Snow started to fall inexplicably on a noisy night just before Halloween, as I left The Place after a single night performance of La Bambola di Carne, part of the 2008 London International Festival of Contemporary Dance. Organized by Dance Umbrella, this year’s festival featured twenty-one different productions by well known companies (including Merce Cunningham, Richard Alston, Mark Morris, O Vertigo, Stephen Petronio and Batsheva Dance Company) as well as other establishedand emerging choreographers or solo artists from Europe and overseas. Letizia Renzini was introduced to the festival as the creator of La Bambola di Carne, credited with direction, video composition, sound, and live performance, while her partner Marina Giovannini danced the major role in the piece and was responsible for the choreography

Birringer, J

Body Space & Technology

English

Brunel University Research Archive

La Bambola di CarneLetizia Renzini, with Marina GiovanniniThe Place, Dance Umbrella, London, October 28, 2008By Johannes BirringerLa Bambola di Carne, Letitizia Renzini/Mariana Giovannini. Photo courtesy of La Biennale di VeneziaSnow started to fall inexplicably on a noisy night just before Halloween, as I left ThePlace after a single night performance of La Bambola di Carne, part of the 2008London International Festival of Contemporary Dance. Organized by DanceUmbrella, this year’s festival featured twenty-one different productions by well-known companies (including Merce Cunningham, Richard Alston, Mark Morris, OVertigo, Stephen Petronio and Batsheva Dance Company) as well as other establishedand emerging choreographers or solo artists from Europe and overseas. LetiziaRenzini was introduced to the festival as the creator of La Bambola di Carne, creditedwith direction, video composition, sound, and live performance, while her partnerMarina Giovannini danced the major role in the piece and was responsible for thechoreography.The two Italian artists from Firenze had not been seen in the UK before, and LaBambola appears to have been their first collaboration, receiving its world premiere inJune 2008 during the Venice Biennial. After an extended period of dancing for theBalletto di Toscana, Giovannini made her choreographic debut in 2003 (winning theUbu Prize for Empty Space, Requiem), while Renzini has worked for a number ofyears as DJ, video artist and performer collaborating with female bands (jazz, vocalimprovisation, electronic music) and RAI Radio3, as well as with maverick theatredirectors such as Romeo Castellucci (whose Societas Raffaello Sanzio has made aname for its stunning visual performances).2As unexpectedly as the early snowfall, Renzini’s creation startled our attention bytaking us onto a backward journey into the darker recessses of the animatedexpressionism of the silent film era. The journey, however, is carried out with acomplex, innovative weave of design and visual choreography. Renzini achievessomething that is quite rare in today’s multimedia and technology-drivenexperimental performance world – a fully developed, finely tuned and superblystructured live film-dance-music work featuring an almost completely integrated(interactional) synthesis between moving image composition and a physical dancecharacter that moves in and out of the projected visual narratives with the same easewith which Renzini works the turntables and mixes the sonic layers.What kind of projectionist world of dance is this?  It certainly works on an entirelydifferent level as many VJing performances in the club scene. There are very fewvisual/graphic effects here that are not integral to the telling of a story and an overallcompositional coherence. We are struck by the effortless ease with with the dancer(Giovannini) seems to inhabit the screen world, initially as a shadow silhouette, thenstepping out of it into the stage light, downstage right  before the triptych screens,where she becomes a double of “her” film doubles.  The sharply contoured rectanglesof light almost appear to create screen spaces on the floor where the dancer slowlycreates images of a body animated as if by invisible machinations, as if controlled bysomething outside of her. Dressed only in her underwear, and her slender,androgynous body perceived in stark contrast with the opulently dressed womencharacters on film, Giovannini’s first onstage appearance creates a sense of tendernessand even unease.from the opening of Lubitsch’s film “Die Puppe”. Archival photo.The evening had begun with a surprise. There is an empty stage with three screensarranged as a triptych upstage, and during the first ten minutes of rear-projections wewatch an old movie with intertitles, the sound-track creating a lush atmosphere ofmystery as we watch a man set up a card board set of a town (projected onto thecentral screen). After a while, the film on the center screen slowly expands outwardonto the whole triptych, then the architectural contours seem to become uncannilywarped almost as if the images were seen through a prismatic mirror. The film town3seems to blur and lose its clear outlines. Renzini adds back light  onto the right sidepanel, as Giovanni’s silhouetted body appears life-size in the film and animated littlespiders crawl around the panoramic vista, from left to right and right to