A series of ‘somatic foraging walks’ for small groups of participants in different parks in Berlin between (April - June 2023). In these guided walks I offered meditative propositions and shared my experience with wild foraging in the urban landscape. By somatic foraging, I refer to the practice of roaming in urban green spaces and foraging wild plants for eating and healing purposes. But as well, I understand the foraging in a metaphorical sense, where we are here in this place to seek and harvest a sense of belonging to nature and plant life, and a form of healing from our disconnected societal relationship to nature. At the same time we are here to give something in return, may it be a physical thing, or just conscious attention and gratitude to all that we witness.
URBAN PLANTARIUM (2022 - 2023)
Eco-somatic research at the intersection between ecology and dance, combining foraging; the practice of collecting wild plants for culinary purposes, with somatic dance; focused on the attunement to the environment. The solo-movement research was funded by DIS-TANZ-SOLO both in 2022 and in 2023 where a participatory phase, called FORAY AND INTUITIONS, invited small groups of attendants into a series of somatic foraging walks. In these walks, michela filzi offered guided experiences and meditative propositions in different parks in Berlin. This research is an exploration of the nomadic practice of foraging, which enables one to encounter any landscape and attune to it, in the ever-changing green areas, parks and gardens of the urban landscape.
The project concludes itself in the two events of URBAN PLANTARIUM - performances and conviviality, taking place in the yard of Uferstudios on the 20th and 21st of June 2023. All attendants of FORAY AND INTUITIONS and an extended audience are invited to gather around Solstice and the celebration of plant life.
The choreographic research and the shaping of musical compositions, takes place between Berlin's parks and the dance studio. michela filzi and sound artist Sebastian Faust, harvest field recordings and use them to compose sound scores through the use of a motion tracking camera. The inspiration taken from a specific plant is translated into a movement improvisation, which is translated into a sound score.
The movement improvisation is guided by the association of the plant with a specific part of the body (energetic centres or chakras), a quality of movement and an energetic pattern.
Our physical shapes are the results of energetic patterns giving rise to those forms over time. Roots, leaves, flowers, fruits, seeds, energetic gestures: ascending, descending, contracting, expanding. From a tiny roundish thing we stretch out sinking our root pole into the ground and reaching the leaf pole up towards the light. Expanding upon germination, contracting into flower buds, expanding into flowers, contracting into pollen, expanding into fruit, contracting into seed.
TIPPING POINT (2022) - ResearchLab
A dance research project by Michela Filzi developed as part of the #TAKEHEART residency funding program of the Fonds Darstellende kunste, in collaboration with Kampnagel (Hamburg).
The project investigates the changes and properties of a dynamic system in the immediate vicinity of a tipping point. In ecological and social terms, a tipping point is the point at which a series of small changes or events in a dynamic system become significant enough to cause a large, irreversible change. Based on the assumption that the body itself is a complex system and that a group of dancing bodies forms an even larger and more complex system, I have applied the phe- nomenon of the tipping point to movement research for a group of dancers and non-professional dancers.
Metabolic Encounters (2020-2021) - MA research project on an object oriented movement practice
MĀYĀ (2018)
You, me & data (2017 -2018) - a multimedia performance that plays on the notion of screened reality and the absurdity of normality in the 21st century.
The Throw Zone (2017 - 2018) - reflects on the pressures of our times and addresses the Zeit- geist of a generation lost in the immensity of possibilities.
Reel (2015 - 2018) - a collection of older projects
Hexentanz (2015) - a multimedia reinterpretation of Mary Wigman’s ‘Witch dance’