ABISSO is a short dance film developed in 2018 by Sarah and Ruggero Pini. Ruggero is a video maker and director of photography based in Shanghai and Sarah is an anthropologist and former professional dancer based is Sydney.
The material depicted in this video was recorded in 2007 and 2010 in Bologna (Italy) and in 2014 in Tenerife (Spain) as part of a larger project documenting Sarah’s experience of illness.
This video exploration applies a phenomenological approach and autoethnographic analysis to the experience of cancer.
ABISSO acts as a visual metaphor of Sarah’s inner landscape during her medical journey.
The underwater images depict the last dance Sarah performed with her original blood. Several months later she successfully underwent a stem cells transplant which radically transformed her body and immune system.
As a performative act, ABISSO marks the acknowledgment of Sarah's deepest fear and the courage to embrace her fate.
Dancer | Directing: Sarah Pini
​Cinematography: Ruggero Pini
Music: Monkeeastronaut
Release date: 2018​

Artist Interview: ​Sarah pini

Interview by Melissa Ramos recorded in Sydney, Australia on 12 May 2019. 

SARAH PINI DETAILS

Video Article: 
Resisting the ‘Patient’ Body: A Phenomenological Account
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Academic Profile: 
Researchers.mq.edu.au/en/persons/sarah-pini
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Vimeo: Vimeo Channel

Instagram: @sarah.pini
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Twitter: SarahPini_Twitter

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Sarah wishes to thank Ilona Hongisto and Karen Pearlman for sharing their expertise, cinematic eye and feedback with her; Catherine Deans, Kate Maguire-Rosier, Julie-Anne Long, Greg Downey, Kalpana Ram and John Sutton for ongoing support with this project.
​Thanks to Riccardo Occhionero for composing the original soundtrack, Matteo Bertoni and Federica Lo Dato for their encouragement and Ruggero Pini and Michele Fabris for hanging in there and accompanying her through this process.

INTRODUCTION

Sarah Pini was born in Italy, where she completed her Master studies in Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology. Trained in ballet and contemporary dance, she worked as a professional dancer throughout Europe, taking part to the first edition of the project D.A.N.C.E. (Dance Apprentice Network aCross Europe) under the artistic direction of some of the biggest names in contemporary dance such as William Forsythe, Wayne McGregor, Angelin Preljocaj and Frédéric Flamand. Currently she is completing a PhD in Cognitive Science at Macquarie University, Australia, researching the dimensions of variation in the enactment of ‘stage presence’ across different dance performers. Alongside her academic research she is developing a series of experimental dance films titled “INFINITO”.

IntervieW Transcript: SARAH PINI 

Melissa Ramos: ‘ABISSO’ is just one from a series of dance videos you made during the time you were living with the intensity of an illness. And in your video article: “Resisting the 'patient' body: a phenomenological account" A tender & brave personal story about how you faced being diagnosed with Hodgkin Lymphoma at the age of 22. This event started a profoundly long and transformative journey for you. Undergoing 10 years of intense recurring cancer treatments & having to face uncertainties & deep fears.
I want to sit on the subject of healing, there’s no denying the strong transformative power art plays in assisting artists distilling their suffering through expression. Could you please speak to us more about your journey to healing?

Sarah Pini: I think this project has been crucial for me in terms of finding my way to cope with this illness and find my own way through it, especially in terms of helping me giving a different meaning to the experience I was going through. So it was, in that sense, I think that it was an important part of the healing process because it's not just about healing the ill body, the biological body, but if you can shape or attach a powerful meaning to something that - when it happens, when you receive a cancer diagnosis, it's really hard to find meaning in a sense, it’s just: “why? Why now, why me?” And yeah, it's just something that it's not what you would like to go through, what you would you expect especially. I mean I was 22, so I was quite young. That was probably the least of my expectations, I never thought about that. When I got diagnosed, I didn't even know what cancer mean in a way. Like I knew it was bad, but it's something that never crossed my mind. So, I think healing to me is something that it really needs to go through all the dimensions of life, of your experience. It's not just healing the body, it's not enough in a way, you need to also heal your mind. And also your environment in a way, like your relationship with the people that are close to you, with the place that you inhabit. For me these ten years it has been a difficult and challenging journey. And a transformative one, because obviously your body change and you go through a lot of transformations, but also a healing one, and a chance, let's say to reshape and reconsider and transform myself. I think in that sense having a creative practice or an embodied practice could have a strong potential for healing.

