What stood out the most in this try-out, however, was the interaction among participants during the conversation. This was not only evident in the simultaneous discussions at the start of this dramaturgical unit, but also in the way they actively listened to one another in the full-circle conversation. At this stage, performer-audience interaction remained minimal; apart from Niccolò’s sound shaping the flow, the rest was entirely driven by the audience. The following video is a short recap of the audience conversation. 

Draaiboek or script

5.3 Try-out 3

Title: Choreomaniac seeds - Vol. II

Performers: Silvia De Teresa - piano, voice and movement; Niccolò Angioni - live electronics; Giuliana Nanna - movement.

Date and time: 29^th of January 2025. 16:30-18h.

Programmed in: “CAN YOU HEAR THAT?! Session 2”

Space: HaagsPianoHuis (The Hague, NL)

“There’s no frustration, only surrender” (Annex G, entry 18^th January).

This performance delves into liberation through exhaustion and pain - letting go the burdens of guilt, pressures, and frustrations that weigh us down. Through movement and imaginary of trance-like states, performer Giuliana Nanna and I navigate a raw, cathartic journey of release, blurring the lines between individual and collective experience. As grief is surrendered, a fleeting moment of clarity emerges with the luminous theme of Bach’s Chaconne in D major, only to dissolve once more into a shared reflection between participants.

Index of try-out 3

5.3.1 Description of the process

5.3.2 Documentation

5.3.3 Comparative analysis

5.3.4 Reflection

5.3.1 Description of the process

Similarly to Chapter 5.1.1 and 5.2.1, the initial focus will be on the process leading up to the performance, followed by an examination of the performance itself.

Preliminary thoughts and reflections

After concluding the previous performance, the idea of exploring an entirely new concept grew stronger. Rather than further refining the existing idea, I shifted the focus to the core of this project. Why am I doing this? What drives my investigation of choreomania, and why am I drawn to alternative approaches to performance-making?

Additionally, the collective experience and the fluid hierarchy between performer and participant - particularly during audience discussions - sparked thoughts about the communal dimension of the work. More questions emerged: while the residency on choreomania hosted a collective of artists, the process itself remained largely individual. Why didn’t they approach it collectively? This reflection brought me back to Aun Helden’s process during the residency, which emphasised embracing the environment and fostering a more holistic creative approach. Even though her work was individual, the process was so immersive that the results were strongly shaped by the place and her interactions with everyone (Annex D). Ultimately, these realisations led to a desire to collaborate with another performer and develop the work collectively.

The process

During the initial phase of this process, I delved deeply into the literature on choreomania. This exploration allowed me to reconnect with the ideas in Gotman’s (2018) book and weave together the discourses on choreomania with the artistic processes of the artists I observed during the residency program at the DOOR Foundation. Additionally, my interest in long-duration performances was reignited, along with the exploration of pushing the body to its limits (Annex G, entry 1^st January). I also felt a strong eagerness to explore performance in an outdoor environment. However, given the scheduled performance date - January 29^th - this would have been a risky choice.

Since the performance was part of the concert series curated by NAIP students (Ron Aviv, Sigrid Angelsen, Pietro Caramelli and me) and held in the same venue, I had to adhere to a strict time limit of 30 to 45 minutes. This constraint significantly influenced the dramaturgical structure, as I knew from the outset that audience interaction - particularly the discussion at the end - was essential. Given that this exchange would take approximately 10 to 15 minutes, I had to carefully shape the remaining performance time accordingly.

