I met Daniela Lucato for the first time last summer in a luminous Berlin

​

afternoon. We immediately started to talk about our activities and

​

interests and she told me about her filmic and choreografic works.

​

Then I saw her videos and found them very inspiring, but only when she

 

mentioned the fact that she was looking for original ideas for developing a

 

new choregraphic project I realized I could gave her my script The wheel

 

to read.

 

The impulse to write it in 2000, immediately after moving to Berlin, came

 

fully unexpected to me. As a philosopher of language focusing her

 

research on the origin of human language and bodily perception and 

 

questioning the threshold between them I found German Tanztheater and

 

especially  the work of Pina Bausch and Sasha Walz I discovered at that

 

moment very stimulating. And yet I would have never expected that

 

instead of using it to understand those issues at a theoretical level  I would

 

had felt the irresistible need to write a long choreographic text with a

 

complex, circular structure and a  precise description of the scenography

 

bult around a huge  impressive wooden wheel I noticed in a street yard,

 

where workers use to roll around it electric and phone cables, promptly

 

falling in love with it.

 

I was aware that a choreographic script written by a philosopher was

 

something weird, which had not so much hope to be performed.

 

Choreographers rarely work with scripts and rather compose their work

 

improvising it with the performers. Moreover it was a very ambitious

 

project implying a big budget (at least seven performers, an expensive

 

scenography, videos, etc.). Later on I often perceived the gesture of

 

writing  The Wheel a bit like a message in a bottle thrown in the abyss.

 

And however I did not give up the hope that someone discovered it and

 

gave it birth. In fact despite the very positive feedback I often got about

 

the script I never succeeded to get it performed.

 

I’m so grateful to Daniela, who made this miracle happen or I would

 

rather say who gave start to an exciting process which is still moving its

 

first very promising steps. When Daniela first read The Wheel she

 

immediately knew she could get it performed and communicated it to me

 

with a strong confidence and  a contagious enthusiasm. She got not scared

 

by the complexity of the whole frame. Her very spontaneous and intuitive

 

approach found the best method to deal with it. She told me that  what

 

impressed her most was the visionary dimension of the script and she

 

asked me the right questions for exploring this dimension.

 

During our intense dialogues I was surprised remarking that the most

 

abstract philosophical level of the script was easily combined with the

 

emotional, individual and even autobiographical aspects of it. This

 

connection become for Daniela an original insight she could applied in

 

her choreographic work. In the first moment when she selected four

 

performers and started the improvisation work with them I must confess I

 

was quite scared and at first I did not want to take part in it. I also felt that

 

Daniela needed a free space to develop her insights. But when eventually I

 

met Roberta and Nico, the performers, looked at their improvisation work

 

and discussed with them it was really a deep emotion. I was also puzzled

 

by the fact that Daniela’s artistic sense not only could originally translate

 

the script using our common discussion and interpretation but also

 

managed to reproduce in her performance some of my present research

 

interests I did not explicitly presented to her. For instance in the very first

 

scene which she defines “pre-birth” the dancers interacting with some

 

grapes perform a sort of archaic sensual ritual which reminded to me the

 

Bacchus rites present in several mythological mother-centered narratives

 

whose remnants are still to find in different rural traditions.

 

It is a great pleasure to work at this common project with Daniela, Nico

 

and Roberta. After the “Prima” of an ideal The Wheel’s “First Chapter”  at

 

the English Theater in April Daniela also did a beautiful video referring to

 

the last part of my script we recently discussed together using the

 

psychoanalytic ideas on children sexuality developed by Laplanche and

 

Pontalis and originally reframed by Judith Butler in an article on Gender.

 

And we are already planning the next steps which will involve other artists

 

and philosophers. Without any doubt it will be fun again for all of us!

​

​

​

​