Interview with Riccardo Buscarini

Riccardo Buscarini talks about No Lander

Your past works shown at The Place have been so varied. With Athletes; a stark, visually arresting piece all female piece, you sweep the Place Prize, The Plusies showed us a completely different side of you, more playful, then you brought 10 tracks back to our stage – autobiographical solo. How does this work fit with the work you have been showing in the past few years?

All my works start from personal suggestions, the state I find myself in. No Lander is definitely coming from one of those places. Different states, moments in life have different needs and therefore produce very different works.

More specifically, let’s talk about the music. Music seems to always play a huge role in your past work. What made you decide to move away from ‘epic’ focus on more subtle, intricate and perhaps challenging soundscape?

I have a love/hate relationship with music. I am very fascinated by its communicative power. A sound can change our perception of a specific scene or situation. For No Lander I wanted the body to be the main focus of the spectator’s attention and the main medium of communication. In the work is the body to create movement and to generate sounds that are then captured, manipulated and that transform the territory where body finds itself in. “Soundscape” and “landscape” are synonyms in No Lander.

How is this piece autobiographical and why is it important for you to be telling this story now?

Being a migrant myself, I feel deeply touched by the themes of home, identity and belonging, which all seem very present in our contemporary society. What is happening in the Mediterranean at the moment has also had a great impact on my reflections.

In the past 3 years I have been moving and travelling from place to place quite a lot. So I started imagining they could be the seed for a new work. I have always wanted to make my personal tribute to Homer’s Odyssey too, which has become the aesthetic framework and one of the main inspirations for the movement. The work does not follow the epic’s narrative though.

Why was it important for you to have an all male cast?

My Place Prize piece Athletes featured three women. I wanted to go to the opposite side this time. The imagery I am using for No Lander - heroes, soldiers and sailors - needed an all male cast too. Moreover, in the work the dancers build a unified group in which we do not see strong individualities but different facets of the same identity. This is crucial in the work. I was also interested in exploring masculinity and its movement nuances of course.
 
So this piece is about the sense of belonging, the sense of home perhaps. Why do you think it is so important for us to feel like we belong somewhere or to something?

It is not important to “feel like” we belong to something, somewhere or someone. In the past few years I have come to believe that we inevitably do belong to something, somewhere and someone. It is just a matter of realising it and accepting it. I believe this search is important, because it is a part of our history and our identity. At times, inexplicably, we refuse to belong, we avoid giving in, we do not allow ourselves to stop for many reasons. We keep on travelling, as if we are lost at sea. The title No Lander, for me, represents that unresolved clash between the primary desire to find a shelter for ourselves and, at the same time, the will to escape from it.
 
You have travelled the world, where do you feel most at home?

I haven’t travelled the whole world, but that is definitely my plan! Home is where you heart is”, it’s not a place, but the feeling you have when you are most at ease. I can have that when I am with the people I love, or the thought of them, anywhere. 

This sense of belonging is quite topical as we see terrible stories from migrants trying to escape their homes at all cost. Is there a bigger message to this piece related to this (no worries if not – we won’t publish anything that’s irrelevant)?

Although the work stems from very personal suggestions, as I said before, the current situation in the Mediterranean is present in my thinking and references to it appear in the imagery of the work. It is a horrible, very complex and delicate situation, of which all of us are responsible. I can’t say that No Lander attempts to offer an answer to it, neither a statement on it. It would be too ambitious and I wouldn’t feel honest. I like to think that the piece rather invites us to ask ourselves the obvious - and yet so crucial - questions: what is home? where is that place of comfort?
 
Do you choreograph on your own or is there elements of collaboration with the cast in this piece?

My creative process is always based on an agreement with my collaborators: I offer my vision, they offer their commitment to it. I always share the starting point of the work - even the ideas behind a specific scene or movement - and I ask them to commit to them through their own creativity. The process is a constant exchange between my ideas and my collaborators input. The final decisions are in my hands though!
 
What would an audience member be expected to feel after seeing No Lander? 

No Lander is an emotional and meditative work. It is silent and subtle, sometimes tender, sometimes tense. I don’t know what to expect from the audience. It it so pure, so bare. It is an experiment for me. I am curious about their reaction. What I desire most is the piece to create a strong state in the spectators… and that the piece will stay with them.
 
Is there anything else you’d like to say about the work, your work in general?  
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I don’t. Is there anything more you would like to ask?