The first person I contacted for advice on the abstract components of the try-out (concept, narrative, and dramaturgical units) was María Trigueros, a highly creative pianist with a deep interest in theatre and dramaturgy. In a meeting with her, she observed that my idea for the performance sometimes lost direction and advised me to reduce it to one core element - the one that impacted me the most. Furthermore, she helped me by posing this question: What makes you want to do this performance and this research? What do you want to say with the performance? The first thing that came to my mind was liberation. Liberation from constrained self-expression. Liberation from the guilt of letting my love for classical piano fade (or temporarily disappear). Liberation from predetermined ways of thinking about performers, performance, or art. After the meeting, I kept reflecting on it and I wrote in my journal a burning thought: “I would want to connect with people, make it a collective thing. ‘Towards a collective, non-hierarchical performance’” (Annex G, entry 2^nd January). After this, I contacted Giuliana Nanna, a performer I had previously worked with in SYNAPSE Collective, and invited her to join the project, which she immediately accepted.

The concept continued to evolve and branch out over time, while its core essence remained unchanged. A more in-depth exploration of this development can be found in the selected journal entries (Annex G). One branch of the concept considered shifting the audience’s role from passive observers to active participants—allowing them to experience and physically embody liberation rather than simply recognising it as the central theme. Another explored idea was incorporating the possibility of choice for the audience: they would select between two colours, and this decision would determine with which group of audience members the performers would engage beyond the fourth wall. This distinction would not only reshape performer-audience interactions but also highlight the boundaries and interactions between participants. While this concept was further developed, it introduced significant challenges in the process, as will be discussed later.

Creating a mood board proved incredibly useful for picturing the concept of atmosphere during the performance, and therefore further sculpting the concept and narrative. By atmosphere, I refer to the abstract, subjective sense of energy perceived in a space. Through the reflective process, I continue to explore its importance and role in shaping a performance.

From this point in the process, I began considering the music during rehearsals with Niccolò. He had a drum machine that perfectly complemented the club-like, “rave” rhythm - its steady, driving beat aligning with the sense of exhaustion we sought to evoke in our exploration of letting go. During meetings with Niccolò, we also worked on different possibilities of working with the text and how to improvise with smaller fragments of words. Dramaturgical units were also roughly defined in these rehearsals, dividing it into a tryptic featuring a movement improvisation of 10 minutes, a central classical seed with improvisations, and an audience performative conversation (Annex G, entry 20^th of January). The classical seed would consist of playing a theme by Bach in D major, from the central part of his Chaconne for violin, which was composed after the death of his wife and the arrival to this theme is associated with a deeply spiritual dimension.

Simultaneously, movement rehearsals began with Giuliana though separately from the music at first. The initial phase of our collaboration focused on establishing common ground. I briefly introduced the concept of choreomania and its connection to my research, but my primary goal was to convey the essence of the performance while emphasising my interest in their creative input. I wanted the process to be truly collaborative, ensuring she felt a personal connection to the work.

The most challenging aspect of the process was, without a doubt, the movement sessions. We began by exploring exhaustion through jumping, transitioning from stillness to the heaviest possible jump. Given that this dramaturgical unit needed to last ten minutes, we tested it once in this form. To address the time constraint, we also considered starting the jumping earlier, before the audience entered, so that fatigue would already be present - introducing an element of long-duration practice that remained largely invisible to participants’ eyes. Furthermore, I suggested incorporating chains as a metaphor for restraint, exhaustion, and liberation.

Following this, we had an in-depth discussion about audience interaction. I had proposed engaging the audience in the jumps, but Giuliana raised significant concerns. She felt that directly involving them would divide our attention, preventing us from reaching the state of concentration necessary to fully embody exhaustion. She strongly believed that either the audience should be considered from the beginning, making them the primary focus, or we should immerse ourselves entirely in the experience, allowing the audience to be impacted by witnessing our state. Given her experience and my trust in her judgment, we decided to focus solely on our own exhaustion.

After abandoning the idea of engaging the audience in the jumping, I shared the new ideas with a professor at Koninklijk Conservatorium, who suggested incorporating a heavy object that could be handed to the audience, allowing them to physically experience exhaustion - an aspect I was eager to explore. In the following rehearsal, I took many chains to the rehearsal to explore possibilities. However, Giuliana once again raised an important point. She emphasised that working with objects in theatre and performance is delicate and requires much work; given the limited time before the performance, we would not be able to refine the gestures and care necessary to convey the poetic meaning effectively. Taking a pragmatic approach, she suggested focusing on a single, powerful element - the jump - which was already rich in meaning and potential. Instead of introducing additional complexity, we decided to push this idea further and develop it to its fullest.