left.Giovannini’s silhouette grows larger, almost enormous. At this point, Renzini haswheeled out her turn table desk in front of the stage left screen, and her presence inthe dark is now felt, rather than seen, while see geometric lines crawl out onto thescreens to form mysterious spider webs. The graphics enter into a playful relationshipwith the old movie, almost as if the contemporary digital medium tried to re-masterand echo the animate frame rates of the old reels.Slowly and unmistakingly, the precision of the editing, lighting and the dynamicalternation of the black and white tonalities of early film, overlaid with crisp animatedlines, crawling insects, and – later –  contemporary video scenes shot in color, createsone of the sustaining, and increasingly heightened, rhythmic aspects of the evening.This rhythm is both musical and choreographic, initially applied exclusively to theimage-movement, then developed further by the live dancer on stage. The other mainfeature of the work is the overall graphic quality of the “visual music” (digitalanimations working from right to left, from one screen to the others, isolated in thecenter or spreading out to the panoramic totality of all three screen). Its symphonicquality builds the composition of a narrative that moves from film projection to theflesh body of the dancer (and her mostly silhouetted musican partner), from the“machine” to the human (and back). Renzini’s techno-music/jazz mix and her vocalsform the other component of the visual narrative; she combines “film music” withnumerous layers of often extremely low frequency electronic music, microtonalglitches and hisses conjured from the subterranean levels of her sonic samples.One might argue that this type of “choreography” does not compare well withconventional contemporary dance of any persuasion. Trying to place this work, I wasreminded having witnessed an eccentric “live film” performance (El Automóvil Gris)by the Mexican company Teatro de Ciertos Habitantes, a few years back  in the U.S,and that production was shown in a music-theatre, not a dance context. The Mexicantroupe had unearthed Enrique Rosas's 1919 semi-documentary movie El AutomóvilGris about a band of robbers who end up being caught and shot by the police; theyperformed the entire silent film in a mock-Japanese rendition revisiting the earlytradition of benshi live-narration (voice over) and creating a vocal-musical translationof the film which was so brilliant that it dwarfed other  artistic attempts to use silentera films (e.g. Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin) for live concerts with newlycomposed symphonic music. La Bambola di Carne does not showcase an early film,it recomposes it into something new. The only other examples I know of such quasi-archaeological revisionings of early modern art are Bill Morrison’s Decasia(recomposing found and nearly decomposed archival film stock to a violent musictrack by Michael Gordon) and Martin Arnold’s equally haunting visualization conceptfor Deanimated, an installation of three digitally reprocessed and disintegrated horrormovies in which the filmmaker “scratches” individual minimal scenes frame by frameto achieve unexpected intensities of what one might call “motion gestures.” Thesegestures, of course, are created technologically through the digital re-editing processand the halting/jittering of single frames.Renzini sticks a bit closer to the history of dance, “re-processing” Ernst Lubitsch’sfilm Die Puppe (1919) and focussing on the movement motifs in it, or rather,4inventing her own unique graphic style of gradually morphing the film’s framearchitecture and narrative content. Die Puppe  is a comedic story of Baron vonChanterelle’s effort to find the right bride for the young heir, Lancelot. Based onE.T.A Hoffman’s darker tale (Der Sandmann), the heroine of Lubitsch’s film – a realgirl and her “double” (a mechanical doll built by toymaker Hilarius ) – of courserevisits the Coppélia figure of classical ballet, first created by the young GiuseppinaBozzacchi in 1870 in what became the most-performed romantic ballet at the OperaGarnier. What might have attracted Renzini’s graphically exuberant take onHoffman’s tale of the double is the underlying theme of uncanny ambiguity betweenthe human and the mechanical, between desire and (fearful) make-belief contained inthe idea of the doppelgänger.La Bambola di Carne convincingly translates the old medium of film intocontemporary digital performance, with layerings of graphic and video scenesachieving a dizzying mix of visual motion that to some extent overshadows whatGionavanni can do in the real flesh. Her presence, not surprisingly, lacks the intensityof the visual media against which she is called upon to perform a silent incarnation ofOssi (as Lubitsch’s heroine is called), a real double of the much more evocative filmactress who plays woman and doll, confounding object of desire to the youngLancelot who prefers the doll over the girl after having fled to a monastery. Theoriginal film’s humor is unmistakingly affective, and the odd intertitles add aparticular charm to the narrative development of the plot, especially as Renzini’s liveelectronic sound gains a very powerful and dark dimension, immersing her audienceat times into a cauldron of