I am an Italian artist, artistic researcher and facilitator of pedagogical and cultural processes working with somatic approaches in dance, choreography and performance practices. I believe that the eco-somatic arts can work as a catalyst for ecological awareness and community cultural (re-)generation. This involves, first of all, a return to perception and the recognition of the wounds of our destructive cultural heritage. This is a necessary step towards (re-)gaining the collective ability to grieve for ecological losses. My work aims to recognise and destabilise the consequences of colonial / capitalist / extractivist practices of ecosocial destruction and individual alienation by revaluing the interpenetration of urban, archeological and natural environments and by re-somaticising the ritualistic dimension of human experience. My long term goal is to create networks and platforms for exchange and to disseminate tools, processes and perspectives of eco-somatic embodiment which support the development of translocal communities of practice and collaborative ways of inhabiting the Earth with other beings and forms of life and with matter. I aim to promote the role of dancers, movers and other somatic and eco-embodied artists more as grassroots agents of ecological consciousness and cultural change.
Raffaele Rufo (PhD)
About my work
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My background is rooted in socially inclusive practices and community cultural development. My artistic, research and pedagogical practices are entwined with the Australian ensemble ‘Liminal Theatre and Performance’, with body-phenomenology and with the Argentine Tango dance, which I later combined with Contact Improvisation, Body Weather, the Felndenkrais method of somatic movement, with deep ecology and biological gardening. I have developed my professional career travelling across Europe, Africa and Australia for more than twenty years. My whole life and professional development have been about change and transformation of forms and perspectives. I have engaged with different social and cultural contexts working often outside the comfort-zone of institutions. I have taught Tango, Contact Improvisation and more open ended forms of relational improvisational dance, somatic partnering and choreographic embodiment in studios and with theatre groups, with schools and university students and in festivals. I was involved as choreographer, facilitator and performer in a wide range of participatory artistic and community projects.
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I am currently based in Ostia (Rome, Central Italy) and my home is situated in the Natural Reserve of the Roman Coast. This is a place where the urban, archeological, rural and naturalistic dimensions of the landscape are intertwined in very interesting ways. To the West speaks the Thyrrenian sea, with its ancient waters where the river Tiber ends its long journey after crossing the inner city of Rome. To the South breathes the Forest of Castel Fusano with its thousands of dead pine trees, still standing on their dead roots, killed by fires and by parasites imported from outside Italy and Europe. I live literally 30 min away from the Colosseum and the Vatican City, in a “periphery of the periphery”, as the poet Pier Paolo Pasolini, who was murdered here, used to call it. In Ostia the contradictions between cultural, spiritual and material degradation and the potential for social innovation and (re-)generation are very strong. As a father of two children as well as an artist, researcher and facilitator facing precarious working conditions and looking for an institutional affiliation, I am surrounded by a rich connective tissues of mainly informal and scarcely funded grassroots initiatives, groups and organisations of eco-activists, outdoor and arts-based alternative educators, performing artists. social workers and cultural facilitators. I moved to the countryside of Ostia in 2021 mainly to provide my children with an opportunity to live a healthy life as children, to move freely and play outdoor and be in direct contact with the rest of nature and with other children. These are opportunities that are lacking in most urban contexts. Living where I have lived for nearly 4 years now has given me a concrete opportunity, or perhaps has placed me before the necessity to integrate the land and its nonhuman living beings and systems in the equation of my daily life. So many of the experiences that in a metropolitan urban areas can only be experienced superficially or as aspirations towards a “greener” and more ecological life have become my day-to-day, simple reality.
