Interview With Rosanna Terracciano on PLACE/Is a city written on this body?

By Sebastian Rueda

During Calgary’s bid to host the Olympics for a second time I remember hearing a lot about the need to, “put the city on the map.” It prompts the question of what makes a place distinct, and what makes it important, is it what other people think? Rosanna Terracciano’s piece airing on the National Arts Centre’s website, asks a similar question about how place informs the way we move and what we create.

Born and raised in Calgary Alberta, Terracciano highlights the space that in many ways dwarfs the city. Travel just outside the city and you’ll be reminded of how miniscule human construction is in comparison to the sky. And indeed as Terraciano’s desperate cries of “I love you, I love you not,” mimic Calgary’s, and to a greater extent, Alberta’s relationship to the rest of the country, we become reminded of how the cries of four million people measure up against the other thirty three million.

Terracciano then introduces us to the city of Napoli, here, a video of her father is projected behind her and we can plainly see the effect the city and the Italian language has had on her father: gesture. As the lights come up, the video of her father is played rapidly, we see certain gestures clearly. We see Rosanna seated, pulling away from something? Or leaning back upon it?

Watching this I thought about what I may traditionally consider to be dance, between the animated and expressive language of the gestures being projected and the cool, focused, and simple movement of the dancer performing live. Is either more of a dance than the other? Perhaps the question is irrelevant and perhaps it’s more important for us to consider the movement and communication between human beings as an extension of performance. The same is true the other way around.

Having to adapt a performance piece to online distribution came with its fair share of challenges. One of them being the fundamental change in relationship between the performer and the audience. The audience has a surrogate, being the camera, and the consideration must be made as to how to frame the performance and guide our eye. Rosanna Terracciano has created a masterful production that takes the viewer through so many moods and atmospheres all while holding our attention.

I return to Calgary. Rosanna Terracciano tells me she has a love/hate relationship with the city, “I love you, I love you not,” comes to mind. The open sky, which as I write this, is without cloud or smoke in sight, is vast and seems infinite. To Terracciano, the fact that you cannot point to any one thing and say, “this is what Calgary art looks like” is much like that vast and open sky. And so what if it isn’t on a map and what if there isn’t a specific voice? If it means we get to see more pieces and artists like Rosanna Terracciano then I think it ought to stay that way.