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In August 2022, I traveled from Istanbul to Luc en Diois, a village in  La Drome region of France, to attend the annual AS Nomadic College for the first time. That year, there were seven of us from the team who participated in the Axis Syllabus workshops led by Barış Mıhçı in Turkey. During the workshops in Luc en Diois, I interviewed with Frey Faust, Francesca Pedulla, Barış Mıhçı, Jerome D’Orso, Manuela Martella and Anne Cecile Chantune, who are part of the Axis Syllabus Research Meshwork (ASRM) and who gave workshops at Nomadic College. Together with my friends who participated in AS studies in Turkey, we prepared these interviews for publication. We share with you the interview with Francesca Pedulla.

August ‘22- Luc en Diois

Banu Açıkdeniz: Dear Francesca, I want to ask how and where your path crossed with the Axis Syllabus archive, but can we start from your experience in academia?

Francesca Pedulla: My academic path was a bit torturous, I would say. In high-school I studied classics: Ancient Greek and Latin. These fields brought me to the university, since no one can do anything only with that kind of education otherwise. At the university I studied architecture for two years. I continue to be passionate about architecture and I really enjoy working with architects, because I like the way they see the world. But I was also very lucky to realise early on  that the architectural discipline was not exactly my thing.

I was already dancing then, but dancing was more of a hobby for me. I was not thinking that dance could become my way of life. My family was not artistic, so dance was not really part of my childhood world, but I was very interested in theatre. That is why I chose architecture; to be able to design and create scenography.

Then I realized that actually I was more interested in ideas; concepts, philosophy, creative texts, etc.  So I started studying theatre and performance history and theatrical literature. This is the field I ultimately graduated from.

Meanwhile, I simultaneously studied African dances at the beginning of this second cycle. It was a big positive change and at a very challenging moment for me personally, as I was struggling with anorexia. I think getting closer to dance changed me a lot, along with other things as well. It was healing, in a very good way. I re-felt the power of my body. And I think that one of the aspects that really brought me to study and go deeper in African culture was its attention towards the body. The body is perceived as both channel and matter. (“It is the presence of matter.” consider deleting) Because all ceremonies and all rite of passages are constructed through material manipulation and the use of the body to express the Devine, through song, the spoken work, the rhythm… In order to create changes, metamorphosis. I think it was a very important aspect for me, for my personal growth and healing path.

When I started to study I had a chance to meet amazing people, and among them especially Koffi Kôkô a choreographer from Benin, a pedagog and dancer. He was living in Paris. Paris was really the center of the new wave of African dance. I started to study with him there. It’s thanks to Koffi that I decided to dance.

His work was very interesting because he was the first one who succeeded in bringing the spirituality of his culture -the Vodoun culture- into the European dance field, together with a group of young choreographers from Africa. For the first time they were trying not to confine this new wave of art in a folkloric cage. So they created  FEIDA, Fédération Internationale de la Danse Africaine. So they were claiming the right to do art using their own knowledge.

So when I finished university, I started studying at this school. It was a 2 year acting school in France/ Bourdeux. We were learning a lot of different African dances and styles. These were different ways of dancing from different ethnic groups. We were also studying biomechanics, anatomy and music. In these years I started to go to Benin. The school was organizing these trips which focussed on working on site in context. Benin really struck me. I fell in love.

Then, I started to go to Benin every year. And I decided to do a PhD in Paris.  My topic was the “The Contemporary State of Dance in West Africa”. So I was not working on the “Contemporary African Dance”, but on what was happening in Africa. It was very related to what was happening especially in France at that moment. France was developing what we now call “Contemporary African Dance”. They were sending French choreographers to Africa to create a new style of dance.  As they have choreographic centers in France- The National Choreographic Center (CCN)^[1]– they were trying to do the same thing in West Africa.

I stayed in Paris for almost one year. And then I was disgusted, I really couldn’t get along with my professor. I was pretty tired of being always on the other side: studying, instead of doing. So I quit in a very abrupt way. I took a night train to Italy without saying anything to anyone (laughs).

In Italy, I began working in the company of Giovanni Di Cicco, a very well known Italian  choreographer. At one point, I decided to create my own pieces – instead of only working in other people’s  projects. I said ‘Look, I have some ideas about how to preserve tradition but also keep evolving it’. So what I was looking for was not a way merely to preserve the traditional dances I had learned. And this approach was not welcomed in Paris at the time.

In the summer of 2001, I took my first workshop with Frey Faust, in Vienna. You know sometimes life goes like this… I was there for the ImPulsTanz Festival… many years ago.

I thought then, that with Axis Syllabus, Frey was the only person I knew at the time that had found a way to transmit true movement neutrality. This precious information about what constitutes universal basics was missing from my experience. I was studying African dance for more than 10 years yet I was missing that link.