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For me, being Italian has nearly always meant being a migrant because my father and my mother migrated from the South of Italy to the North before I was born. I myself migrated from Milan to other Northern European cities and then to Australia and, without knowing, I ended up living half of my life as a migrant. In me, there was always a desire, an instinct, a centrifugal force to reach out towards the strange and the unknown. Several times I felt I was an exile. And the heart of the problem is that I also feel an exile when I am in Italy, in my homeland. The question of positionality is for me mainly about how I find pathways through which I can connect with my cultural heritage and ultimately with my heritage as a being in the world. I am aware that, if want to do this eco-somatic work of restoring the relationship with body and land, I need to make connections between contemporary eco-somatic knowledge and traditional eco-cutural knowledge. And not only knowledge of other non-Western cultures, I need to come to terms with my own history and culture. This means in my case the traditional eco-cultural knowledge (or lack thereof) of the ancient Greek-Roman tradition, where it came from and how it got mixed with the peoples who were already living in the Southern Italy - we're talking of over 3000 years of cultural history. I need to really reconnect with that. And that means going through the pain of realizing how much has been lost but also realizing how much of that heritage was already about colonizing. Because the Greek-Roman tradition became what it became through the colonization of other peoples and lands. In fact, the Greeks came from Greece to the South of Italy as colonizers and settlers. And my family comes from Cilento, a rural area a few kilometers away from one of the major settlements that the Greeks made in the Campania region. It is called Paestum and now is one of the main archeological sites in Italy, because of its beautiful temples, some of which are nearly intact from 2000 years ago. Yet, this realisation came at a very high cost. When I returned to Italy from Australia in 2019, just before the Covid pandemic, I was faced unwillingly with a sort of professional “suicide”. I had lost the ground needed to sustain economically and socially my hybrid identity as an artist and academic researcher on which I had invested 20 years of my life. We could not stay permanently in Australia for reasons of discrimination in the immigration laws of that country. My kids were discriminated because they are born with a genetic disease. This was very hard to accept. This sense of disempowerment and displacement both in my own country and in other “richer” countries is the main force driving my vision and endeavour to build the International Forum for the Eco-Embodied Arts (IFEEA) with the aim to widen and support access, participation, connections and exchanges across and beyond geographies, abilities, cultures and disciplines.
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My artistic practice explores the search for roots in a world where roots are as deeply needed as out of reach. The act of returning is formalised as ‘a ritual of passage’ where the object of return (landscape) and the mode of return (passage) are both transformed. The project uses and develops eco-somatic improvisation to create ‘gateways’ between matter and movement. Enacted at chosen sites, a dramaturgy of multisensory encounter incorporates the experience of exile as a necessary preparation for reconnection to place. The ritualised metamorphosis of loss into new forms of belonging recalls folk practices I observed growing up (see the ‘Tammurriata’ of Cilento). Eco-somatic entanglements with non-human environments extend the ritualisation of time and space to the contemplation of ecological disaster and the prospects for repair. My proposition is that the eco-somatic embodiment of rituals of passage in urban and non-urban settings offers the public an entirely different way of navigating the contemporary condition of being/not being at home.
My artistic practices integrates the centrifugal experiences of migration (the period of my residency in Melbourne when I trained with Liminal Theatre and Performance and completed a PhD in dance and performance studies) and the more recent reappraisal of my own ancestral connections - a centripetal desire. My earlier mastery of the Tango dance (itself a centrifugal moment, a constant movement towards the other and the stranger) and my exposure to the psychophysical metamorphosis associated with the public ritual of the ‘Milonga’ are part of my essential ‘migrant’ biography. In the other direction, a return visit to my family in the Cilento this summer, participation in a family funeral and associated rites of passage, provoked a new and unexpected sense of alliance between my cosmopolitan artistic identity and my cultural roots. The funeral bore witness to a profound and ancient kinship between people and place and, in details of the observance, between humans and plants.
Leading up to this epiphanic experience, and with accelerated urgency during Covid, I had dedicated myself to developing a new eco-somatic performance practice defined by its attention to the psychic and affective qualities of physical places; I was searching for a new kind of reaching out that revivifies matter as it reconnects place to passage. The key ingredient of this approach is a more-than-human dramaturgy of the double movement (outwards/inwards), where environmental affordances indicate directions that, subtly internalised and reciprocated, produce new ‘gateways’ or openings to the other. In ‘Danced by the Tree’ I developed improvisation scores for synesthetic encounters with trees in urban parks and forests of the Milan area. Through site-responsive processes of touching and being touched, witnessing and being witnessed, the soma was imbued with arboreal presence and attuned with ecological wounds. Dance was reclaimed as a healing force. In ‘Return of the Centaurs’, I explored the relationship between gateway and ruin, showing how the taken-for-granted passages of an archaeological site (Pompeii) functioned as memory sites for rituals of passage. In ‘Ecosomatic Persephone’, with dramaturg Flavia Gallo, we tried to put ourselves in the conditions of witnessing the possibility of crossing the threshold between the human and the nonhuman by re-somaticising ancient myth. We worked in the studio by bringing the materials collected in the dying pine forest, sharing ecosomatic improvisational movement practices, and attending to the sensory language that can enable us to see life-death-life as a fact of love as in the myth of Cora who become Persephone, the queen of the underworld. In the light of the Cilento return, these dance techniques of attunement and choreographic embodiment serve as a bridge between the rootless and the challenge of returning (differently) to roots.
