This work stems from a reflection on the tragic events of Orlando, Florida, where an individual, on June 12, 2016, entered a club in the city – the Pulse, in fact – and shot randomly, killing 50 people and wounding 53 more. The story took place in a gay-friendly venue.
Pulse is the name of the place, but it is also heartbeat, breathlessness, rhythm: that of the people dancing in the club, a vital pulse, a gunshot. It also means strength, energy. We stage a reflection about the concept of community today, a questioning of individual identity, framed in a place outside of everyday social life. The bodies are dominated by a repeated and pulsating motion, they tend to a contact that is never defined, they create groups that lead the individual to be either isolated or included. In this brief study a question arises about the role of a community today, suspended between being strong in front of changes in society or recreating an isolated and inaccessible dimension. The concept of community and its characteristics, of fear for its fragility, lies in the ability to rebuild the community itself. A safe place, to freely express one’s own identity, but also for the inability to accept oneself and one’s own condition.
In an open and globalized society, a group gathers to survive the state of extraneousness in relationships with others: social archetypes where the law disappears in front of attacks from outside.
The dance, having as its focal point the body, is a perfect medium to talk about gender identity, fear, ability to be together. This work is not placed in the strand of gender issues but analyzes, starting from a historical fact, the perception of the other.
In Pulse, three people enter an environment that is already a club, in which lights, music and sounds only partially reveal what is happening: the audience is already projected, before of its entry, into an environment that is peculiar and “other”. The atmosphere is abruptly interrupted from the outside and this newly formed community breaks and loses its identity, which is reconstructed in the second part through an ironic dance but with an unexpected ending. Pulse is an attempt at union that does not take place, a wound to a body that on stage must resume moving and growing in front of a socially in crisis.