sound as we watch the frenzied (sped up) motionrepetitions of the mechanical doll.Dancer Marina Giovannini in front of animation. Photo courtesy of Letizia RenziniThere is one fine sequence of graphic stills which look like pencil drawings creatingcartoon tableaux of a room (e.g. an easy chair and two small drawings on the leftscreen), and once again Giovannini enters the (screen) room in black silhouette almostas if she were in one of Kara Walker’s macabre cut-out landscapes of 19th centuryAmerican minstrelsy. The black figure is animate, then still, and then the tableauxbegin to move and stills become moving images, as if the theme of the “double” andthe illusion of identity is conceptually applied to the convergence of cinematographicand animated film languages, here made to dance in front of our eyes like wildJapanese manga. The strongest sequences occur in the final sections, after Renzini has5moved her turn tables downstage center, and the box-like scaffold is suddenly framedby thin blue neon strips while a row of orange lights comes on upstage, bathing thespace into a warm glow to Sabina Meyer’s distorted blues song aching withmelancholic desire, underscored by a wailing saxophone. Just prior to this scene,Giovannini had performed a quiet solo with a rectangular piece of red plexiglass, itspliable reflective material shape spotted by lights creating beautiful visual echos onher body as well as a translucent armature behind which the dancer positions her armsand legs, almost as if to comment on the doll maker’s construction of the femaleautomaton.La Bambola di Carne, with Marina Giovannini. Photo courtesy of Letizia Renzini“Paperdolls” drawings by Paolo Fiumi for La Bambola di Carne. Photo courtesu of Paolo Fiumi.6The doll maker creates a replica in the movie, and Renzini and her team (the motiongraphics/animation artists Raffaele Cafarelli and Gregory Pétitqueux, the drawingsare made by Paolo Fiumi) refract this motif of uncanny appearance in manifold ways,finally translating the climactic Lubitsch scenes of the wedding ball into a frenzy ofkaleidoscopic “game” enviroments – moving, tilting, and collapsing 3D halls ofmirrors projected as if stacked against each other on all three screens, unaligned andoblique, with distorted “expressionist” geometries holding a female figure (thegirl/doll) in a POV that zooms in and out, as if we were invited to become first personshooters hunting down a fantasized figment of the imagination. Renzini’s softwareuses game engines to achieve this dynamic POV, and one wouldn't be too far off tothink of this aesthetic as influenced by contemporary machinima.Near the end, a blue animated figure is dancing on screen while Giovanni echoes thedance on stage, then both female performers climb into the turn table box anddisappear. We now see them only on live video camera feed, as they undress/dressinto ballet tutus, contemporary female tricksters who seem to play games with the oldmovie and the Lancelot character (“What a pity you are only a doll,” the intertitlestranslate him, and then “I can't believe you are real”). The frame rates, at this pointnear the end of the performance, seem to have been sped up through reprocessing, andthe silent film gains a superb slapstick quality clearly reminiscent of the extraordinaryBuster Keaton-like mania of a body getting caught in different rates of speed or theburlesque trompe l’oeil effects of distorted geometries.The ”wedding scene” near the end. Photo courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia.Renzini’s art is a new choreography of digital transformation and layering (2d/3D),using camera techniques and editing, animation and color effects to build a powerful,and often humorous drama of strange tautologies, animated Magritte landscapes filledwith a subversive feminist sarcasm that is understated and yet gripping.  We areshown a work that joyfully excavates an early modern treatment of the uncanny,poking fun at male fantasies (as they also played out in bizarre fashion in the dolls7created by surrealist artist Hans Bellmer, especially his photographs and sculpture-objects of Les Jeux de la Poupée), and transposing Lubitsch’s movie into acontemporay multi-media performance that takes its cues from a musical aesthetic –DJing, or what Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky has called the “rhythm science” of mixing.It is a hybrid aesthetic that recomposes historical and psychological layers of meaninginto a complex cultural collage of identity confusion, the virtual becoming real andthe real disapperaring behind a veil of animated signs, with the little insectsresembling the early Pacman game and thus another layer of the more recent historyof gaming and navigating in 3D worlds. La Bambola di Carne is more convincing andeffective as a media performance, in the end, since Giovannini’s physicalperformance skill is outplayed by Renzini’s reprocessing and mixing; in this sense,the media apparatus on stage cannot incarnate or give life to the “real” woman.Rather, the choreographic embodiment of the “puppet”  remains merely an anagramof the projected superimpositions. The anatomies of the unconscious, the doubleddolls, are extruded into the plasticity of Renzini’s digital medium.Further Reference: http://www.letiziarenzini.com/

