Maria Isidora Vincentelli
Dancer and performance maker. After completing her dance training in London, Maria Isidora Vincentelli chose Athens as the base for her artistic research. She collaborates on interdisciplinary projects across Europe and the UK, often working with musicians, filmmakers, and visual artists to create performative works that cultivate the body’s intuitive intelligence, generating states in which new ways of being in the world can be imagined.
The themes of the projects she is currently involved in include ritual theatre, erotic ecology, experimental polyphony, and lament. In 2023, she was awarded the North East Emerging Artist Prize for the audiovisual installation Timekeeping.
Maria Isidora Vincentelli was a participant in the Nomadic School 2024.
Maria Isidora Vincentelli begins her workshop with a reading from an essay taken from the publication Strangers. Essays on the Human and Nonhuman by Rebecca Tamàs: the essay reflects on the deep and restless connection between the human body and nature, through the figure of the Green Man and above all the work of Ana Mendieta, interpreting the fusion between human and non-human as a ritual, feminist, and political gesture, capable of challenging the boundaries of identity, Western culture, and our relationship with the earth.
After the reading, Vincentelli proposes a physical warm-up and a series of choreographic practices that connect the participants’ bodies with each other and with the surrounding space.
In the afternoon, the workshop continues with a reflection on ritual, intertwined with Vincentelli’s practice and creation. She shares with participants some practical guidelines for constructing a ritual based on research she developed with writer Oli Cox in Uganda.
Instructions for a Ritual, inspired by CAConrad (The Extreme Present —CAConrad, 2014)
Created by Maria Isidora Vincentelli and Oli Cox in Jinja, Uganda
Adapted for Nomadic School 2025
RHYTHM & SCORE (20 mins)
Deep listening: Julius Eastman, Femenine, Vol. 1
- Listen
- Mapping and marking: create a graphic system of notation to score what you are hearing, marking rhythm and refrains, think about how sounds intersect and synchronise, your score might be a highly complex schema or a simple outline of an experience.
- Automatic writing: write as you listen, this might be from observation or imagination, write entirely in the present tense, without self-editing, write continuously, allow for simultaneity and dissonance, you might want to use your graphic score as a guide or index for your writing
“the graphic score is a nice way to think about writing in an expanded way, and leads in to people writing a ritual that needs to be performed, taken off the page”
RITUAL (20 mins)
Use the scores produced in the previous exercise to create a ritual – a set of instructions which possesses its own internal logic and resists determination or efficiency. This ritual must force your writing to become performative, in that it follows certain constraints or requires certain actions to be carried out whilst writing.
- Exchange your ritual with someone else in the group. Find a space and follow the directions you have been given in the exchange, consider how the ritual can be interpreted, misunderstood or subverted.
- Think about how meaning reveals itself within your writing, like a code unravelling. Think about the writing as a game played with a reader, what are the rules? The beauty of interpretation of a ritual by another person than the writer. Mirrors audience/performer experiences.
What is the ritual for right now at this moment in time in your life?
What is your intention?
To release? To merge? To summon? - We can swap or it can be for ourselves? Where can they go, what can happen? Can rituals interact? Can different people try on different ones? Can one be collectivised? Can a common thread be drawn?
By giving your ritual to someone else, they enact it for you, and you give over to the collective.