Melissa Ramos: You mentioned about the different dimensions when you were processing it. Could you talk more about how you processed these different dimensions?

Sarah Pini: Yeah, I didn't do it like, I would say, I didn't do it in a systematic way. But of course, when you face these disrupting events you face existential crisis or issues, so you really need to find a way to shape a new meaning, to find some other meaning. Find a way to understand and accept the reality, but in a way that it’s bearable and makes sense to you. I would say just having been labelled as a cancer patient, and not being able to do all the things that you were used to do or wanted to do - all your identity and self, disrupted and destroyed. In that position, I think just treating the body and expecting that everything will be fine just by taking your meds, I personally think that it won’t be enough. It’s not that you’re not going to get cured, of course you will. But in terms of the psychological well-being, it's important to have a way of make sense of what's happening while it's happening.

Melissa Ramos: Yeah. So making sense... Why was it important for you to perform while going through treatments?

Sarah Pini: For me it was important to dance and enact these performances while going through treatments because it was a way for me to tell myself the story I was able to hear in a way, so it was a way for me to make sense of a critical and disrupting event. Obviously, I didn't want to hear this, I didn't want to know that I was a cancer patient and I ended up being cancer patient for 10 years. So for me it was a way of coping and transforming my reality. It was the only place where I could have an agentic perspective. I could influence my reality in a way. It was a way for me to tell this story, but on my own terms, basically.

Melissa Ramos: How has this experience change your perspective on life & movement?

Sarah Pini: This is really difficult to untangle, if it was having this experience of illness that change it, or if it was approaching this experience of illness through dance that also change the way I was experiencing illness. So, it’s really difficult to untangle what had the more strong or powerful effect that transformed my perspective. But yeah, what I can say for sure is that it deeply transformed my understanding of my body, and why a body moves and why a body should move. And what moves us.

Melissa Ramos: During & after your medical treatments – with the support of your brother (being a professional video maker).
You were adamant to film intimate dance performances in different meaningful locations, and express different metaphors that map your emotional body with the landscape. I’m curious to know what was going on in your mind & body when you were performing. Could you express to us your intentions, feelings, and thoughts you had at the time?

Sarah Pini: What I was trying to do with these dance performances and filming, obviously back then I didn't know that I was going to develop this project the way I'm doing it now. So, for me was more a matter of, I would say, to have my personal healing ritual in a way, it was a way for me to cope with the events and with the situation I was in. It was a way for me to kind of rewrite my own story. That is something that I also mentioned in the video article that just got published. When you go through severe illness, your body is treated as an object by the biomedical model, let’s say so. For me having this practice, this filming and this dance performances, it was a way to regain a form of agency, to gain a form of control. And at the same time a way of reshaping my own narrative. So in that space and in those particular places, that were all places linked to my biography, like either familiar places like home, the home of my grandparents or my home in Italy and other meaningful places. We filmed ‘ABISSO’ in Tenerife and that’s the place where my mom moved after she retired, so these were kind of meaningful places in terms of emotional links to family, memory and life, the life as I knew it before the illness.
For me it was a way to reinforce a healing process and a way also to make sense through my body, because my body was going through a lot during all the treatments and the illness. I would say it was a form of healing practice and some form of reshaping my narrative. A kind of embodied diary. So rather than writing down my feelings or emotions I was just enacting them, just dancing through them, and I was hoping this way, what I had in my mind while I was doing that, to find just the way of feeling me, feeling that I could exist in this space, that I was not just a diseased body.

Melissa Ramos: You weren't thinking that you had that when you were performing or was there times when you slip in and out of that kind of conscious thinking?

Sarah Pini: I think that was my intention before I started the improvisation or the dance. So, every performance we filmed, I already had in mind why I would choose that particular place because there were basically, like all these performances happen either before or after crucial moments during my illness, my treatments.
So, either I was going to do some disruptive meds, so it was like the beginning of just before starting something that I knew would have been difficult. A form of kind of preparing (myself) that either happened during or after some other events related to my illness. So, every time it was a bit different, so it was not every time the same. And I didn’t film for like two years, even if I was going through the treatments. So yeah, it's not like we had this project in mind, and just it was…

Melissa Ramos: it was spontaneous?

