The 60 minutes dance quartet ‘Merlin’ is a present-day dance tale playing with the irruption of instinct and myth through the surface of our social composure.

In a culture that is increasingly dominated by symbols, images and ready-made concepts, there appears to be a growing rift between the visible expression of our existence and nature, around and within us. Standing with one foot on each side of this rift, MERLIN asks the question: can we reconcile our longing for meaning with the brutal turmoil of organic life?

Digging into several sources, in particular Jean Markale’s study of the character Merlin, the piece proposes a new perspective on one of Europe’s most prominent mythical figures. Many times represented on screen and throughout literature, the very nature of Merlin invites us to a new representation that only body textures can produce: an intermediate, dialectic space that stretches between mythical essence and temporal narrative - the place where substance meets shape.

2016 | Revolver

Picture: Robert Harte

REVOLVER, was created in collaboration with Argentinean visual artist Martin Mele and music composer Oscar Mascareñas, and funded by an Arts Council project award.

REVOLVER is a dance and visual arts experiment. A woman stands on a barricade. Revolutions. Proclaimed promises meet resistances made of flesh, bones, history and objects. Captive in her own landmarks, she fights to turn the proclaimed change into reality, as the barricade materializes the frontline of change.

Performances: Festival Mouvements sur la Ville, Montpellier (France), TDP’16 - Tipperary Dance Platform, Tipperary (IE), Festival Le Neuf Neuf, Toulouse (Fra), Project Arts Centre, Dublin (IE), Festival Isadora, Krasnoyarsk (Rus), Villa Panaderia Dorada, Düsseldorf (Ger)

2016 | A thing is a thing is a thing is something else  [film]

The screen dance film “A thing is a thing is a thing is something else…” talks about embodiment. It looks into the struggle that  arises between a proclamation of intentions and the physical realisation of the conceptualised project: resistances opposed by flesh, memory, culture and structures – both individual or social – prevent the true realisation of idealised change. A thing… draws its substance from a 15 minutes solo performed at Dublin GPO as part of the commission commemorating the centennial of the Irish Proclamation of independence.

A woman builds a barricade in the Irish countryside: a slightly absurd representation of our attempts to keep control or move forward, often ending up in building barricades that are internal as much as they are external. The stop motion technique used to create the video underlines the repetitiveness of the action. Flesh and purpose collide with the harshness and lifelessness of objects. The barricade is seen as the frontline of action, but also as the place of status quo where momentum is stopped by the attempt of both sides to move the line.

A thing… is a humorous statement on the status of personal and social revolution. While the word suggests both fundamental change and circling back to the starting point, an individual is piling objects between two trees. The barricade that arises in stop motion suggests timelessness, underlined by repetitive action, and simultaneously refers to the comical dimension of silent films. The defensive stacking literally becomes a landmark that delineates time and space, between here and there, between before and after, between one and another. As it becomes obvious that the barricade starts to separate a landscape from… itself, it evokes the frailty of human attempts to alter the course of things.

The film suggests the correspondence between individual attempts to impose change to one’s own flesh and the attempts made by revolutionaries to trigger social change through a written proclamation: it evokes the inertia that personal and collective memories, constitutive of our own flesh, and constitutive of social structures, opposes to change. As the woman accumulates objects to build the barricade she just seems to do more of the same, channelled by patterns and memory, until she finally wraps it up up with fabric – an attempt to temporarily define shape and unity, and take a stance deemed valuable.

2016 | The endless story of trying to make new out of a single self

This solo dance project was commissioned by Dublin Dance Festival to be part of Embodied, The GPO 2016 commission performed at GPO as part of the Commemoration of the centenary of the proclamation of Irish independence.

‘The endless story…’ proposes a hybrid dance-and-visual arts experience to observe phenomena of dis/continuity and traces, as well as the influence of memory and personal imprint in our conception of self-history and social history.

Is a proclamation sufficiently powerful to redirect histories? The work proposes a vision on the expression of a non-Irish-but-Irish female body today in Ireland. Revolving about her life traces, but also revolving around the traces of the unfolding piece, she takes action as an experiential mode, an act of re-composition leaving new traces inside old traces.

The loud presence of public speeches feeds in statutory authority, directing policies, and wordily promises. The contrasting presence of female dance, palpable, undeniable in its historicised material truth, creating discursive dialogue with the unsubstantial promises of speech, while she traces her own landmarks. Substance responding to words, and the visual work of Martín Mele quietly responding to the dance, anticipating its interpretation, re-reading it to offer his own impression, elegantly shadowing the choreography, while generating yet another imprint.

2015 | Moorland

The title Moorland evokes rough and legendary landscapes that are both typical and mythical in Ireland.

