Solo Dancing and Multiple Selves in Igor and Moreno’s Beat (2019): ‘Smarginatura’ as a politics of plurality

Daniela Perazzo

doi:10.21476/PP.2025.102563

Keywords:

solo dancing , autotheory, plurality, smarginatura, dissolving boundaries, margins

Abstract

In this paper, I consider the potential of the choreographic format of solo dancing to become, paradoxically, a site for the exploration of multiple subjective states. Thinking through conceptualisations of the plurality and differentiation of existence—from Rosi Braidotti’s (1994) theory of nomadic subjectivity, to Roberto Esposito’s (2012) rethinking of the notion of personhood, to Jack Halberstam’s (2011) generative idea of failure and losing one’s self—I attend to the performative and affective modalities through which solo dancing can reveal a commitment, both aesthetic and political, to the articulation of the subject as multiple. Solo dancing is conceptualised in this paper as articulating a critical response to the flattening and isolation of the neoliberal individual.

In times of multimediality and globalisation, I suggest that solo dancing, although imbricated in practices of performing the self, can fulfil a function that both overlaps with and exceeds stylistic gestures of self-presentation and visceral gestures of self-expression. I will reflect on the extent to which solo dancing can become a field of intensity in which the place of the subject is both unclaimed and made available to different voices. In exploring the complex ways in which the dancing of a solo performer can debunk the contradiction between its perceived singularity and its potential plurality, I will examine the solo work Beat (2019) by Igor and Moreno in which Margherita Elliot’s relentless dancing to electronic music materialises on stage many selves through a mesmerising sequence of states of plural possibility. These are not stable images, but rather slippery yet powerful impressions that inevitably fade into the next. As the dancer incessantly reinvents her body’s vocabulary and modes of address, her personal boundaries dissolve—as in Italian novelist Elena Ferrante’s concept of ‘smarginatura’, the condition of pushing dangerously towards the edges of one’s self.

Author Biography

Daniela Perazzo

Dr Daniela Perazzo is Associate Professor in Dance Studies and Postgraduate Research Coordinator for the School of Arts at Kingston University London. Her research interrogates the intersections of the aesthetic and the political in movement practices. Her work has engaged with the Deleuzoguattarian notion of ‘minor’ practice and its articulation in current choreography; with diffractive methodologies and Karen Barad’s notion of entanglement and intra-action; with questions of subjectivity and collectivity in choreographic and dramaturgical processes; and with understandings of intimacy as relational and political. Her latest research explores notions of vulnerability and discomfort and attends to the gaps, difficulties, and entanglements of modes of being in relation. Her publications include articles in Performance Philosophy, Performance Research, Dance Research Journal, Choreographic Practices, Contemporary Theatre Review, and the Journal of Awareness-Based Systems Change. Her monograph Jonathan Burrows: Towards a Minor Dance was published by Palgrave in 2019 and her chapter “Vulnerable Practice: Thinking through discomfort and precarity in Project O’s Voodoo” is included in the third edition of Contemporary Choreography: A Critical Reader (Routledge, 2026). Among other roles, she was co-convenor of the Theatre, Performance, and Philosophy Working Group of the Theatre and Performance Research Association (2018–22) and co-investigator on the AHRC-funded project “The Dancing Otherwise Network: Exploring Pluriversal Practices” (2023–25).

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