Sarah Pini: It was completely spontaneous. So, I didn't know what I was going to do with this material. I just had the need to do it while it was happening. And also, well to be honest, back then I didn't even know what would happen to me. So yeah of course, like the idea of future wasn't really a kind of stable or clear possibility - yeah. I didn't really have a plan in mind, so it was more like an immediate response, like a need to express or to tell myself.

Melissa Ramos: Yeah. The feeling that you were going through - in that time.

Sarah Pini: In a way that was a sustainable for me. And as a professional dancer back then, using my own body to tell my story - I mean that it was just like the more natural way of expressing it. But when I did it, I didn't have in mind this project or the idea of editing and composing this short film. That just happened kind of recently in the last years, I started to work on that, and kind of reshaping all the material that I collected over ten years of treatments and performances.

Melissa Ramos: So when you said that you would do a performance before something major happened and then again after. Was it in the same location?

Sarah Pini: No, I never filmed or perform a dance in the same location. Because another reason is that all these events had like a major transformative impact not just on my body, but of course also on the way you relate to the body, to your life, to your environment. Every time we filmed a performance it was either before or after major events or crucial or difficult times. So yeah, when we were going to start to work on another one, things would have changed already so much, so we couldn't ever get back to the same place. I think that's also a kind of metaphor for what a healing process, or a transformative process, is about. You can't really, you just change, you can't really go back, like there’s no the point where you started. You can't really go back. You just need to keep going and move.

Melissa Ramos: And one of the interesting things you mentioned is the notion of the “Other”, Quoting you: “Holding together two opposite dimensions. The body-self and the body-diseased-object?” How has this notion influence your narrative subjects?

Sarah Pini: I worked with this idea of 'other' both in terms of cancer as 'other' and that's an idea that comes from Deborah Gordon, a medical anthropologist who wrote on this subject and did research on the different meanings related to this disease. How people make sense of this illness and what are the common metaphors and language used to describe and talk about this illness. So yeah in my ethnography, I talked about this idea of cancer as ‘other’, in a sense that we tend to have this understanding, not just about cancer but everything that it is seen as something frightening and unknown. It's really something that scares people because you can’t really control it, and that all these fears are kind of, I would say, are difficult to deal with because they're ingrained somehow in our biology and that's our link to the idea of 'other'. What is 'other' is something that you don't know, you don't really know well. If you don't know something, you don't know how to deal with it, you don't know how to react. And so, even if it might not be as dangerous, but since it's unknown and it's different from what you know, it becomes problematic. In my research, as my body became 'other', it became something that I couldn't really control, I embodied this idea of alterity. Again, these performances for me were another way to kind of bridge my, let's say, my broken self with the kind of story I wanted to tell, the story it was important for me to believe in, basically.
And when you go through all these treatments, when you're in hospital, you stop being a person certain times and you become a disease. That's why I talk about the diseased object, the body as a diseased object, because they treat your condition, the 'disease'. So, you become the results of your tests, you become the medical definition of what's going on in your body. And it's really hard to deal with it, to keep it because you're still a person, so it’s not that you just stop being what you have been or feeling yourself and your identity but you also gain, you also get this different or new identity which is also 'other'. So, it's new, it's different, it’s unknown, and it's new for you. For me going through this period and going through these treatments with an embodied practice, with a dance practice, it was my way to kind of cope and try to pull together these two opposite forces, these two opposite meanings.

Melissa Ramos: The 'other' diseased body definition that these doctors gave you did they actually made sense to you?

Sarah Pini: Well it doesn't make sense in the beginning, because I guess that's a shock. I’m talking for myself but also all the literature I read on this topic, it's always like a traumatic event, and it takes a while to adjust and kind of accept and kind of shift your own perspective. Because in the beginning it's like: “that's just not possible because that's me, like I’m healthy, I’m ‘normal’” and all of a sudden you just became the opposite. So it takes a while to find a way to cope with this identity, and my response was the need to perform and to shift this, and just to find a space where I could also be something different, not just a cancer patient, not just a diseased body.

Melissa Ramos: Yeah I'm interested in this 'other' as you just said this 'other' being, once you were informed about this 'other', to cope with this news you would perform it in a way that you could process it, but at the same time you created another character. How did that evolve? Was there any that stood out to you?

