Fase Orale [2018]
performance
Concept, Choreography: Federica Dauri
Performance: Federica Dauri, Martina Gabrielli
Sound composition: Elisa Batti
July 2018 — Santarcangelo Festival, Santarcangelo di Romagna, Italy — invited by Markus Öhrn
2019 — Contemporary Cluster, Rome, Italy
2019 Garbicz Festival, Garbicz, Poland
Fase Orale is a choreographic work that investigates intimacy as a relational and embodied practice. Developed from the pre-existing friendship between the two performers, the work considers the interpersonal bond not as a narrative framework, but as choreographic material in itself. Friendship, sisterhood, trust, and vulnerability become the conditions through which movement, perception, and physical relation emerge.
The title refers to the oral phase of early childhood, understood as a pre-linguistic stage in which the mouth constitutes a primary site of sensory knowledge and interaction with the external world. Drawing on this dimension, Fase Orale approaches the mouth not only as an anatomical or erotic site, but as an organ of perception: a threshold through which the distinction between self and other is tested and negotiated.
The choreography unfolds through close physical and sensory encounters. Touch, breath, smell, taste, licking, weight, and sustained bodily proximity form a vocabulary through which the performers perceive and respond to one another. Their existing intimacy enables a degree of exposure that complicates conventional distinctions between choreographed action and lived experience, allowing the relationship itself to shape the conditions of the performance.
Fase Orale examines carnality as a mode of communication and knowledge. The body is approached as a porous, relational entity whose boundaries are continually redefined through contact with another body. The work explores how intimacy can generate movement, unfolding through attention, reciprocity, vulnerability, and care, through the subtle ways in which one body listens and responds to another