The Tools' Dance was born as a research project aimed at establishing a video archive of agricultural gestures investigating the automation of labor in agriculture. The project, which started in 2011, involved temporary community migrants and local farmers' laboratories, producers of agricultural machinery, farmers, dancers, choreographers, teachers, trade unionists and scholars in the construction of a gesture mapping of raw material crops Extra European origin in the West.
The gesture linked to the ritual of cultivation represents a strong model of social culture. Abandoning the hoe to drive the tractor does not only imply a change in the posture of the human body. The machine, in its innovative and positivist sense, activates morphological changes in the territory that affect new social dynamics.
For each type of cultivation (from cotton to coffee), specific themes emerge: the mechanization of the body and the loss of gesture memory; the role of migrants in the labor market; the individual gesture of the worker in relation to ideology and power; work as a propaganda tool; the man-machine; work as the main tool for collective and individual development.
Based on these reflections, The Tools' Dance - Collective Performance is a further development of the work, also born following a complex workshop that took place in Careof in May and June and involved a number of subjects from the Milan migrant community, today the main actors.
Thanks to the mediation of the Access and ASSPI Cooperative and thanks to the collaboration of ASGI, a working group has been established with people from various African countries, each linked for biographical or cultural reasons, to agricultural practice as a work and a symbol of social culture. Along with them, the study of gestures and the sharing of worker experiences, has led to delineate different themes: the mechanization of the body and the loss of gestural memory; the role of migrants in the labor market; Work as a propaganda tool; The man tool; The relationship between technical slavery and technology.
The Tools’ Dance - Collective Performance has seen the choreographic support of the Contemporary Dance Company Ariella Vidach.