I needed something to decode the steps when traveling and studying in West Africa. Of course it was not only about the steps and not only about a dance [form] as well.

Physically, I was trying to study movement analysis, while attending classes or working with different contemporary dance teachers, but the tools they offered were not helpful for understanding those dances that I was so attracted by better. My eagerness to keep searching and using them as an artist as well was strong, but it was not enough for me. So this is the link between The Axis Syllabus and my studies and  that was the reason I started to study The AS.

During this period I began to visit Benin by myself and there I had the chance to meet Eric Acakpo. (Actually he would be here at the Nomadic College, but unfortunately he couldn’t have the visa this year). His family is very important there, because they are practicing and transmitting the Vodoun culture for many years. But also what is very specific about this family is that they stay very open mentally. Eric’s father in particular welcomed many researchers from different fields into his temple and family home and had lively discussions with them. So his mindset was very [special].

I was welcomed as a daughter and this experience was very important for me. I was there with a friend, an anthropologist. And we were doing research together. My research was more about dance, but it was more or less the same motivation or inquest as her’s; finding an entry point into a culture that you don’t belong to.

This was a very intense training. During these 2-3 years, I stayed in Benin for 3-4 months out of the year in Eric’s family house with my friend or sometimes alone. We were the only white people there. Even though the locals were super welcoming, we still had a lot of difficult moments of adaptation or misunderstandings. We had the chance to see many ceremonies. So I really was not there as a visitor. Then in 2003, I decided to get initiated into Vodoun. It was another big step. You enter into that world, so you don’t see it from outside anymore. It is very hard too. Because I absolutely didn’t want to land myself in this mysticism without loosing my hook. So it was -and still is- hard work to keep going back and forth between my mindset (my way of looking at reality).You do not always find similitude. In any case, it continues to be a very important experience for me.

My work started to go in two main directions. One was -let’s say- the more “technical” work supported by the Axis Syllabus, which was not purely technical of course. And the other one was the study of the Vodoun culture: being there, staying there, indeed living there. Even if these two worlds seem so far apart from each other, for me actually they are not. Because the main objective of the Axis Syllabus is to “re-position” the human body, to see it in relation to all other bodies, the environment, everything. We can call it “nature”. Rather than considering the human body as not “related to”, nor “a part” of everything. Looking at all these fractals, the process of evolution, and actually the Vodoun philosophy… is pretty much the same: humans are in a constant relationship with the whole environment, with all the elements. We can call them “gods”, we can call them “energies”, or we can talk about environment. So, for me absolutely there was no friction [or contradiction] between these two fields. What we started to do together with Eric, was to organize little workshops only for Beninese at the beginning. I was trying to give them some tools from the Axis Syllabus archive and use them to analyze the traditional dances.

At the beginning it was a very selfish interest. I wanted to learn. I have learned a lot by looking. Looking and looking, for hours and hours… But still there was a gap. Maybe I was not mature enough or I didn’t have enough tools, formation and experience. But I had the idea to let the tradition develop. The society evolves and things are changing. And exchange happens much faster than before. So there is a need to adapt and it becomes a kind of a pressure. And of course art also should evolve in the same way. But how? I  was observing that the influences coming from the Western dance world were not fitting into the basic principles of those traditional dances. This was the problem that Frey tried to solve: the difference between the technique and aesthetics. This is still is very chaotic. Technique should be about the mechanics, the way to do things; but not related to a specific “way” of doing things.

So my point was: “if we look at the technique, the way to do things, the way the muscles work, the way the joints behave, then we’ll have the knowledge that serves us to read and better understand the heart of a specific dance or a specific step”. Once you have the heart, then you can create variations that do not exist yet.

Actually it’s how it happens in tradition. Because it’s not the replication of the steps in the same way. It’s evolving but also keeping on. So if you keep the roots you can evolve and conserve the tradition. But if you loose the roots -maybe it’s not a bad thing- but it means we’re losing something.

I was the first white person who got initiated into Vodoun though Eric’s family. I was difficult to deal with, as it was also very difficult for me to deal with them. They needed to ask themselves many questions, questions which I had to ask myself as well. They were trying to figure out the way to hep me to enter their world. But also they needed to find ways to cope with all my fears, my resistance, the doubts and my questions which were very strange to them. Eventually we did it together. Me, his family -especially his older brother and Eric- together we’ve overcome this process of translation, interweaving and confrontation.

What does it mean to live together? Although we had good intentions, we were having confrontations on both sides with a lot of prejudice that we didn’t even know that we had.

