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This performance piece is inspired by claire and Maya’s encounter with the work of Gianni Rodari, an Italian teacher and children’s book writer whose pedagogy valued children’s innate playfulness and nurtured their imaginations as writers through collective processes. In Grammar of Fantasy, his ‘introduction to the art of inventing stories’, he explores the belief that children—and all humans—have a basic right to play, and further that creativity is essential to social justice movements.

Of the many exercises and experiments he guided with his students, his ‘Fantastic Binomials’ exercise struck a particular chord with claire and Maya. This exercise prompts writers to find two not-easily-related words and bring them together to spark the storytelling imagination.

In this research and performance project, we seek to expand on Rodari’s notion by translating his writing exercise into a dance practice. How can we take two distinct, not-easily-related terms and have them relate in space-time? What kind of tensions arise, what kind of poetry occurs by approaching this exercise through movement? Are there inherent storytelling properties in dance and how might they facilitate, or challenge, this binomial process?

The Fantastical Power of Two is anchored in the notion of singularities brought into a pair, into pairing. We facilitate this in ways that attempt to be as concrete as Rodari’s writing exercise, all while engaging strategies from time-based art: for instance by merging dances, embodying improbable word combinations, or improvising ways to explore the syntax of movement. We also explore broader ‘meta’-questions of how dance and writing may also be a ‘binomial’, informing one another to spark the imagination in an individual, a couple, a group, and audience.... Or perhaps claire and Maya are a binomial, living in different countries and cultures, separated for many years?

Independently developed with the support of Greywood Arts (Cork, Ireland), Forsøgsstationen (Copenhagen, Denmark), and through remote sessions on zoom.