Turning the world back to earth (and back again) through Alessandro Sciarroni’s spinning practice

Abstract

In this article, I address Alessandro Sciarroni’s spinning practice as it was taught and perceived in the context of the choreographer’s workshop at the 2019 Na Prática summer school in Portugal. Drawing on my personal involvement as a participant, I begin by evoking my embodied experience to outline and characterize the different impressions raised by the spinning exercises. Therefore, exploring a possible understanding of my body-in-action within the experimental rationale that framed the workshop. I then take a closer look at the practice under Martin Heidegger’s conceptual dichotomy of ‘earth vs. world’ insofar as it provides a systematic scale of relational possibilities between our bodies, ourselves as individuals and our surrounding environment. Hence, contributing to the overall debate around the relation between somatic practices and knowledge reproduction. I build on this reflection by further exploring the potential that spinning practice has in stimulating new understandings of ‘being in the earth’, thus raising the great conversation about the urgency of human beings to ‘turn’ their attitude towards the planet.