Moorland explores a mix of darkness, roughness and extreme precision. It evokes the ambiguous links between the amorphous underworlds of intuitions and sensations that are stored in our body memories, and the - socially acceptable - structured shapes of our daily lives. Superposing this “matter” approach, with more classically designed choreography, Moorland explores the juxtaposition between substance and shape, stiffness and release, obscurity and light, personal and collective expression. The Moor creates situations in which the dancers reveal opposite but complementary forces at work in each human being.

Moorland is a modular ensemble piece. The work can be cre-created with a group ranging between four and 25 dancers. It requires a certain level of technique and experience and is best suited for young dancers or dance students. Throughout a 2 weeks process, Iseli-Chiodi transmits the core materials of the piece to adapt and recreate the work into a new performatic shape, taking into account the experience of the dancers, the size of the group, and the nature of the space.

Iseli-Chiodi created various versions of Moorland, including:

• The Moor, a 35 minutes piece for eight dancers of Junior Company Le Marchepied in Lausanne, (Swi). Performed in France, Ireland and UK.
• Moorland, a 20 minutes piece for 5 dancers at the MA dance students at the Academy of Music and Dance, University of Limerick, Ireland. 
• Moorland, a 30 minutes piece for 22 dancers of Conservatoire à Rayonnement Régional de Toulouse, France. Performances at Festival le Neuf Neuf, Toulouse.

2013 | Fit/Misfit [a collaboration with Lux Boreal]

Four dancers between Mexico and Ireland, immersed in a spaghetti western ambiance. Fit/Misfit is a showdown starring their individual sensibilities and the need to belong. They negotiate their place, trying to fit in, adapt, and trust... Combining dynamic partnering dance and physical theatre, this energetic pulp-fiction cast humorously investigates our - sometimes awkward - attempts to belong to a group.

Fit/Misfit is a collaborative production between Iseli-Chiodi and company Lux Boreal in Tijuana (Mex). The creation took place between Mexico, Ireland and France. Premiere: Festival mouvements sur la Ville, France.

Performances: Representing Ireland @ Dublin Dance Festival (IE), Festival Mouvements sur la Ville (Fr), Foro Experimental del Centro Estatal de las Artes de Ensenada (Mex), Foro Experimental del Centro Estatal de las Artes de Mexicali, Teatro de la Casa de la Cultura de Tijuana (Mex), White Box theatre San Diego State University (USA), Dublin Fringe Festival (IE), Firkin Crane Cork (IE), Tipperary Excel Arts Centre (IE), Engage Festival Bandon (IE), FIDESP Santa Fe do Sul (Bra), FIDESP Votuporanga (Bra), FIDESP Araraquara (Bra), Tanzmesse Düsseldorf (Ger), Festival José Limon Mazatlan (Mex), Festival José Limon Los Mochis (Mex), Festival José Limon Culiacan (Mex), Encuentro Internacional de Danza Entre Fronteras Mexicali (Mex), Festival Cuerpos en Transitos Tijuana (Mex), Les Printemps de Sévelin Lausanne (Swi), Fetival de Danza Contemporanea Lila Lopez, San Luis Potosi (Mex), Teatro casa de la Cultura Tijuana (Mex), Festival Internacional Cuatro por Cuatro San Cristobal de las Casas (Mex), Festival Internacional Gonzalez, Guadalajara (Mex), Festival Angelopolitano de Danza, Puebla (Mex).

2011 | Solo Logic

Solo Logic is a dance solo with video, and a public window into intimacy. It is instinctive, sensitive, and if it is logical, it has to be Solo Logic.

In Solo Logic, video projection is treated as a window, in a muted language that contrasts with the live performance.  Solo Logic emerged with a decision to stop following usual patterns of movement, aiming to reset the balance between energy and fineness, between, skills and sensitiveness… Sometimes transparent, sometimes reflective, the video projection is treated like a window: it gives insights into the origins of the movements, also acting as dual partner in the solo configuration; Solo logic reflects the silent inner violence that sometimes affects our intimacy.

The music is transient, rarely occupying the space quite fully. Sound coming in layers as images would, as memory does. While the dancer struggles to maintain integrity, a song eventually comes up like a bubble, bursting through indecision, bringing back an instant such as we are longing for.

In the company’s work, video serves a need for perspective: it repositions and reveals the spectator’s point of view, through a subtle play with time. While incorporating voyeuristic layers of looking, it redefines and highlights the tensions between viewer and performer, and perception of time and place.

In our perspective, dancing onstage is a political statement, set to gauge a culture that discards the past, denies instincts, treats our bodies like external devices, rejects ageing, standardises aesthetics, only respects the spectacular, prefers decency to truth, gives up personal thinking to religions.

2010 | Me seeing you too

Under construction

Jazmin Chiodi and Alexandre Iseli are artists in residency at the Tipperary Excel Arts Centre since 2008

They are founders and directors of the Tipperary Dance Platform programme and TDP’ international dance festival

See  www.tdp-danceplatform.ie