La bambola di carne

Johannes Birringer

Directory of Open Access Journals

La Bambola di Carne
Letizia Renzini, with Marina Giovannini
The Place, Dance Umbrella, London, October 28, 2008
By Johannes Birringer
La Bambola di Carne, Letitizia Renzini/Mariana Giovannini. Photo courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia
Snow started to fall inexplicably on a noisy night just before Halloween, as I left The
Place after a single night performance of La Bambola di Carne, part of the 2008
London International Festival of Contemporary Dance. Organized by Dance
Umbrella, this year’s festival featured twenty-one different productions by well-
known companies (including Merce Cunningham, Richard Alston, Mark Morris, O
Vertigo, Stephen Petronio and Batsheva Dance Company) as well as other established
and emerging choreographers or solo artists from Europe and overseas. Letizia
Renzini was introduced to the festival as the creator of La Bambola di Carne, credited
with direction, video composition, sound, and live performance, while her partner
Marina Giovannini danced the major role in the piece and was responsible for the
choreography.
The two Italian artists from Firenze had not been seen in the UK before, and La
Bambola appears to have been their first collaboration, receiving its world premiere in
June 2008 during the Venice Biennial. After an extended period of dancing for the
Balletto di Toscana, Giovannini made her choreographic debut in 2003 (winning the
Ubu Prize for Empty Space, Requiem), while Renzini has worked for a number of
years as DJ, video artist and performer collaborating with female bands (jazz, vocal
improvisation, electronic music) and RAI Radio3, as well as with maverick theatre
directors such as Romeo Castellucci (whose Societas Raffaello Sanzio has made a
name for its stunning visual performances).
2
As unexpectedly as the early snowfall, Renzini’s creation startled our attention by
taking us onto a backward journey into the darker recessses of the animated
expressionism of the silent film era. The journey, however, is carried out with a
complex, innovative weave of design and visual choreography. Renzini achieves
something that is quite rare in today’s multimedia and technology-driven
experimental performance world – a fully developed, finely tuned and superbly
structured live film-dance-music work featuring an almost completely integrated
(interactional) synthesis between moving image composition and a physical dance
character that moves in and out of the projected visual narratives with the same ease
with which Renzini works the turntables and mixes the sonic layers.
What kind of projectionist world of dance is this?  It certainly works on an entirely
different level as many VJing performances in the club scene. There are very few
visual/graphic effects here that are not integral to the telling of a story and an overall
compositional coherence. We are struck by the effortless ease with with the dancer
(Giovannini) seems to inhabit the screen world, initially as a shadow silhouette, then
stepping out of it into the stage light, downstage right  before the triptych screens,
where she becomes a double of “her” film doubles.  The sharply contoured rectangles
of light almost appear to create screen spaces on the floor where the dancer slowly
creates images of a body animated as if by invisible machinations, as if controlled by
something outside of her. Dressed only in her underwear, and her slender,
androgynous body perceived in stark contrast with the opulently dressed women
characters on film, Giovannini’s first onstage appearance creates a sense of tenderness
and even unease.
from the opening of Lubitsch’s film “Die Puppe”. Archival photo.
The evening had begun with a surprise. There is an empty stage with three screens
arranged as a triptych upstage, and during the first ten minutes of rear-projections we
watch an old movie with intertitles, the sound-track creating a lush atmosphere of
mystery as we watch a man set up a card board set of a town (projected onto the
central screen). After a while, the film on the center screen slowly expands outward
onto the whole triptych, then the architectural contours seem to become uncannily
warped almost as if the images were seen through a prismatic mirror. The film town
3
seems to blur and lose its clear outlines. Renzini adds back light  onto the right side
panel, as Giovanni’s silhouetted body appears life-size in the film and animated little
spiders crawl around the panoramic vista, from left to right and right to left.
Giovannini’s silhouette grows larger, almost enormous. At this point, Renzini has
wheeled out her turn table desk in front of the stage left screen, and her presence in
the dark is now felt, rather than seen, while see geometric lines crawl out onto the
screens to form mysterious spider webs. The graphics enter into a playful relationship
with the old movie, almost as if the contemporary digital medium tried to re-master
and echo the animate frame rates of the old reels.
Slowly and unmistakingly, the precision of the editing, lighting and the dynamic
