Giulia Vittori
inventor of performance visions
COMMUNITY WORK
Performance Workshops for CSDWG
Irvine, CA, 2018-2019
Photograph (c) 2018 Lilibeth Labuen.
The Community Safety and Diversity Working Group is composed of UHills residents in Irvine, CA, who have come together to promote a safe, just, and friendly neighborhood by creating opportunities for residents to interact with each other and law enforcement to build community. Website: https://uhills.org/safety-and-diversity/
Feeling Safe
July 2018
FEELING SAFE was a performance workshop organized by Community Safety and Diversity Working Group and UCIrvine Police Department of UCI. It aimed to create a safe environment by building a climate of familiarity between UCI police officers and UHills community members.
I invited participants to engage in creative activities that challenge our behavioral habits to create communication, empathy, and trust. Working on a variety of scenarios and exploring relational gestures, we used performance to get to know each other, unpack stereotypes, deconstruct power dynamics, and lower the anxiety that such dynamics create. Performance is an empowering art that can support us to not only envision a safe environment but also to make it happen, allowing us to pause and feel what safety means to each of us, as members of the community where we live.
UHills Performance Lab Sharing Series
March-May 2019
A series of workshops for non-professional
performers, intended to bring the members of UHills community to know and trust one another with their differences by making performance
together. Organized by Community Safety Diversity Working Group
SHARING OUR STORIES
March 10, 10am-2pm, Community Center
Each of us brought a story we cherish from our cultures (broadly defined).
We shared episodes that define our identities in society.
SHARING OUR COLORS
April 12, 1-5pm, Community Center
A combination of performance and painting exercises helped us
share our emotions as we created together.
SHARING OUR SPACES
May 19, 1-5 pm, Community Center
We explored the different spaces we share together in our neighborhood
in an open and creative place of expression.
Photograph (c) 2013 Arne Folkedal
TESTIMONIALS FROM THE SHARING SERIES
"Giulia, thank you for sharing your gift of performance with us. It was powerful indeed!
I was reflecting yesterday, what a rare gift it was, to be lead out of our over mechanicized daily routines to allow for the elements to enter and leave us, for emotions to rise and fall. How very natural that felt and how unique! Thank you for stirring that for me!" Susan P.
"I told a simple story about how my Orthodox Jewish family had survived pogroms in Russia because their neighbors had lent them crosses. Under Giulia's direction we acted out the story. What had always been told to me as a simple story of connection across difference and gratitude took on so many more layers of meaning - uncertainty, vulnerability, dependence, shame and relief all came forth in ways that I had never imagined. I understood more deeply how my family might have felt and the emotional undercurrents that informed their emigration from Russia and shaped their new lives in the United States. It was a profoundly moving experience that I will never forget."-Martha F.
This workshop introduced me to new forms of mindfulness. We began with metaphors generated from our memories of important spaces and locales which we then expressed through movement. It was an amazing journey! Julia L.
The Sharing Our Spaces workshop operated on multiple levels from the meditative to the performative, from the self-reflective to the communal. In the space of an afternoon we were able to draw from our memories, from meaningful artifacts that we shared, from gestures and observations, and from candid interaction, new ways of understanding where we live, and with whom. Hobart T.
“When the stage becomes a canvas, strokes turn into intimate gestures, and sounds move the environment. Impro Lab takes inspiration from the improvised performances that European artists Kandinsky, Sakharoff, and Schoenberg made at the beginning of the past century in Munich by putting into relationship painting, dance, and music. Through a series of workshops in structured improvisation, you are invited to explore the possibilities for connections between live arts and images. Impro Lab calls towards the dynamism inherent in sound, movement, and color and investigates how noises become spatial, lines three-dimensional, and gestures abstract.”
Impro Lab:
Painting Performing Music
Stanford, CA, 2013
Video and footage by Giulia Vittori. A few improvisation moments
from the workshops. Thanks to all the participants in Impro Lab.
Photograph (c) 2013 Arne Folkedal
I Nostri Colori
Our Colors
Spresiano, Italy, 2015
When invited to teach a workshop for the women of my previous theatre group Compagnia Teatro d'Arte Spresiano (Italy), they told me: "We'd like to challenge our selves to reflect about our physicality and voices, as women, today." This workshop explored our now and here: looking at our being women today, can we imagine where we'd like to go? Using both traditional and experimental theatre and painting techniques, I guided the participants to follow each other, using attention and surprise.
Where I feel, there you can also feel.
Inspired by the voices of Edgar Lee Master's Spoon River Anthology, we asked: "Who's us who's they?" How far is a past female condition in a world, our own, certainly different, but still too often re-proposing the same oppressive socio-cultural mechanisms? We embodied colors and poems - steins, emotions, gestures. The collective making that we explored became a laboratory to find materials for a future performance, starting from us, from our bodies and voices. To listen, to make together, mean to understand with a different mind - starting a research which is both personal and collective.
Photographs (c) 2015 Daniela Bosco.
Thanks to the Compagnia Teatro d'Arte Spresiano.