Sarah Pini: That’s really interesting. Yeah it’s true, I don’t think I was realising that I was creating another character because I was already trying to cope with the fact that I became a character that it was new to me that I didn't expect to act or perform this role - the cancer patient - for over 10 years. But it’s true, because through performance you create also a different space, you create a different identity. So, in these performances I was neither the patient that was going to the hospital and do the treatments or the patient that the doctor would be dealing with, but I wasn't the professional dancer I was used to be or... I was kind of, something in-between something...

Melissa Ramos: I love that.

Sarah Pini: Yeah, something in-between. But still something that had a place. For me, that’s why I linked these performances to significant places as a way of kind to get some energy from the places that were important, that had a lot of meaning and emotions attached, because you need to get this support, this strength. Yeah, it’s really hard to live in that position. It’s hard because all of a sudden you have to, it’s not that you have to get rid of your identity, but this is a kind of very disruptive event that strips you away from what you, everything that you knew, that you know. So to just live, live in that space defined by medicine, by the biomedical way of understanding the body, it’s tough, it’s really difficult.

Melissa Ramos: I love how you said, “I finally became a Chimaera”, for listeners who don’t know what a Chimaera is, it’s a Greek mythological monster, that has a lion head, body like a goat and a tail of a long serpent. Why did you become a Chimaera?

Sarah Pini: Well this is actually the medical definition. In genetics is said of an organism containing a mixture of genetically different tissues. In my case is both kind of a metaphor, but it is also kind of a fact. So people that receive a bone marrow transplant for example are defined as 'Chimeras'. In my case for example, I did a bone marrow transplant from an unrelated donor, so now my body has two different genomes. One genome is the one I was born with, but from the stem cells that I got from my donor I have also obtained a different one. These cells recreated the immune system and all the blood cells from scratch. Now I have a different blood type than the one I was born with. I'm actually a biological 'Chimera' as all the people that receive this kind of treatment. It is a mythological monster that became a medical term.

Melissa Ramos: Because I actually looked it up and there’s a whole story about it.

Sarah Pini: It’s fascinating and I love the idea of being a 'Chimera'. That you’re a hybrid. Something that is a blend of different things, that somehow hold together and it’s a kind of an impossible beast. I love the concept of 'Chimera' but that it’s also a medical definition.

Melissa Ramos: Did you make a work about this 'Chimera'? Did you make a dance performance about this moment?

Sarah Pini: yes, the 'Chimera' episode, I'm working on this second episode. The series of film called 'INFINITO’ is a series of eight short films. So, the second episode is the one that we filmed right after the transplant. So yeah, hopefully it will be out soon.

Melissa Ramos: Yeah. Can't wait.

Melissa Ramos: At the time you made ABISSO, it marked an important transformation in your life. Could you please describe to our listeners what that moment was, and the situational narratives that took place?

Sarah Pini: When I decide to film a 'ABISSO' it was a crucial moment in my medical trajectory because it was 2014 and I already had lots of treatments so basically eight years had already passed and it was a moment where basically I realised that there were not many options left and at the same time I was very, very exhausted of being in this place. Because my trajectory with lymphoma, with cancer, was a strange and particular one. Luckily Hodgkin Lymphoma is a disease that is highly curable today, but there are some nasty cases where it’s a bit more challenging. Unfortunately, I was one of these cases, so all the treatments I went through worked, but only for a short amount of time. So, I had lots of relapses, so basically every year I was going through the entire process all over. I thought it was over and then it wasn't. So, after eight years – that's the time when I filmed ‘ABISSO’ – I was really exhausted, like I couldn't really cope anymore. I just had the feeling that I really needed to... to change that pattern, that life. So that’s the reason why I filmed this performance underwater because that was my feeling at the moment. Because I was doing one treatment, one immunotherapy that was a phase one trial because I already had all these standard treatments and they didn't work.
I was enrolled in several medical trials and basically this wasn’t really working anymore so I knew that the last possible available treatment was a bone marrow transplant. Something that I never really wanted to do because it’s really a tough process and challenging, so I was always hoping that there could have been other options, but at that stage I realised that if I really wanted to have a chance of getting rid of this disease, the transplant could have been possibly the last available option and so I was feeling I was really stuck in this dimension. So I filmed this dance underwater because that was the feeling I was having, like my life and the reality it was kind of disconnected from the rest of the world, it was like in a separate dimension, a dimension where you couldn’t really breathe. So, it's like when you keep your breath underwater. You can’t wait to be able to get on surface and breathe. If you keep your breath underwater for too long you just get this feeling in your body that you really need to breathe. And that’s what I was feeling, so I just needed to be able to breathe and to stay on the surface. So that’s the kind of feeling I tried to, I wanted to express, that I put in this performance.

