I am an Italian artist, artistic researcher and facilitator of pedagogical and cultural processes working with somatic approaches in dance and performance practices. I believe that the eco-embodied arts can work as a catalyst for ecological awareness and community cultural (re)generation first of all by helping people return to perception and recognize the wounds of our destructive cultural heritage to regain 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 rediscovering 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 forms of life. I want to promote the role of dancers, movers and other somatic and eco-embodied artists more in general as grassroots agents of ecological consciousness and cultural change.

Raffaele Rufo

About my work

  • 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 dance 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 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-phenomenological 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 2023 (Vol. 6.2).

 

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.

I look forward to new adventures and collaborations.

Raffaele Rufo, Rome