alternation of the black and white tonalities of early film, overlaid with crisp animated
lines, crawling insects, and – later –  contemporary video scenes shot in color, creates
one of the sustaining, and increasingly heightened, rhythmic aspects of the evening.
This rhythm is both musical and choreographic, initially applied exclusively to the
image-movement, then developed further by the live dancer on stage. The other main
feature of the work is the overall graphic quality of the “visual music” (digital
animations working from right to left, from one screen to the others, isolated in the
center or spreading out to the panoramic totality of all three screen). Its symphonic
quality builds the composition of a narrative that moves from film projection to the
flesh body of the dancer (and her mostly silhouetted musican partner), from the
“machine” to the human (and back). Renzini’s techno-music/jazz mix and her vocals
form the other component of the visual narrative; she combines “film music” with
numerous layers of often extremely low frequency electronic music, microtonal
glitches and hisses conjured from the subterranean levels of her sonic samples.
One might argue that this type of “choreography” does not compare well with
conventional contemporary dance of any persuasion. Trying to place this work, I was
reminded having witnessed an eccentric “live film” performance (El Automóvil Gris)
by the Mexican company Teatro de Ciertos Habitantes, a few years back  in the U.S,
and that production was shown in a music-theatre, not a dance context. The Mexican
troupe had unearthed Enrique Rosas's 1919 semi-documentary movie El Automóvil
Gris about a band of robbers who end up being caught and shot by the police; they
performed the entire silent film in a mock-Japanese rendition revisiting the early
tradition of benshi live-narration (voice over) and creating a vocal-musical translation
of the film which was so brilliant that it dwarfed other  artistic attempts to use silent
era films (e.g. Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin) for live concerts with newly
composed symphonic music. La Bambola di Carne does not showcase an early film,
it recomposes it into something new. The only other examples I know of such quasi-
archaeological revisionings of early modern art are Bill Morrison’s Decasia
(recomposing found and nearly decomposed archival film stock to a violent music
track by Michael Gordon) and Martin Arnold’s equally haunting visualization concept
for Deanimated, an installation of three digitally reprocessed and disintegrated horror
movies in which the filmmaker “scratches” individual minimal scenes frame by frame
to achieve unexpected intensities of what one might call “motion gestures.” These
gestures, of course, are created technologically through the digital re-editing process
and the halting/jittering of single frames.
Renzini sticks a bit closer to the history of dance, “re-processing” Ernst Lubitsch’s
film Die Puppe (1919) and focussing on the movement motifs in it, or rather,
4
inventing her own unique graphic style of gradually morphing the film’s frame
architecture and narrative content. Die Puppe  is a comedic story of Baron von
Chanterelle’s effort to find the right bride for the young heir, Lancelot. Based on
E.T.A Hoffman’s darker tale (Der Sandmann), the heroine of Lubitsch’s film – a real
girl and her “double” (a mechanical doll built by toymaker Hilarius ) – of course
revisits the Coppélia figure of classical ballet, first created by the young Giuseppina
Bozzacchi in 1870 in what became the most-performed romantic ballet at the Opera
Garnier. What might have attracted Renzini’s graphically exuberant take on
Hoffman’s tale of the double is the underlying theme of uncanny ambiguity between
the human and the mechanical, between desire and (fearful) make-belief contained in
the idea of the doppelgänger.
La Bambola di Carne convincingly translates the old medium of film into
contemporary digital performance, with layerings of graphic and video scenes
achieving a dizzying mix of visual motion that to some extent overshadows what
Gionavanni can do in the real flesh. Her presence, not surprisingly, lacks the intensity
of the visual media against which she is called upon to perform a silent incarnation of
Ossi (as Lubitsch’s heroine is called), a real double of the much more evocative film
actress who plays woman and doll, confounding object of desire to the young
Lancelot who prefers the doll over the girl after having fled to a monastery. The
original film’s humor is unmistakingly affective, and the odd intertitles add a
particular charm to the narrative development of the plot, especially as Renzini’s live
electronic sound gains a very powerful and dark dimension, immersing her audience
at times into a cauldron of sound as we watch the frenzied (sped up) motion
repetitions of the mechanical doll.
Dancer Marina Giovannini in front of animation. Photo courtesy of Letizia Renzini
There is one fine sequence of graphic stills which look like pencil drawings creating
cartoon tableaux of a room (e.g. an easy chair and two small drawings on the left