Melissa Ramos: The process of going through that bone marrow transplant. How long did that go for?

Sarah Pini: Well the medical procedure it normally takes one month to five weeks, but then the recovery takes years. I would say like five weeks of hospitalisation; how do I say in English... in a quarantine room where you have no contact with the outside world except for one person that can come to visit you, being locked in a two meters room for like a month and a half.

Melissa Ramos: That’s what we mean by suffocating. You couldn't go and do anything.

Sarah Pini: yeah, it’s really painful, it’s a tough procedure, but it's an amazing treatment and able to save and cure a lot of people.

Melissa Ramos: I want to sit on the subject of “water”, the element of water conveys many symbolic metaphors and emotions, what does water signify for you in ABBISO?

Sarah Pini: That plays a big role. So, we were visiting my mom who moved there in the last years. There was already this connection to the fact that I was visiting my mom and at the same time it was like a challenging moment, it was a difficult time that I was going through. So aside from the need to express, and kind of enact, this feeling of having been kept in a separate dimension and not be able to breathe, as I would have loved to, there was also the element of the water as a source of life, And also another reason why we filmed ‘ABISSO’ underwater is because at that time I knew that if I was going through a transplant from an unrelated donor, that would have also had an impact on my blood. Because that would mean that I would have loose and changed my blood. This dance ‘ABISSO’ was also the last dance I performed with my original blood. So, it was a kind of a mourning, or kind of a mourning ritual for something that was going to happen, and losing my blood, it was also like losing the link with the mother. So, I think there is also this element embedded in the film. Yeah that’s the other meaning embedded in this film. It's both the feeling of being kept in a separate dimension and the feeling of wanting to be in this element as a source of life and a way of getting the strength to face the incoming future.

Melissa Ramos: So you filmed that just before you...

Sarah Pini: Yeah, we've filmed that in December 2014, then I had the transplant a few months later, like one year later but that’s because I couldn’t just go through the transplant, I had to do other treatments before in order to be ready to do it. But still, when we filmed ‘ABISSO’ I knew that what I needed to do was a bone marrow transplant because I went through all the other possible treatments for many years and nothing worked. The doctors told me that it was the last available treatment. So, the last chance to maybe get cured. I was really scared, at the same time, so I guess there was all these elements, I had a lot of fear for what it needed to be done.
Melissa Ramos: Mmh yeah. And filming underwater takes a lot of strength as well. Were you able to film very long under there?

Sarah Pini: Not really. I mean a little bit, it's more the editing, I can free dive a bit but I'm not like...

Melissa Ramos: Did you have in mind what choreography you were going to do or was it improvised?

Sarah Pini: It was improvised but also I kind of had some structure in mind, in the sense that the movements I did, I thought about it before, there was some movement that kind of reminds a foetus, like this maternal idea of the water as a source of life. But I also wanted to have a kind of... to give a positive feeling, so not just the pressure, and the fear, but also being in water, being underwater. How do you say... immersed in this element. It was something that could lift me up in a way, so yeah, there are some movements that kind of remind me of a foetus, of being in a womb.

Melissa Ramos: What kind of processes do you employ in making choreography for film? Do you plan ahead before you film or is it improvised? 

Sarah Pini: In terms of this project 'INFINITO', this series of performances, it collects the work done in the last twelve years. For that project I was improvising, but I always had already an idea of what I wanted to say and what I needed to do. Either in terms of the location and the character or the topic I needed to express, it wasn't completely improvised in a sense.

Melissa Ramos: When you are translating movement into film what are the challenges that you have or vice versa? Do you have an image, or do you have a feeling before you create a scene?

Sarah Pini: It's like, I kind of have the film or the performances in my mind. Also, we made this for the camera, the way it was intended to be filmed. Yeah, I would say I never rehearsed any of this movements or choreography, but I already had a clear idea in my mind when we started filming. I would say that was a kind of improvisation on a theme that I would have already been working on for a while. It wasn’t just getting to the space and improvise according to the atmosphere or the moment because I knew the spaces before, and I knew what kind of meaning was embedded in these places.