After many arguments and resolutions Eric and I found a good solutions and decided to open this box to others. So we created a project where we invited people from outside. I was also working in Europe and as I was very interested in this topic, I created a company. It was the first Italian company that came to Benin and met the Beninese company. Then we did our first project Malentendus et d’autres choses,  “Misunderstandings and other things”, for which we examined and used what was happening to us when we stay together, as material for the performance.

As my academic pulse never stopped, I started to study more. There was one philosopher who especially changed my way of perceiving things about culture; his name was Anthony Kwame Appiah. He’s a half Ghanaian and half British philosopher. When I saw him at a conference, I said “now I have to read everything he wrote”. He has a very simple way of describing very complex dynamics. One of his first books is Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. Actually we created a a project based on this book. It’s analysing exactly what we were searching, with Eric. What does it mean to live together? What about different values? How to deal with the deception that the hierarchy of values are different? How to deal with different perspectives?

There is a beautiful example in this book. There was a village, where the water was not good so everyone was dying of diarrhea. Western doctors came and they wanted to disinfect the water. They were suggesting to boil the water before drinking. However there was a lot of resistance, until they talked to people in the village openly. And they found another solution. They started to say people that there are bad spirits in the water, so by boiling the water they would evaporate. It’s very interesting, no?

But honestly, who has actually seen a virus? Very few people. A virus could be also defined as a bad spirit. For me this is really the base of the work that I do with Eric. We don’t need to believe in others’ perspectives, but we also don’t need to negate them in order to keep our perspective. Negating the other perspective means there is no space for a dialogue. Dialogue in itself is the universal value. If we can get into dialogue; then we can also fight if we decide to.

So we had another big project, it was ‘ Dialogues Inévitables – The Inevitable Dialogues’ that we worked on for 4-5 years. It was a big company with 17 people. Some members were from Benin, others from Senegal, Canada and France. We started to work on this idea, the same idea in essence: observing the dynamics arising from living together, using dance and music as a tool to elaborate and transmit our perspectives.

Then, while we were researching the concept of the “dialogue”, we decided to focus on “consumerism”, something fairly new in West Africa at the time, and created a piece that told the story of ‘ God Money’. I think it was an amazing project. We worked mostly in Benin, but also in Brussels, in Berlin and in Italy as well. There were other people who were studying on the same topic or a topic that we found related; so we created projects together. It was very exciting. In Brussels, we were all working at this cite de culture, built in the 50’s in the banlieue (periphery), a very poor neighbourhood of Brussels, something the Africans had never seen before. During the project we lived and worked together closely. The connection we created was deep and powerful. Then we invited other artists and researchers to nourish our research. This project lasted for 2 years and then we started the “Traces” initiative.

Banu: Can you tell us about “Traces” which has been taking place in West Africa for years?

Francesca: Traces is a project which I conceived of with Eric. It’s the follow up to The Inevitable Dialogues.  The subtitle of  Traces is “interweaving wisdom”. The idea is based on the knowledge about the body in motion. You can gather such a knowledge in many many different ways. It can be scientific, theoretical, or practical… the point for me is to recognise that there are many ways to gather knowledge about the body in motion, about dance, about the relationship between dance and music and about the performative way of living with and in a body. In Traces, what we try to do is to interweave all these aspects in different ways.

Many of the participant artists come from Africa -Benin and Togo especially. But not necessarily from the same background. There are traditional dancers, contemporary dancers and break dancers. Some of them do not know anything about local traditions. We also invite dance artists from abroad. It’s a bit like here, [Nomadic College]. It’s true that we share a lot of stuff but we also have a lot of differences too. We weave a lot of differences. And my point is that we need to recognize that we’re not the same. That we don’t see life in the same way, we don’t live in the same way. So this is “Traces”. In Traces; we have trainings, we teach the Axis Syllabus© through traditional dances.

The Axis Syllabus  is an entry point for the people from abroad, but it’s a way of reconsidering everything from the people, from there. At the same time we visit a lot of Vodoun ceremonies, trying to look at those ceremonies as a performer. Because there is a very high performative potential. The idea is to understand how the ancient practices can nourish the current practices. We try to make this effort.

Banu: At some point you mentioned that you came back to academia, which department was it?

Francesca: Paris 8? It was the Dance department. But as my topic was related to Africa we had lots of studies on anthropology and ethnography.

Banu: You are an independent researcher. You are giving lectures, publishing articles… Where do you give your lectures, mainly in Italy?

Francesca: Yes, I am an independent researcher. I have given talks in the United States, in Brazil, and in Italy. I’m also curating many different events. For example I collaborate in Scie Festival, in Bologna, together with Nuvola Vandini, an anthropologist who also quit academia.

What resonated in me was that The Axis Syllabus was aiming at mixing theory and practice in an honest way. Because what I was missing in academia was that. For example I was obliged to participate Cunningham classes every week. Not that it was uninteresting, but for my research, it was not useful.  It’s not that I’m against academia itself. I simply realized that it was not for me anymore, I needed to be in the field and be free to focus on what I thought to be relevant.

