Startup Forum
Startup seconds: Chiara Bersani
Read | 7 September 2023At Spring Forward in Elefsina, Aerowaves invited 11 emerging dance presenters to the Startup Forum, to be guided through the festival by four Aerowaves Partners, and to propose a curatorial project. Three of them were awarded €10,000 each to follow through with the project: Chiara Bersani (IT), Fatima Ndoye (FR) and Guillaume Guilherme (CH).
We are publishing snapshots from their production journeys to track their progress, problems and practical solutions.
In July, Gaia Clotilde Chernetich spoke with Chiara Bersani for a second time about her MUSIC NON STOP project, that will take place in mid-September.
Interview by Gaia Clotilde Chernetich
For Chiara Bersani and Giulia Traversi, the idea of the MUSIC NON STOP festival appeared as a space for radical yet gentle experimentation. Spazio Kor, where they have been working in Asti, northwest Italy, has been evolving towards an idea of a “cultural centre” different from any other. All events, productions and educational activities are designed to meet the needs of an ever-larger audience. MUSIC NON STOP, opening in September, will be a four-day event with special attention to accessibility – a pioneering curatorial approach that aims to offer a pleasurable experience to everyone willing to experience contemporary dance and music.
Chiara, what have you been up to since we last talked about MUSIC NON STOP?
We are currently going through the process of making our final choices. With Giulia, we are dealing with aspects connected to those “off” events which are not purely choreographic or performative. We are trying to understand if we would like to expand the programme or if we eventually prefer to keep it lighter. A DJ set will be programmed at the festival and we have decided to ask Fra de Isabella to play for us. Fra is already working independently on the very specific idea that DJ sets can also be comfortable places for neurodivergent attendees. Up till now, we have always given a lot of attention to physical accessibility, which we always fully guarantee at Spazio Kor. Accessibility for blind hosts is not particularly problematic, but unfortunately we must accept the fact that there is no way to allow complete access to DJ sets and performances for the deaf community. The idea of making our programmed DJ set accessible to neurodivergent people is now keeping us busy because it stimulates a wider reflection on space and time.
What does it mean to deal with time in an accessible way in the case of MUSIC NON STOP?
We wonder if a DJ set before dinner time, for example, might be easier to access for neurodivergent people. Practically, we are thinking about playing music outdoors, where it is possible to find different “sound areas” and create different levels of potential engagement with sounds and people. One of the most complex issue we are dealing with regards deaf people.
Deaf people represent a large community. How do you create a space accessible for them? Is this always possible?
Dance is always a complex matter for the deaf community. It is not only about their relationship to sounds and music, because their relationship to dance does not necessarily need to be sound-based. The problem is connected to the power of images that dancing produces. They need quite coherent images allowing them to follow, for example, their own train of thoughts, or, in case images are incoherent, we need to guarantee them a good variability. Concretely, slow movements in a white space without sounds can become disorienting, and silence may results discomforting. MUSIC NON STOP’s programmed artist Courtney May Robertson is going to present a short piece which we can properly frame in order to make it accessible. Soon we are also going to define the profiles that will be invited to experience a workshop with her.
How is your curatorial approach is evolving?
We need disabled bodies to keep searching a new form of visibility. Our focus on neurodivergent spectators welcomes and questions new approaches. For all these reasons, and because making festival events fully accessible requires hard work and time, we want to keep things light. The programme presents one event per day. This is quite a radical choice, but we would like to keep a festival atmosphere even with events shown at this pace. A festival does not need to and cannot be fully packed with events if it wishes to be accessible to the largest possible audience.
Festivals are often thought as immersive experiences interrupting our daily lives. It is interesting to think of a programme that does not require this. I think that festivals like MUSIC NON STOP deserve to be considered as combinations of gentle places with welcoming, soothing and comfortable agendas.
There is also another crucial aspect which Giulia and I would like to take care of. Smaller cities especially can often be invaded during festivals. The local community is kind of asked to temporarily shift away while the world of the festival takes over. We wonder if a festival with a gentler approach can become respectful in many different ways. We don’t want the community of Asti to feel colonised by our work. Our anti-festival approach is also working as our season preview. We are also looking forward to the opportunity to stay in Asti, which is neither my nor Giulia’s home town, for a longer time. I hope MUSIC NON STOP will be the start of something ongoing. We also need to test if Spazio Kor has the right attitude and spirit to become a bigger festival venue.
Is MUSIC NON STOP ready for communications? How are you going to take care of this aspect?
We are defining the idea of engaging a sort of accessible storytelling which will keep track of the ongoing festival. We have commissioned performer and multidisciplinary artist Matteo Ramponi to create the festival poster. He is sort of specialised in collage technique, and we invited him to collaborate because we feel fine with surrounding our festival with an image created by an artist who is also a friend, accompanying us on a journey which is both exciting and a bit scary.
From my perspective, a term such as “accessibility” – which was felt as “specific” until few years ago – now seems incomplete. The performing arts and their politics are becoming more responsive and diversified as they deal with diversity at all levels. Do you agree that curating the performing arts asks us to get radically rid of any form of discrimination?
In our case, Spazio Kor is always accessible to everyone. We curate and produce events for our specific audience. They have become acquainted with the fact that all texts get translated into sign language or that audio descriptions are available. This helps everyone orientate, and represents our approach. In those cases where we have not been able to specifically work to make events accessible to specific forms of disability, we communicate what we are able to provide. Trustworthy relationships with specific communities of disabled spectators can take place when limitations and tools are explained beforehand.
How do you reach your audience at Spazio Kor? How do you attract new spectators?
In Asti, we now have some groups of frequent spectators and friends who trust our work and are curious and happy to join in our events. Slowly these groups are getting bigger and more diversified. That’s also why we need to work to respond to everybody’s needs, as we are doing for MUSIC NON STOP. We hope to attract new spectators and share our work and our programme with them. My ambition is that accessibility can continue developing practices and tools that can be useful to everyone, not only for disabled people.
MUSIC NON STOP will take place at Spazio Kor (Asti, Italy) from 13-17 September 2023. See https://www.spaziokor.it for details