In our next rehearsal, Giuliana suggested wearing the chains under our clothing, keeping them invisible to the audience. This would accelerate exhaustion, introduce physical discomfort from the metal against bare skin, and amplify the sound of the chains as our jumps intensified. During the movement construction, we started with the smallest movement and with the feeling of being anchored to the deep sea. Giuliana insisted in the importance of letting the movement grow by itself very slowly. Furthermore, we practiced the peripheral vision technique, which enhances awareness of the surroundings without fixating on a single point. Here are some examples from our rehearsals:

Giuliana and I started occupying all the space, but when the audience entered, they naturally surrounded the whole space in a circle, so we ended up in the centre. Niccolò was static in his live electronics station.

The interactions between disciplines in this try-out mirror those from the try-out 2. Some sections were inherently transdisciplinary, making it difficult to define clear boundaries between distinct disciplines or speak of direct dialogue between them. However, interactions between performers were particularly evident and in constant dialogue within the classical seed and improvisation. Furthermore, the interaction within the space, in the first part, was especially notable: our eyes were directed to the full space with the peripheral vision, we were anchored to the floor and then jumped as if we were reacting against it.

Audience feedback

This time, the performance was sold out, resulting in a much larger audience. During the full-circle audience conversation, several key words emerged: “very brave”, “surprising”, “intriguing”, “deeply moving”, “I wondered”, “illusion of lights”, “twilight zone”, “rave”, “freeing yourself”, “reflections” and “pushing boundaries”. The participants’ insights built upon one another, fostering a sense of active listening, reflection, and fluid exchange of ideas.

Whereas some people liked how we “pushed [our] own boundaries” and felt it was very brave to perform something like this, another participant said he found also himself very brave. Another audience member expressed being deeply moved by the connection created in the room, a sentiment that immediately resonated with three others, who responded with “me too”.

Furthermore, others commented on the illusion created by the lights and recognised themselves “wanting to jump”, seeing themselves “raving, in a rave”, wanting to join the jumping and the party, or even thinking about Pogo dance.

On another note, many responses centred around curiosity and self-questioning, as audience members engaged in a cycle of rhetorical questions, asking and answering each other in an ongoing dialogue. One woman described these reflections as “a present for all of us”. Another wondered aloud, “I wonder if we would’ve felt very different if this conversation didn't happen, but we’d kept in silence”. Giuliana, the dancer in the performance, didn’t know how I would facilitate the audience conversation, so she too became an audience member in that moment. She shared that she had “never felt as integrated as an audience member in a performance like this”.

Another audience member, who had also attended the previous performance, thanked me after the performance and said she had some thoughts she would share soon. However, not receiving an answer nearly one month later, I reminded her to give some feedback if she felt like it. She then sent me an incredibly insightful message. Given its relevance, it will be included in full:

“What has really stayed with me even now is the first part of the performance. It was really powerful. It could have only been that and it would have been just brilliant! The sound of the chains was incredible. And the moment you went into countertiming on the jumping was genius to me.

When you took off the chains there was something in me that wanted you two to take the chains off each other. I guess there was something about it that made me relate to shackles of womanhood somehow and wanted you to support each other in taking them off. I don't know what the intention was, but that was what I was reading into it.

Whereas many others mentioned they felt it was a party and wanted to join I think I always perceived a pain in the process. And yes, maybe I wanted to dance too, but not from joy per se, I think I wanted to join what felt like an effort to let something go, shake something very heavy off. And the revelation of the chains confirmed that to me.

I think I had a similar discomfort as the first time with the end of the performance where we're asked to share. Even though I get the impression many people really enjoy it. I do like that there's an explicit time carved out for reflecting how you feel and maybe some people need that.