Melissa Ramos: And do you direct the video maker?

Sarah Pini: Yeah, we worked collaboratively in that sense. My brother has a good sense for the photography, so he knows what works best in terms of light, angles and so in that sense, he directed me. But I was also directing him, like “we do this and then we go there, and then we do this and that”. And so, it's kind of an intertwined collaboration.
It's not really, you can't really separate, like who directs what…

Melissa Ramos: Do you have a good relationship with your brother?

Sarah Pini: Yeah, I mean it has been great working with him on this project, he is my little brother, he’s my younger brother, we weren’t that close when we were kids, but of course growing older... And we collaborated on other projects as well, on other video dances, we worked together in other contexts.

Melissa Ramos: Great.

Melissa Ramos: You might visit him in China.

Sarah Pini: Yeah, I would love to!

Melissa Ramos: Does the location affect you and the way you move in specific location?

Sarah Pini: Yes, I think, apart from this specific project, I think that’s a very important and interesting aspect to work with in screendance. One of the most interesting and beautiful things. Just because of the meanings or the emotions you can get from being immersed in a place. I mean it’s so different from when you perform in a theatre, when you have this black box like abstract space. I think screendance or when you do film in certain landscapes or use open spaces, it’s really about this relationship with the environment. So it’s how can you move through an environment, but it’s also how this environment shape your feelings and emotions as well. It's a kind of intertwined relationship. It's different than performing that scene in theatre, in a way, I mean it's different.

Melissa Ramos: And based on the location do you have something in mind when you're looking for a location? Do you just stumble upon a space get effects straight away, that is a good space to...

Sarah Pini: Yeah. Well it depends, sometimes for my project 'INFINITO', the locations I worked with, were significant places. So it was not really a matter of aesthetics or, it was just like, I needed to do it there because I was there, and it was important for my story. In other contexts, it depends, if you work in a museum or I’ve been doing this other project and we’ve filmed the scientists, the biologists’ practices in the lab, so you get inspired with a very different environment, so it depends sometimes it is the context that you work with, so it’s not that you decide. But I would always keep in mind this relationship, I would always keep in mind that we're not just influencing or shaping our environment. It's also always important to acknowledge how much a space changes and transforms you as well. So yeah, I think that it was something that I would always try to acknowledge somehow.

Melissa Ramos: Yeah, it's really interesting. Do you also get affected by the sound and the location?

Sarah Pini: Yeah, I would definitely say so. I'm just thinking of all the performances that we did for this project 'INFINITO', for example the film I’m working on now is called ''RISVEGLIO’ which means ‘waking up’ (awakening) and that’s the performance we filmed after the transplant, so the 'CHIMERA' one. With that it was the end of January, it was winter in Italy and we filmed near the river bed, near my home, and so it was an environment, I mean there was the natural sound of the wind and the water, so that was already again a metaphor or a way of working with the location, with the natural elements, with the place in an emotional metaphorical way, because there was already, that place was describing, was like a perfect description or metaphor for the kind of feeling I wanted to dance, to enact. So yeah, I would say - yes.

Melissa Ramos: The soundtrack is by Monkeeastronaunt. What was your choice to work with him & how did you collaborate on developing the soundtrack?

Sarah Pini: He’s a friend of mine and I asked him a long time ago to compose a music for this project, but it was way before we edited it.
I asked him to compose music for the performances I was collecting during my treatments. So, he came up with this soundtrack which I think, it kind of expresses also this feeling of separation and oppression.
He gave me the music, quite some years ago. But when we started working on editing 'ABISSO' and making the film, I realised that this music that he gave me before was perfect for that specific feeling. I asked him to compose an original music, that then it ended up in this film.

Melissa Ramos: Yeah. When I was listening to it, I felt like an echo underwater. So I thought that was perfect for the soundtrack.

Sarah Pini: Yeah, and basically, we edited it to the choreography, I mean the dances are on this soundtrack. I mean it was a two-way collaboration so he composed it I think in 2010, and then I just kept it there because I knew I would have wanted to use it for this project one day.

Melissa Ramos: So even the sound was influenced by your choreography? And or was it influenced by this music?

Sarah Pini: Yeah well, we had a first edit without the music. Because I had this choreography in mind that kind of reminded me of the womb and then being in a separate space and not be able to breathe, so yeah, we first edited the film without the music then we added it and then kind of re-edited it.

