Renaissance celebrated the dignitas,
calling
it always like sapiens. A connection that changes radically the common
conception of the man just because in every man
he
discovers the folly, because he reveals how the sapiens is insipiens,
because he finally lets emerge in his most deep meaning the theme of human
ambiguity.
A
reflection about the human condition. On the other side of irony, there is a
deep conception of the relationship illusion/truth, wisdom-knowledge /
silliness-folly.
Eugenio Garin
The
foundation of Erasmus’s mind is his fervent desire of freedom, clearness,
purity, simplicity and rest. Without liberty, life is no life;
and
there is no liberty without repose. Liberty should be spiritual liberty in the
first place. What arrogance is to bind by institutions
a
man who is clearly led by the inspirations of the divine spirit!
The
world, says Erasmus, is overload with human constitutions and opinions and
scholastic dogmas, and overburdened with the tyrannical
authority
of orders, and because of all this the strength of gospel doctrine is flagging.
Truth must be simple. “The
language of truth is simple, says Seneca; well then, nothing is simpler nor truer
than Christ.” ”I should wish”,
Erasmus says elsewhere, “that
this simple and pure Christ might be deeply impressed upon the
mind of men”.
Johan Huizinga
The first two sentences of Erasmus
of Rotterdam here mentioned have been emblematic for us of a deep process of
comprehension
of human nature and very close to
our condition of dance.
The aim of “Something in between”,
which is necessarily transnational, is to stir the consciousness and direct the
sensitivity of the audience
towards that part of humanity which is denied and it has been
ideated in virtue of the evocative history
linked to the memory of psychiatric hospitals,
the healing of the legacy of
suffering and embarrassment, but also of a new awareness of the dynamics of
committal.
Something in between constitutes the
first part of a trilogy about the abnormal and the guilt.
Our
Buto Dance Company has been created in august 2003 around the dance project
“Something in between”, reflections about
the
socialization of madness and the
memories of places which accompanies it, conditions it or treats it.