Dog Tags

Transgression has seldom been the prerogative of a woman. To imagine beyond a code of conduct; a space of confinement; or a mode of speech, is at once transgressive and uniquely empowering. Fired by an urge to shatter distance and access voice; Italian born visual artist, Dr. Firenza Guidi, in her recent performance, Dog Tags, treaded beneath the black veil of a Christian widow. Seeking to articulate the widow as a sensual and emotional self; a site of noise; not fixated within the tragic bounds of the black uniform imposed upon her body.

In Dog Tags, Firenza contemplated the experience of war, whose enduring consequence she holds as being the widow. The performance was the culmination of a fortnight long annual, international summer school led by Firenza. In the school, which gathered young performers and artists from continents stretching between America and Asia, Kurt Vonnegut's text, Slaughterhouse V served as a creative impulse.

Firenza's practice is complex and does not lend to easy definition. There is an overt literary dimension in her work that she pursues rather passionately. But the performance itself arises at the intersection of multiple planes of which the literary is but a crucial one. Through it, the content for the performance is enlivened.

Intensely physical exercise and expression occupying the body, allow performers a vocabulary and inhabitation that presses their engagement with the literary impulse. An invitingly raw and primal plane of body formation and movement enables performers to shed any acculturation attached to their own bodies and respond physically to the varied creative impulses including the performance site and audience.

Dog Tags, was dotted particularly with dialogue derived from Slaughterhouse V, but situated in a curious and refreshing disjunction with the physical act in performance. Action and word did not stand in a supplementary relation. Their disjunction activated the audience to decipher the performance as constituted dialogically. And in some sense spiritually, as the disparity between the spoken word and performed movement was preserved.

Firenza's work has often been termed as site specific, being explicitly un-theatrical. Indeed, she engages with site: in Dog Tags, the city square in the heart of Fucecchio.

The site is not factually performed. Its visual specificity is maintained, and with the investment of design and lighting, it is woven into the performance as an active agent. The site of Dog Tags was not simply an historical correlate complementing the performance, but subtly contributed to the physical and felt experience of the piece.

Contemporary design at once exaggerated and obscured the square, propelling it into a formation distinct from its everyday appearance. One building breathed with pieces of leather, roughly stitched together evoking sensuality, texture and violence simultaneously. Another, through lighting design induced a nostalgic romance as a sequence of waltz was performed visible, only through its windows. A third, with a biblical fresco rendered tearfully the agony of a widow as drops of red ink spilled on a transparency projected upon the fresco.

Multiple intersections such as these propel and foreground form in the performance. Form arises as an abstraction of the lived and commonplace experience or encounter. Firenza's skill to imbricate the literary and abstract as separate yet interdependent is commendable and inspiring across media, including cinema and literature. This merits appreciation not only in terms of execution, but more importantly because though Firenza has made no pretence or claim to address internationally, abstracted form in her work catapults it to transcend distinctions of culture, custom and language, as disparate as they may be.

Some of the most lasting and compelling moments of Dog Tags are when performers dressed as black widows allow for emotion to surface through strong, acrobatic bodily and voice renderings. Making for physical movements and formations that bear an anarchic value. Such moments of delicate and intricate nuance performed so closely are not simply radical or reactionary. Poetically they speak for and beyond the precincts of womanhood. At once addressing and exceeding identity.

Dog Tags, is a powerful and daring work that establishes a woman's voice in her many and contradictory hues... seductive, angry, bold, tender. Lending to the widow a human dimension; best summarised in the words of one performer; 'She is a widow. She is not dead.' To even imagine the widow with such emotion and verve is in itself a transgression from socially established norm. In this the woman both within and behind Dog Tags share equally.