screen), and once again Giovannini enters the (screen) room in black silhouette almost
as if she were in one of Kara Walker’s macabre cut-out landscapes of 19th century
American minstrelsy. The black figure is animate, then still, and then the tableaux
begin to move and stills become moving images, as if the theme of the “double” and
the illusion of identity is conceptually applied to the convergence of cinematographic
and animated film languages, here made to dance in front of our eyes like wild
Japanese manga. The strongest sequences occur in the final sections, after Renzini has
5
moved her turn tables downstage center, and the box-like scaffold is suddenly framed
by thin blue neon strips while a row of orange lights comes on upstage, bathing the
space into a warm glow to Sabina Meyer’s distorted blues song aching with
melancholic desire, underscored by a wailing saxophone. Just prior to this scene,
Giovannini had performed a quiet solo with a rectangular piece of red plexiglass, its
pliable reflective material shape spotted by lights creating beautiful visual echos on
her body as well as a translucent armature behind which the dancer positions her arms
and legs, almost as if to comment on the doll maker’s construction of the female
automaton.
La Bambola di Carne, with Marina Giovannini. Photo courtesy of Letizia Renzini
“Paperdolls” drawings by Paolo Fiumi for La Bambola di Carne. Photo courtesu of Paolo Fiumi.
6
The doll maker creates a replica in the movie, and Renzini and her team (the motion
graphics/animation artists Raffaele Cafarelli and Gregory Pétitqueux, the drawings
are made by Paolo Fiumi) refract this motif of uncanny appearance in manifold ways,
finally translating the climactic Lubitsch scenes of the wedding ball into a frenzy of
kaleidoscopic “game” enviroments – moving, tilting, and collapsing 3D halls of
mirrors projected as if stacked against each other on all three screens, unaligned and
oblique, with distorted “expressionist” geometries holding a female figure (the
girl/doll) in a POV that zooms in and out, as if we were invited to become first person
shooters hunting down a fantasized figment of the imagination. Renzini’s software
uses game engines to achieve this dynamic POV, and one wouldn't be too far off to
think of this aesthetic as influenced by contemporary machinima.
Near the end, a blue animated figure is dancing on screen while Giovanni echoes the
dance on stage, then both female performers climb into the turn table box and
disappear. We now see them only on live video camera feed, as they undress/dress
into ballet tutus, contemporary female tricksters who seem to play games with the old
movie and the Lancelot character (“What a pity you are only a doll,” the intertitles
translate him, and then “I can't believe you are real”). The frame rates, at this point
near the end of the performance, seem to have been sped up through reprocessing, and
the silent film gains a superb slapstick quality clearly reminiscent of the extraordinary
Buster Keaton-like mania of a body getting caught in different rates of speed or the
burlesque trompe l’oeil effects of distorted geometries.
The ”wedding scene” near the end. Photo courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia.
Renzini’s art is a new choreography of digital transformation and layering (2d/3D),
using camera techniques and editing, animation and color effects to build a powerful,
and often humorous drama of strange tautologies, animated Magritte landscapes filled
with a subversive feminist sarcasm that is understated and yet gripping.  We are
shown a work that joyfully excavates an early modern treatment of the uncanny,
poking fun at male fantasies (as they also played out in bizarre fashion in the dolls
7
created by surrealist artist Hans Bellmer, especially his photographs and sculpture-
objects of Les Jeux de la Poupée), and transposing Lubitsch’s movie into a
contemporay multi-media performance that takes its cues from a musical aesthetic –
DJing, or what Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky has called the “rhythm science” of mixing.
It is a hybrid aesthetic that recomposes historical and psychological layers of meaning
into a complex cultural collage of identity confusion, the virtual becoming real and
the real disapperaring behind a veil of animated signs, with the little insects
resembling the early Pacman game and thus another layer of the more recent history
of gaming and navigating in 3D worlds. La Bambola di Carne is more convincing and
effective as a media performance, in the end, since Giovannini’s physical
performance skill is outplayed by Renzini’s reprocessing and mixing; in this sense,
the media apparatus on stage cannot incarnate or give life to the “real” woman.
Rather, the choreographic embodiment of the “puppet”  remains merely an anagram
of the projected superimpositions. The anatomies of the unconscious, the doubled
dolls, are extruded into the plasticity of Renzini’s digital medium.
Further Reference: http://www.letiziarenzini.com/


La Bambola di Carne

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