A line of performers in colourful outfits is seen from the side, making expressive hand gestures as they perform, resembling a secret or symbolic sign language.

Home Movie

Wee/Francesco Scavetta

Home Movie deals with our emotional responses to the connotation of “home” as a place of warmth, comfort and affection. Home as a metaphor for identity, of domestic bliss, conflicts and routines. The place where to welcome and where to close the door and be by ourselves. Where we feel safe and where dishes can pile up. The utopian emotional location we recollect with nostalgia. When talking about home, we often regress to childhood and refer to the place we grew up.

In its most simplified gesture, the home is a microcosm of the world where are constantly traced thresholds and broken boundaries.

The audience in this project is more exposed, and present, than in other performances. Home Movie is a sort of rite of passage that invites the public to explore and become familiar with the performing space, that constructs and deconstructs rooms within the room. The gate, the corridor, the inner walls of the house, the blueprint, the maquette; its rooms continuously keep suggesting narratives and associations. And the audience, by locating, and relocating themselves, through proximity and changes of view point, might shift between being the guests at some weird event, or a bizarre family party, or the witnesses of recollection of private fictional memories. The five dancers on stage rediscover daily rituals embodying a physical cartography that keeps transforming in front of our eyes: the sense of ‘everyday’ experienced during a lifetime. The gesture of welcoming becomes an iconic forgotten language, connecting and rejecting at the same time, in a short circuit of contradictions. And the exploration of the architecture of the space itself, exposes different ways of becoming familiar with that environment, with each other and with the audience.

The image of the house becomes the topography of our intimate being: people need houses in order to dream, in order to imagine. A politic of the gaze, juxtaposed to the impression of the glance: epiphanic and restless. Home Movie is calling for understanding of a house as universe of intimacy and immensity.

Credits

Concept, choreography
Francesco Scavetta
Created in collaboration with the dancers
Carl Aquilizan, Robin Haghi, Anika Edström Kawaji, Gry Kipperberg, Thomas Vantuycom
Music and sound design
Kim Myhr
Dramaturgy
Saša Božić
Scenography
Francesco Scavetta, Luciano Goizueta
Light design
Stefano Stacchini
Costume design
Maren Saedi
Costume assistant
Mari Ballangrud
Carpenter
Anders Hamre
Production
Wee
Co-production
Dansens Hus Oslo, Vitlycke – Centre for Performing Arts
Supported by
Arts Council Norway, Fond for lyd og bilde, Fund for Performing Artists, Oslo Kommune

Images

  • Five performers in colorful outfits twist and turn their bodies to form a living blueprint, set against a backdrop of a wall decorated with retro furniture and patterned wallpaper.
    © Francesco Scavetta
  • Two performers stand close together as one peeks playfully from behind the other, both extending their arms outward in a warm, welcoming gesture.
    © Francesco Scavetta
  • A performer in a red outfit blows air through a blue tube to keep a balloon labeled NOW floating in the air.
    © Francesco Scavetta