April 3, 2008
Student and her flying feet entertain at airports
Alice Gosti loves airports. So it makes a certain sense, perhaps, that as a dancer she would she would want to perform in them.
Gosti, 22, is a senior in dance who will graduate this spring. She was raised in Italy and traveled often to the U.S. as a child. “I was always in love with airports as a kid,” she said. “You feel like your body is out of place when you get off the plane.”
Airports, she said, are “transitional spaces” that lack a sense of time and space. Really, they are nonplaces — neither quite here nor there.
After all her travel and hours spent in airports, Gosti got the ghost of an idea: She decided to create a dance piece for performance only in airports. She sought and received a Mary Gates Leadership Grant, and began writing to airports to ask for access and permission.
She wrote, “This project is about creating a performance that in 10 days will travel from airport to airport all around the world. It will interact with a characteristic shared by all airports — the power to alter one’s perception of space and time. I am interested in juxtaposing the airport — a place where space and time are warped or even suspended — with dance, an art form completely dependent on how we perceive the body moving in space and time.”
Unfortunately, she only got replies from three airports — Seattle’s Sea-Tac and the international airports in Frankfurt, Germany, and Reykjavik, Iceland. But for this energetic and innovative student, that was enough. She held a couple of open rehearsals in Meany Hall and then left March 19 for her series of performances.
She performed inside each of the three airports, beyond check-in. Her only audience, aside from airport staff, were the people passing through on their way somewhere else — which is just want Gosti wanted.
Gosti described her dance as “a mixture between modern dance and dance theater.” She said the dance is choreographed and plotted out in advance, but certain aspects of it respond to the surroundings in which it is performed.
Mostly, she said, it’s a matter of timing. “The dance has a shape, an aspect of time and motion and space. If we fix the shape and the motion, we can allow the time to vary.” The piece does not have accompanying music, she said — that is provided by the ambient noise of the airport itself.
Gosti said after graduation, she’d like to make a living as a dancer and choreographer. She also is interested in combining dance with the digital arts. She sees the airport project as just a first phase in what might be ongoing work.
“It is an ambition of mine to have a dance company that travels and performs only in airports,” she said. She likes the idea of a traveler passing by and “all of a sudden you come across a company performing.”
Gosti’s blog describes her airport dancing adventure, telling of both the awkwardness at times, and the fun of performing the dance. And how she slowly began to lose her shyness in performance. Read her blog, see photos and watch videos at http://airport.gostia.net/.
