Wilson Tanner Smith – Week 4 – finding what comes

Jul 7, 2023

The source of myth is the same as the source of imagination. And imagination is the vehicle for any kind of creation-synthesis that beats the heart of performing arts in general, and the kind of improvisational moment-making we sought to develop in our residency at Sasso in particular.

Archetypal images, the impossible things that can arise out of any flowing-together of individuals, individual-experiences, histories of a place, living rooms, tidal patterns, turns of the streams down the mountain, angry neighbors (oops), geologic time/layers, humidity, shadows cast by old grapes in the courtyard, neighborhood cats, how mountains are created. The things we got to experience over the course of one busy but pleasantly slow and focused month at Casa Sasso.

Improvisation, intuition, at its best and most vital, is action emerging out of some subconscious wellsprings, an attunement to the needs/demands of a moment, informed by past experience (training, cultural conditioning, etc.), but synthesized anew — these same wellsprings that myth and archetype speak to/from. And as stories (“”) are woven between performers-practitioners, the spontaneous connection points (whether actively embodied or found in the attention of the viewer — who is also a practitioner) mirror the foundations and practices of myth. Objects, spaces, turns of the head or hand, are given meaning promiscuously or with solemnity. It’s ritual, and also it’s a potential we each all carry within us. This imaginative, noticing, playful, mindful capacity for Presence: directed attention and imagination. Those [all things] flowing through [this thing] (place, moment, people, performance, glance…).

Bringing this practice to Sasso, in our final week here we shifted our focus more directly to the House, the home. In a few spaces (courtyard, basement, balcony), we filmed a series of short pieces born out of a play/attuning with each other and with the flows of the house, something that we got familiar with over the course of the month living here. Finally, also, we invited an audience to our practice at Casa Sasso in the form of the camera (and Yara and Elia, two new artist friends from Locarno who filmed the works): a perspective and a sense of [start and end].

After weeks in rehearsal & exploration & research modes, it was gratifying to mark and end to our work here and to more directly play with/in the myths(…) that make this time/place at Casa Sasso just as it is.