I always enjoy your playing as well. It's a moment of the performance in which I feel I can drift a bit. Though maybe conceptually I maybe didn't see the narrative very coherently?

There's something in all of your performances about questioning the idea of the performer. What are they for, how do they interact, what do they bring? I liked how all of you approached that topic differently [referring to the rest of the performances that evening].

The dancing part also made me think of FKA twigs' new album Eusexua and how she talks about that the idea for it started at a rave and she tried to capture this sense of freedom of hours of dancing and developed these pillars for reaching a form of higher self that she called eusexua.” (Annex G, entry 24^th February).

The performance

Although the venue was the same, the disposition of the stage or performing space was different. This video illustrates it:

5.3.3 Comparative analysis

To highlight more clearly the main differences and similarities between the first and second performances, the following table has been prepared. The comments specifically address the third try-out in relation to the second one.

5.3.4 Reflection

“Acceptance and allowance of loss are crucial” (Annex E, entry 29^th October).

Even in the early stages of the first try-out, the concept of liberation was already beginning to take shape - though I had no way of knowing where it would ultimately lead. The idea of freeing myself from the artistic structures I once felt pressured to conform to started to evolve. Somehow, over time, this process became intertwined with the guilt that accompanied deciding to let go. This also led me back to my explorations on guilt with the 8-Day Performance. Ultimately, it made sense to work with liberation because it was such a connecting thread throughout my artistic practice and interests.

At this point, choreomania became essential. The bodily excess and exhaustion enacted during these historical episodes - and observing them not as a symptom of disease but as a natural function - helped me articulate both the conceptual framework and narrative for this try-out. Moreover, I would have never explored exhaustion as a tool for liberation without the knowledge I gained from my research on choreomania and how other artists have approached the topic. In addition, my investigations into power dynamics within performance were profoundly enriched by my experience at the residency, where conversations around power and hierarchies were a recurring theme. Other choreomania-related elements, such as the idea of contagion, also emerged during the audience conversation when they expressed a desire to “join”.

Challenges throughout the process

One of the main challenges was communication within the collaboration. During the early stages, I struggled to convey a clear vision of what was going to happen. While my intention was to encourage a collaborative working approach, I did not articulate this clearly enough, leading to moments of confusion among the performers. As a result, there were times when they expected direct answers to questions that I had hoped to explore collectively.

Another significant challenge was letting go of certain ideas, particularly the use of objects in the performance and interacting with the audience physically. This was a difficult thing to overcome, as I had been eager to explore these ideas. However, my limited experience in theatre and performance prevented me from fully grasping the complexity involved. Giuliana’s insight was invaluable in this process, as she was able to express her concerns and guide the next steps based on her experience.

Navigating hybrid roles and artistic boundaries

What do I want to convey to the audience? What do I want them to take from the experience? Thinking about atmosphere can help answer these questions. By atmosphere, I refer to the abstract, subjective sense of atmosphere or energy perceived in a space. I include it in the comparative analysis table as an expressive component because it generates an impression on the performers and audience, but it is not produced by performers’ actions alone. It is also a variable component. During the development of this try-out, I realised the importance of working with this component. Though subjective and difficult to define, it is useful in envisioning the atmosphere you want to create in a performance and in building the desired connection with the audience. Similarly, creating a mood board helped me visualise and refine it. In this way, considering the atmosphere in the first stages of the process can serve as a valuable tool, developing alongside the overall concept.

On another note, in Gester’s (2021) description on how actions behave, he identifies three main roles: leading, accompanying, and contrasting. However, this distinction inherently suggests a hierarchical relationship between actions. During the movement dramaturgical unit, Giuliana and I struggled to classify our interactions within these categories. Eventually, we identified a fourth, simultaneous role - a hybrid between leading and accompanying. This parallel, co-leading, non-hierarchical role allows individual and collective actions to coexist with dissolved boundaries, while sharing a common objective and being experienced in distinct ways.

