With Justin Kennedy, Leah Katz, Mickey Mahar, Noha Ramadan, Stephen Thompson
Curated by Gigiotto Del Vecchio
On June 6, the Fondazione Donnaregina per le arti contemporanee – museo Madre turns 20 and celebrates with a three-days presentation (June 5, 6, and 7) of Rub Up on Madre, a performance by Australian choreographer and dancer Adam Linder, curated by Gigiotto Del Vecchio.
Linder’s work arrives in Naples for the first time with a project conceived specifically for Madre. It is produced by the Fondazione Donnaregina per le arti contemporanee – museo Madre, organized by Archivorum, and supported by the Amici del Madre.
Rub Up on Madre, performed by Justin Kennedy, Leah Katz, Mickey Mahar, Noha Ramadan, and Stephen Thompson, is a choreography designed for the courtyard of museo Madre. Five dancers perform for the institutions’ walls; turning away from the audience’s gaze and addressing the very structure that contains them. The performers’ figuration shifts from seduction to passivity, and from camouflage to abstraction in this durational choreography that takes the architecture as a primary partner. Privileging play and ambiguity, the bodies enact a solicitation of the museum’s walls, and in doing so bring forth notions of how performing bodies’ are or are not sustained by an institutional context. Triangulating the relationship between viewer, performer and context, the choreography lures attention through a form of oblique presence. The question of “who is performing who?” has been an ongoing generator in Adam Linder’s work over the last decade. Whether in the theatre or in the exhibition space, his choreographies center around notions of animality, technicality and desire. The classical, the digital, the primal, the theatrical, the formal, the improvised, the absurd and the critical — everything has a part to play in this approach, as long as it reveals something about the act of dancing or the cultural value we place on the form.
Rub Up on Madre embodies the tension that lies between the performance, the performers’ bodies and the museum which is now a host to choreographies. The act of performing itself becomes the main focus and currency, which is amplified in how gestures of seduction, transaction, visibility and friction are precisely deployed.
