Totemic was born in the pandemic period as a reflection on the contemporary human condition and its perpetual sense of omnipotence.
I am inhabited by doubt as never before, the pandemic has moved and broken many of my certainties. My daily ritual is disintegrated, searching for a base to rest on. I often find myself navigating in a kind of sidereal space in which I know I can place no certainty.
Totemic is a fallen deity who no longer knows who she is, who no longer recognizes herself in any place or creed. The choreography exhibits a god unrecognizable in the present, concrete in history, living energy but expired in an unidentified limbo. Powerful mute drum resonates at times. The performer falls back into the most enigmatic silence of a new, endless search for himself.
Totemica is meant to be the physical and emotional testimony of this situation, in which one inhabits a dispersed sacredness devoid of footholds.
Chiara Montalbani. Class of 1984, born in Bologna, at the age of 3 she began studying modern-creative dance
at Chorea Centro Studi Danza of Nicoletta Sacco.
She paralleled the study of classical technique with Luciana Semprini (Bologna).
From 2005 to 2006 she attended the One Year Programme at the Rotterdamo Danse Academie in Rotterdam, NL. From 2006 to 2009 he graduated from BA (Hons) Dance Theatre with a 1st class honours, at Laban Trunity College London, UK. Received the 'Marion North' Award as best performer at the Bonnie Bird Theatre, Laban, London UK.
