INSTINCT

INSTINCT is a research-creation project and performance work that emerged from a collaborative research process between Sara Biglieri and Marie Pierre Genovese.

The starting point of the project is the oral history of dancer and performer Marie Pierre Genovese, collected by Sara Biglieri and translated into a series of tableaux conceived as a passage, an initiatory journey.

Oral history is approached here not as a fixed narrative, but as a methodological approach—a space of encounter and resonance, capable of nurturing a shared and profound inquiry into lived experience. In this sense, it enters into dialogue with perspectives that understand embodied practice as a form of historical transmission (Taylor, 2003; Foster, 1995). The project thus explores the possibility of creating from embodied memory, questioning the relationship between body, history, and subjectivity.

This research raises numerous questions: how can choreographic writing emerge from oral history? How can the dialectic between body and history be nourished? Is the body a socio-political construction, or rather a “soma” that resists? Does learning to dance mean embodying a culture and its implicit norms—of posture, power, and knowledge? Is it, in some way, a way of taming an instinct? And how can somatic approaches help us question what is inscribed in the body in order to open up new physical states?

The performance unfolds in six tableaux, each corresponding to a line of inquiry and a specific kinesthetic quality. The work draws on different compositional tools: creative writing (alternating text and bodily exploration), physical marking (touch as a vector of perception), sensory reporting (dialogue around lived experience), and explicitation interviews (Vermersch, 1994), allowing access to a refined awareness of embodied experience.
These methods contribute to creating a space for sharing intimate experiences and developing a form of self-reflexivity. The creative process is thus rooted in an intersubjective dynamic, where awareness of lived experience becomes the starting point for a possible collective elaboration.

INSTINCT proposes a space of transformation that could be described, from a Foucauldian perspective, as a “heterotopia”: a place that is both open and closed, a space of passage, coexistence, and transformation.
In this sense, INSTINCT can be understood as an “open work” (Umberto Eco), a field of possibilities rather than a fixed form. Its composition takes the form of scores which, through improvisation, allow the emergence of forms in becoming—open, unstable, and in constant transformation.

This work was presented at the international conference “Producing Memory in Dance: Oral History and Mnemotechnics”, held in Nice, November 8–20, 2021.