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Today on Siing we will try to discover the world of the artist Federica Loredan
We are in Venice, summer 2018, Ca Roman island. Little Zoe is my daughter's favorite doll at that moment. Little Zoe is sick, he has a fever, what to do in the middle of the lagoon, moments of panic but ... a moment, it seems that with us there is a special doctor who can cure it by listening to her heart and breath with a stethoscope/belt and giving them A very powerful medicine, a candy with honey.
Little Zoe doctor that I encountered on that occasion became a dear friend, his name is Federica Loredan and it is undoubtedly the best Italian performer in the field of body music, thanks to a very personal path that starts from dance, passes through Africa and together combines body percussion.
I met her for Siing and I asked her some questions.
Hello Doctor Federica Loredan, thanks for the availability, let's start from the beginning, what are your origins?
My origins. Well the dance has always lived me. And I don't use this verb at random, it was a necessity, a call, further on it was a cure, a partner, but I never separated and I never had the feeling of choosing it, but always it was the right thing and Normal to do: give it space. So I started like all the girls of my years between Tutù Rosa and imitating the fantastic ballets in front of the TV, then I tasted a little bit of everything especially because my body was not exactly done for classical dance.
When I arrived at the break dance and the hip hop as a teenager it was like putting a very comfortable dress, in which I immediately recognized myself and from there everything that gravitates around us going back from urban dance, to social dance, to the tap until to African dances. Africa has always been a strong and "natural" presence in some way.
On the one hand, I approached a cultural and anthropological point of view to understand what was behind "my" dances, on the other I was lucky enough to collaborate and be a friend of many African artists, pardpers and beyond. For this reason I have often been called within festivals/museums/conferences, somehow bringing a vision of cultural mediation through artistic languages.
Wonderful, movement and rhythm in short, what better roots.
Have you had experiences related to music played?
Well, next to the dance I studied music, both as a privatist and at the Conservatory (piano). I was also good, but it was not my priority, even if he made mine happy, and above all the academic approach was very close to me. Then I needed to go back to studying adult music to understand that there could be other ways, especially thanks to the encounter with the African tradition, which has an oral and more kinesthetic approach .
Because the good percussionist knows dance, the dancer called the percussionist one through his steps, they are a single language that passes through the voice from the body and hands without continuity. A vision in which I immediately felt comfortable, despite its rhythmic and dialogical complexity.
What you tell me is wonderful, not pure execution but dynamic dialogue, movement and music, rhythm and voice ... I think there is everything not?
How did you get to body music?
Like many things in life I arrived by chance , in Brittany, during a Tap Festival, I met Leela Petronio , it was magical for me, because I felt that my two passions could live in a single gesture and not to be lived separately as dance or as music.
360 ° music therefore
When I found myself at 12 already high 1h76, with the flat feet and a totally unsuitable physique to the tip shoes, I suffered a lot, but this allowed me "by chance" to get to hip hop. For years I complained about the fact that in my city there was no "scene" and people to exchange, train or measure myself.
But the isolation also allowed me to create a very personal art identity, nourishing myself with very different influences and without growing under the imprint of a single teacher. He prompted me to travel a lot, to look for outside, to taste everything, create a taste and a critical sense and today I can say that these trips have been more instructive for the meetings and experiences than for the hours of study in the room, i Seminars etc.
I know you have an artistic experience that also goes far beyond music, do you want to tell us something?
Another fundamental moment in my artistic journey made me do the theatrical experience. For the first time I heard that everything was possible and everything could coexist.
Until then I lived hip hop in the underground scene, contemporary dance in theaters, my graphic/pictorial passion in the classrooms of the Academy of Fine Arts, Lis with my deaf friends etc. The theater allowed me to remove stakes and labels, to resort to one or the other resource depending on what I wanted to tell, of the atmosphere I wanted to create. A great freedom and a great complexity together actually.
I am happy to share some links of your performance to give an idea to those who read us about your work.
If I'm not mistaken you have only brought Sol and Sirene to prestigious festivals of body music such as Body Rhythm Hamburg and IBMF Paris, Gocce instead is your latest project, could you talk about it?
I said little about this last creation for now, it is in the making.
The great challenge, despite the little teaser, is not to be on stage, direct/compose and above all to pierce my research and my poetics to other interpreters, mostly young. On the one hand because the theme required a choral dimension, on the other to explore other than one in the only two previous ones I had already developed. Transmission and training are my other great passion.
But going to others a multipurpose and multidisciplinary language matured over a lifetime is a really good challenge! The theme are the ancient crafts. On the one hand with my interest in investigating traditions and knowledge that are being lost, on the other the symbolic/archetypal value.
Lavender is the one who washes the dirty clothes of others, what you do not want to put in the square, the secret, the shame. Important reflection for us who live in the social era, where everyone appears beautiful, happy, satisfied to fill solitude or need for recognition.
This is theater for me, to give a dramaturgical/narrative aspect to the gesture, music, dance, body music at the service of a message, to open reflections and questions in the viewer.
Thanks Federica Loredan for telling you on Siing.
Read also the article: the breath in singing as I know it, as I want it