Banu: Maybe before ending our conversation, we can talk on the material we’re working with you in your classes here in Nomadic College and the polyrhthymic body which is the focus of the classes and which I find quite interesting.

Francesca: Lorenzo Gasperoni [musician] and I have worked together for years. We met more than 25 years ago. Lorenzo is also an independent researcher. He’s also coming from the conservatory, academia. But he decided to stay inside the institution to study and practice his chosen subject, with a focus on world music. At one point he became fascinated with Afrocentric music. So we did a lot of things separately but both felt a need to try to find a common denominator, to try to find something that was an underlying principle that we could transmit to other people. Then it might develop by itself, or could be an entry point for the deeper analysis of a specific traditional dance, music or other cultural aspect, no? Something usable. Polyrhythm is at the base of many traditional dances. As I say in class, there is a way of perceiving music which is very intellectual and mathematical. Then there are ways to perceive the complexity of this music, as a language to describe or curate human dynamics. And this is beautiful, I think. I think this music really expresses the complexity of life. Therefore it is both very complex and at the same time very easy to enter in.

Banu: Bears contradictions in it, right?

Francesca: Yes, a lot of contradictions but they’re also a part of us. So that’s why when we teach we try to give also these -let’s say- “technical” information that our culture provides. And I think they’re really useful, because it gives a way of analysis. But there is also another aspect which is more impalpable and magical; the capacity of human beings to create all these things. It is inherent to the human condition.

So when we relate to the polyrhythmic body; besides the complexity of internal relationships between the joints, muscles, etc. we can also find the connection to other phenomena, such as the cranial-sacral rhythm, which is very very slow. Then we have our circulatory rhythm, breathing and digestion cycles… All these rhythms play together. And what is very interesting is that we have the same thing in music, each rhythm has its own reason to be. They can be independent, and the same time, through their juxtaposition they create magic. Independency in dependency.

What I teach with Lorenzo is the ability to be aware of all these rhythms at once, instead of having a narrow focus; we can call it presence, no? The first week of the Nomadic College I was working more on a theoretical basis. The first workshop was a kind of preparation for this theoretical base and also it was more open, was not really related to the Afrocentric culture. But, what is presence? It’s a way of being tuned, it’s a way of being in relation to the things and especially being able to be in relation with what is happening inside, a shifting vortex. And keeping what is outside as a reference to relate to. So it’s a question of establishing relationships. And this for me is the fundamental power of the “trance” state. In Vodoun, the trance state is one of the expressions of a divinity residing in the body. My personal opinion is that the trance state is the capacity to perceive many things at the same time and behave accordingly. This is what I and Lorenzo are trying to give. And what is very interesting also for me that by going deeply into the study of Afrocentric dance -this is something we also discuss a lot with Frey- there are so many biomechanical principles that are inherent to these dances that are invaluable for other things, a veritable study field. Of course, if it becomes mere “form”, we might lose all these things. So I’m trying to stay as far as possible away from form. It’s not that I don’t like form, but for me it’s like a superficial layer.

Now I am living in Italy. I didn’t spend my life in Italy that much. But I have come back to live in Italy. With Barış an Frey we decided to descend to the South. Actually, my family is from the South but I grew up in the North. This area where we live now is the area of Pizzica, Tarantella, a very strong dance tradition..

Banu: Which is also a kind of trance, right?

Francesca: Yes it is a trance. So now I had an amazing chance because the husband of the woman who sold me the land actually is a Pizzica player for generations and they do a very subtle work. So I started to invite them to play, I mean I feel that we have this common interest. And so I started to study. Again I faced with how complex it is, a simple step. Even if I’m working with rhythm since 30 years now, still it’s very difficult for me to decode and be able to feel… And for them it’s so easy; they say ‘Oh, it’s like this, one-two-three, one-two-three, it’s easy, no?’ And then they say ‘No, no, it’s not the idea!’ And I know that is not easy at all 🙂 It’s incredible how sophisticated it is. Because for me the tradition is very interesting, because in one way there is a simplicity because they need to be shareable. But at the same time they are very complex because I think it’s a way also to affirm who is in and who is out.

Banu: I see. The community and the people outside the community.

Francesca: Yes, because we often say that ‘Ah, the communal dance, the traditional dance, they are so inclusive..’ but you might feel the loneliest person in the world if you don’t know the code. This is something that I’m thinking lately.

Banu: Yes so true… Thank you so much Francesca, it was great to talk to you.

Francesca: You’re so welcome!

^[1] https://www.culture.gouv.fr/en/Thematic/Dance/Dance-in-France/National-Choreographic-Centres