The rhizome, biologically speaking, is an underground ‘reserve’ of certain plant species that allows them to survive adverse climatic conditions. Philosophically speaking, following the thoughts of Deleuze and Guattari, it represents non-linearity and a non-hierarchical organization of existence. Analytically speaking, following Jung, it refers to the invisible nature of life. For Sharon Fridman, a thirty-four-year-old Israeli choreographer active in Spain since 2006 with his own company, it is a declaration of necessity: to demonstrate that society can exist in harmony with the processes of nature.
His Rizoma is a grand happening for open spaces to be performed at specific times of the day (dawn in Rovereto), involving about seventy people and ten musicians. Volunteers who want to develop a relationship with the truth of their bodies, people who feel they can, together, over ten days of creation, become a community. An ecological performance made solely of bodies and voices. Where age or technical training in dance doesn’t matter, but rather the individual’s desire to connect with the universe—to breathe in harmony with others and with Nature. It has nothing to do with new-age practices; it is much simpler: rediscovering through the body a connection with the earth. A profound sense of communion also emerges for those watching this incredible moment in which Fridman seems to stage the origins of the world, a symbolic birth taking shape in every rhizome (biologically speaking). But beyond the sprouting of new forms, there is a free organization of lines in space, where all participants share the ability to regenerate and connect with each other in ever-new geometries. “We aimed to understand the definition of rhizome as a horizontal composition,” explains Sharon Fridman, “that is, without a beginning or an end, something that can give life and be capable of generating.”
All that remains is to participate, to rediscover this engaged young author who has grown artistically within the Vertigo Dance Company, nurtured by contact improvisation, firmly convinced that the responsibility of an artist today is to question the forms of society, creating a mirror that helps develop the ability to better understand oneself.