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Under construction
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Under construction
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I hold a PhD in dance and performance from Deakin University Melbourne and my research has been published in academic journals and book collections (see publications). I am guest editor of the special issue on ‘Ecologies of Embodiment’ of the Journal of Embodied Research (JER 5:2 and 7:2). My movement-, video- and text-based research was recently presented in international artistic festivals, programmes and residencies such as ‘(Re)Gaining Ecological Futures’ at Floating University Berlin and ‘Roots’ at the Italian Culture Institute of Bucharest.
Some biographical notes
My life took an unpredictable turn when, in 2002, I left my job as management consultant at Bain & Company in Milan and left behind a first class Honours Degree in Business and Economics at Bocconi University to start travelling across Europe, Africa and Australia in the pursuit of a more authentically felt mission and vocation.
In the early 2000s, I lived in Senegal where I studied the West African tradition of dance and percussions with the N'Diaye griot family of Louga and with other artists collaborating with the ‘Blaise Senghor’ cultural centre in Dakar. This experience culminated with the production of an independent documentary film that won the audience prize at the Filmondo International Film Festival of Milan in 2003.
In 2004, I moved to Melbourne where I collaborated with the theatre research and experimentation ensemble "Liminal”. Throughout different projects, I observed and participated in their exploration and contamination of Western and Asian principles of acting and theatre-making in search for practices and processes through which the perceptiveness of the actors is heightened and the quality of the creative work deepened. With “Liminal” in 2005 I participated in the production and performance of ‘Damask Drum’, a piece inspired by Japanese Noh Theatre and part of a trilogy aimed at exploring and reinterpreting the work of Yukio Mishima and Zeami.
In 2008, I returned to Italy where I encountered the Tango dance studying with the dancer-actress Valentina Vitolo and various masters of the Argentine tradition such as Raul Masciocchi, Ismael Ludman, Juan Carlos Martinez and Nora Witanowski. I then joined the dance company ‘EfectoTango’, directed by Alejandro Angelica, with which in 2015 I performed “Face of Tango” at the Independent Theatre Festival of Milan. The collaboration with Valentina Vitolo led to develop a teaching practice sensible to the uniqueness of each student and to create the first Tango works for ensemble across dance and theatre: ‘My Name is Tango’ (2013), ‘La Muñeca’ (2015) and ‘Astor Tango’ (2015). Between 2011-2015, I also developed a series of dance and theatre-based programs in middle and secondary schools for motivating and supporting youths subject to socio-educational hardships and at high risk of dropping out. In 2014 these projects were recognised nationally with the award of the “Aretè” prize for socially responsible communication in the education sector.
While studying, practicing and teaching the Argentine Tango dance, I also started a genuine conversation with the philosophical tradition of phenomenology in search for a method of inquiry based on the lived experience of the body. In particular, I engaged the work of German philosopher Edmund Husserl (on consciousness), and of French philosophers Emmanuel Levinas (on otherness) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (on embodied perception). I was confronted with the frustrating realisation that cognitive thinking and analytical language are not enough to relate with and participate in the complex unfolding of reality. I was led to look critically at the dualism between subject and object, mind and body and culture and nature that haunts the phenomenological discourse - and modern colonial-capitalist culture more in general - and that is the cause of much pain and misunderstanding. I was convinced, and now I can also articulate this position more critically, that a first-person, movement-based somatic method of inquiry can help us address the cognitive-linguistic bias of phenomenology while still drawing on its strengths. I found a possible trajectory of research in the growing field of so-called practice-as-research, artistic research, arts-based research or practice-led research (according to the different geographical and cultural academic contexts in which one works). This field of research, often emerging out of the neoliberal incorporation of arts academies into universities, promotes and sustains the combination and integration of artistic practice and academic scholarship.