Describing interactions between disciplines in this try-out reveals the same challenges as the previous one. Some elements naturally transcend boundaries - for instance, the performative seed at the beginning featured chain sounds created by our jumps. Is that movement or sound? Similarly, the audience conversation, from a purely academic or even cynical perspective, could be seen as just a feedback session. Yet, the participants remain in a performative state, while they instinctively time their contributions, shaping the exchange much like a performance itself. This fluid interplay between disciplines continues to challenge fixed definitions of artistic roles.

The struggle with the dichotomy of individual versus collective action has been a persistent theme throughout this research, ultimately revealing a hybrid "in-between." During the choreomania residency, although five artists worked individually, we observed in Aun Helden's process an embrace of both her creative vision and the collective energy of her surroundings and cohabitants. This hybrid dynamic emerged further in our exhaustion explorations - where our roles were neither purely individual nor entirely collective - as well as in the audience conversation, where individual thoughts merged to form a collective artwork. My attempt to create a collaborative piece by designing a movement section with a duo - the smallest possible collective - also exemplified this blend. These examples highlight the fluid and intertwined nature of individual and collective action, revealing a hybrid space where both coexist, influence, and shape each other.

Audience conversation -or participants’ performance-

When Giuliana and I reflected on the audience conversation, we re-examined the hierarchical power dynamics between performers and participants. During the first instruction, participants were encouraged to speak with those nearby. Although some were physically close to Giuliana, no one approached her - she remained standing alone, observing without an opportunity to join the interactions. For her, this was striking, and we thought it revealed how the distinction between performer and participant, rooted in abstract preconceptions of hierarchy, also works in reverse, unintentionally isolating the performer.

On the other hand, this participants’ performance also revealed many positive outcomes. One of the beautiful ideas within this section is that the initial simultaneous conversations remain private and unknown, yet they are still an integral part of the performance. This creates multiple side-stories, with each participant experiencing only a fragment of the whole. I find this idea fascinating because it highlights the vastness of performance - how it is impossible to fully capture every thought or moment. Each participant physically experiences a unique version of the performance, never knowing exactly what made their experience different from others.

Furthermore, the artistic approach of the insights between participants was breathtaking. It becomes an artistic choice, to comment on one aspect of the performance or the other. To comment right after or give it more space. Sometimes, people decide to contrast on what’s being said, but others it adds on top of it. They create a collective piece with their evolving stories, the turns and twists are decided individually yet collectively. There was also space for laughter, which gave it a very organic, natural and intimate atmosphere.

Surprisingly, no one approached us immediately after the performance to offer congratulations - a common practice in the field when witnessing the work of someone you know. Upon reflection, we recognised that this tradition, at its core, might be somewhat performative. For the audience, it can feel like a social obligation, a duty to acknowledge the performer’s effort or to meet external expectations. Likewise, for the performer, these expressions of praise may at times feel forced rather than entirely honest or genuine. We realised that the absence of post-performance congratulations was likely because the audience had already shared their thoughts during the conversation within the performance itself. In a way, this made their responses feel more sincere and unfiltered, emerging organically rather than as a rehearsed courtesy afterward. As Giuliana noted, what happens in the circle is real - after all, why would someone speak in front of everyone if they had nothing meaningful to say?We saw this as a positive shift, one that challenges the convention of post-show congratulations. After all, who congratulated them?

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5.3.2 Documentation

The following documentation can be found below: a recap video of the performance, photos of the performance, a selection of my project journal, a mood board, the draaiboek (or script) for the day of performance, and relevant audience’s feedback.

Photos of the performance

Photographer: Giorgia Lisi.

Behind the scenes:

Performance:

Full video of the performance

Readers who are interested in seeing the full video of the performance can find these in Annex I. The audience conversation has been subtitled.

Selection of project journal

This selection can be found in Annex G.

Mood board

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Conclusions