Melissa Ramos: You stated that your dance video performances are deeply related to the unfolding of your life narrative... I’m curious to know where does ‘ABISSO’ sit in relation to your overall dance-video oeuvre?

Sarah Pini: 'ABISSO' is the first episode that we directed of the experimental film series 'INFINITO' which collects 10 years of dance performances during my illness experience. 'ABISSO' doesn't respect the timeline. We start filming in 2007 and we finished this project in 2016. We recorded 'ABISSO’ in 2014, but we decided that it was important to start from that point and we called the series 'INFINITO’ because of the infinite symbol and also because of life it’s kind of an infinite continuum. We didn’t start the series by having the first episode with the first dance, the first performance we filmed, so we kind of started towards the middle point.  The other films would be related but more in a narrative way and not in a temporal sequence. I would say that this film 'ABISSO' is part of this larger project of eight episodes, so 'ABISSO' is the first we made, but in terms of the narrative we don't know yet where it's going to be located, also because there's no really a sequence. So, every film kind of stands on its own. It tells one story and they're all linked together but more in a metaphorical way. It's not about telling my experience how it happened and when it happened. We think that it's not the most interesting part.

Melissa Ramos: What I love about dance is the invisible language it conveys with that it has many layers of expressions. Could you please talk more about your research on the nature of the variations dance has when enacted on stage across different dance performers.

Sarah Pini: That’s part of my PhD research. I am investigating the variations of stage presence’s enactment and I look at three different dance forms. It's all based around this idea that stage presence is generally understood and conceived as a specific quality of the performer, something that a good performer in theatre or dance has, when a performer dances or acts well, he’s supposed to have, he is said he has a strong presence or that he has presence. So I’m kind of challenging this idea that 'stage presence' or 'presence' in performance has to do with the intrinsic quality or abilities and skills of the performer, and I approach this theme through a cognitive ecological framework.
I'm trying to demonstrate it through my ethnographic study, so I interviewed different choreographers and performers across three different dance forms: Contemporary Ballet, Contact Improvisation and Body Weather. I went to Marseille at the National Ballet and worked with the choreographer and the dancers, asking them to explain and to describe what their experience, what their sense of presence is when they perform and when they perform a specific dance piece, that in that case was ‘Passione’ by Emio Greco, and I worked with some Contact Improvisation practitioners in Italy and here and again I worked on their sense of presence when they improvise and jam. And I also interviewed Tess De Quincey and other Body Weather performers here in Sydney, and again exploring a slightly different understanding of presence in performance. The scope of my thesis is to demonstrate that it’s all a bit more complex than that. So it's something that it's not just related to, it's not just something about the performer, it's not just that the performer has presence and with that can affect and influence the audience and the audience it isn’t just kind of a passive receiver of whatever the performer is enacting, but it's more like an ecological phenomenon. So it’s something that rather emerges. Not only a live performer is able to experience presence while is immersed in a complex environment, as the theatre and enacting or performing dance in a piece, but also there are lots of other elements that influence his experience and in a way influenced the audience, and the audience influence the performer and the context and also the history, the atmosphere, the living together. Through my thesis, I'm trying to show the complexity of this phenomenon. Just trying to reframe ‘stage presence’ in a more ecological sense.

Melissa Ramos: When you collected all this data, was there any patterns that you saw that was interesting?

Sarah Pini: Yeah, even if like the three different case studies are, like the practice, the things they do, the way they understand dance is so different, Body Weather from Ballet, or Contact, they just have different understandings of what a body is supposed to say, so during my research I also showed the different performers, the different dancers, certain videos of the other two dance forms and asked them to comment what they thought about the presence of the other performers. And they were super critical, everyone was really kind of defending their own practice, in a way, like ‘we know what presence means’, they were kind of critical – let’s say. But as you suggest, there was some sort of common pattern and that was their relationship with the environment. Even if they have different ways of understanding the body and the sense of presence, what emerged is that, it’s really linked, tied to an awareness of being immersed in a certain environment. So that I think was the common trait. The being there, the feeling of existing.
"ABISSO was also the last dance I performed with my original blood. So it was a kind of a mourning or kind of a mourning ritual for something that was going to happen, and loosing my blood, was like losing the link with the mother...."
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