With a full scholarship of the Australian government, in 2015 I returned to Melbourne to pursue a practice-led PhD in dance and performance studies at Deakin University, in the School of Communication and Creative Arts. The PhD was awarded to me in 2020 for the somatic-improvisational study of touch in tango as an experience of kinaesthetic listening. As part of the doctoral process of inquiry, In 2016 I performed 'The Tango Touch' at the La Mama Theatre and at the Melbourne Fringe Festival. I subsequently immersed myself in a process of creative experimentation in public places, art galleries and other unconventional performance spaces that generated performance interventions such as 'Crosswalk Tango' and 'Soul Code'. My focus then shifted to studio research with a group of participants. I also began to train in Contact Improvisation and various contemporary forms of improvisational dance such as Body Weather and of somatic movement disciplines such as the Feldenkrais method. My research progressively specialised on the encounter between Tango and Contact Improvisation (ContacTango) as a space for contamination and development of the language of improvisation. The approach to improvisational dance emerging from and out of the PhD inquiry engages tactile experience as a form of kinaesthetic listening on the threshold between the interiority of the dancers and their openness to the world. Besides teaching several series of classes and workshops in various dance schools, I have taught this approach at the ‘International Festival of Contact Improvisation and Tango’ in Wuppertal (Germany) in 2018 and 2020 (where I also facilitated the research-oriented teachers gathering), at the ‘Solo and Contact Improvisation Festival’ in Tyrol (Austria) in 2021, and at the ‘Festival Tango Contamination’ in Strasbourg (France) in 2022.
I have taught, presented and performed my somatic, theatre and dance-based artistic and philosophical work on improvisation and sense perception in conferences, symposiums, festivals, theatres, studios, art galleries and other unconventional performative spaces. My academic research was published in various international journals, such as the European Journal of Ecopsychology (2023), VENTI Journal: Air, Experience, Aesthetics (2022), the Journal of Embodied Research (2020/2022), the Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices (2020), and the Journal of Public Pedagogies (2017) and in the book collection Thinking Touch in Partnering and Contact Improvisation (2020, edited by Malaika Sarco-Thomas). In 2018 I curated the session on The Public and Touch at the Melbourne Conference of Public Pedagogies (2018). Between 2015 and 2017 I conducted workshops and developed curriculum material for the creativity and communication program of Melbourne University’s Master of Entrepreneurship. I am currently co-editing with Dr Doerte Weig the special issue on ‘Ecologies of Embodiment’ of the videographic Journal of Embodied Research due to be published in 2022 (Vol. 5.1) and 2024 (Vol. 7.2).
I now live in Ostia, on the Roman coast (Italy), where I collaborate with the nascent theatre research ensemble “Humanitas Mundi Teatro” to explore the encounter with the other and the intensification of perceptiveness through the somatic, choreographic and dramaturgical intertwining between Tango, improvisational dance and theatre - see the recent creative-pedagogical project ‘Sulla Soglia dell’Altro’ (Thresholds of the Other).
Since 2020, I have been developing a range of dance and theatre-led ecosomatic practices, both individually and with groups, extending the study of perception to the relationship of sensory reciprocity between body and earth and promoting the role of somatic artists as agents of ecological connection and cultural change. In these practices, trees, sand, rocks and the other more-than-human agentic forces of the State Natural Reserve of the Roman Coast are engaged as intimate companions of sensing and becoming. I have recently presented my vision on how the somatic arts can contribute to build liveable worlds during a public lecture at the 2022 ‘(Re-)gaining Ecological Futures’ festival curated by Berit Fisher at Floating University Berlin. I am coordinating the ‘La Selva’ Ecological and Eco-Somatic Arts Residency with Dr Thomas Kampe and Intercultural Roots.