FÜYA is a kinesthetic, philosophical and poetic method I have devised to bring the human creature back to the awareness of its origins, to restore its balance with the world. The FÜYA method is based on the theory of the four bodies and body balances: a pedagogical approach to dance, alchemy and their spiritual origin since the Pleistocene, educating the human organism on the importance of transformation and the sacred through the development of the alchemical body.
The shared origins of dance and alchemy
Once upon a time, there was dance around the fire. Human beings, after hunting, prayed in this way to the universe. It was a necessary ritual for those creatures, who felt they owed nature a debt in some way, that of having freed themselves from the condition of prey. Killing through hunting was still something obscure, certainly involving something that ceased to be visible. Here was born the realm of the invisible, a place teeming with presences with whom one conversed through ritual. Becoming a predator, human beings built their jaws and claws with spears and arrows.
Inclined to mimesis (imitative ability) of self and other than self, the human being had changed his nature into something dynamic, constantly changing. The human being was predator and prey. But doing as if he were the other-human or animal-had also granted him a sharing in that which he killed. Hence would come the need for ritual. Hence the dance would be born.
On this reflection I wrote a book, it is called The Dance of Eros and Thanatos and you can order it conveniently on Amazon. This book recounts the importance of mimesis during the evolution of humankind. This is also the source of the educational and pedagogical function of the arts. This book promotes art as an educational form that can safeguard the freedom of expression of each human being. That is why I speak of a queer pedagogy.
The purpose of FÜYA is to activate the capacity of the human organism to connect with the ritual of the hunter, entering the cave from which it emerged long ago.
FÜYA: a reason to dance today
FÜYA: the technique of five bodies
The days of the hunter around the fire are still in our cells. When the sky was filled with stars, the human organism was made of stories and rhythms around the fire. Those days are still in our memories. The FÜYA method I created researches the alchemical body in this way. The study of the body led me to create a methodology to study its potential. Thus I divided the alchemical body into four bodies, which I use as a guide for my pedagogical method:
- the physical body focuses the body, blood and bones, to focus on its own flesh;
the emotional body focuses on the range of connections that move and move the organism to participate in what is outside through its internal humors;
the spiritual body strives to shed its human garb to become other than itself (a tree, a mountain, a drop of water, a computer, a firefly);
the remote body recognizes the importance of what no longer exists, what is far away, on the other side of the world or what has never existed.
The free play of these four bodies in dance is represented by the alchemical body, which is able to unite distinctions, harmonies and disharmonies and transform the whole into something other and greater than the sum of its parts. This is the foundation of the FÜYA method, a method based on the balances of the human organism and the 5-body theory. A kinesthetic pedagogical approach that aims to teach non-violence through the development of these qualities of the human being’s body. In my book Dance and Alchemy, which is available on Amazon, I have expanded on the subject matter.
The four-body and body balance technique is preparatory to developing body posture, the origin and quality of movement, choreographic inspiration and the very reason for one’s dance. The FÜYA method, therefore, is a pedagogical approach based on maieutics and aims to bring dance out of the body. It aims to stimulate students’ reflection through the development of a historical memory of performance and a philosophical awareness of dance.
Dance opens wide the invisible
We have a responsibility to what exists, but we also have a responsibility to what does not exist. That is why I wrote the book Dance and Alchemy. We must return to the sacred. After the performance FÜYA Requiem I told the audience my reason for dancing. Watch the video:
Everything is rhythm. Wakefulness and rest, hunger and satiety, youth and senility. FÜYA is part of this rhythm. It is time to burn and enlighten ourselves, for we are beyond the creature living under our skin. All of FÜYA’s research is based on the alchemical body and its presence. Better, on its presences. We live in space and distort it with our presence. Space effects us, retroacts against us and for us. There are no limits, boundaries or gaps between things: everything is interrelated in a tangle of ties. Presence is about the unity of visible and invisible experiences.
What does not exist is as important as what exists.
We have a responsibility to what does not yet exist, to what is around us, to what is distant or within us. And we also have a responsibility to that which will never be reversed. We are part of the performances that set the conditions for the possibility and impossibility of the materialization of the world. We are part of the performances that reverse what matters and what is excluded from the materialization of the universe.
We have no privileged place in this rhythm: we are part of a universe that is not merely human. In fact, largely inhuman. Even if it is constantly humanized by the feeling of the human creature. Presence is this awareness. We are important and irrelevant at the same time. We are absolutely negligible and simultaneously essential. This is the rhythm of transformation. This is FÜYA.
Dance and Pedagogy: dance is in our DNA
What is the connection between dance and pedagogy? Dance is in our DNA from our birth, it is part of that genetic make-up that we can define as an art instinct, as Denis Dutton puts it. As soon as we enter into relationship with the world, we gesture and murmur, cry and smile, mumble and sigh in spontaneous modes that articulate a wonderful natural language. Through the eyes of butoh dancers Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno, the movement of the child and, even before that, the movements of the fetus in the womb are harbingers of dance and inspiration.
From the time we are children, we never act independently of our context; rather, our acts and choices are in tune with whatever else exists around us. This ability to immediately express our discomfort or happiness and act accordingly, coming to terms with our environment is, for Brian Boyd, evidence of our being compulsive creators of attention-generating strategies.
Among the various tools we naturally use to gain the attention of others is the creation of stories, which at some point become as wacky as they generate the result hoped for by the man cub. Our relationship with stories and other art forms soon becomes a way to gain experience. Through the arts we are able to “make as if” we were other than ourselves, having experiences that we normally could never have and experiencing lives that could never coincide with our own.
But art is not just fiction; it is also work, that is, an activity that is about creating something from scratch or reconfiguring pre-existing things by using what the world offers to recompose new meaning, form, structure, mass, light or relationship. This newness may not be an absolute, but it will be the result of a personal filter, based on our experiences. Sometimes it becomes non-art, it is non-work, that is, it is an activity that is proposed for its futility, ephemeral, even contrary to life and is about the destruction of pre-packaged patterns, conventions, rules and status quo.
On the pedagogy of dance
Learning to dance, for the child, means learning to deal with the rhythm of things. Through dance education, in fact, we discover the infinite possibilities of coexistence we are given with the events happening around us.
If anger comes from the world, dance can respond by transforming itself into expressive vitality. If sadness comes from the world, dance can respond with the clarity of wind to bring peace, new serenity and a little playfulness. And dance can also do the opposite of what has just been described, transforming itself into non-dance. It can push beyond definitions and become other than itself.
But when it is authentic, that is, when it brings the human creature back into connection with the fire of origins, dance is in harmony with the rhythm of the heavenly spheres.
This does not mean that it is without torment; on the contrary, it is charged with the original guilt of the human creature. It needs bloodshed, it needs to return to expressing devotion through ritual. But it is no longer anthropocentric, no longer self-referential, no longer makes the human being feel without a place and meaning in the universe. It restores the umbilical cord that was broken with civilization and the domestication of humanity. There homo sapiens regains his balance in the universe.
Mimesis and narrative at the dawn of human evolution
For Aristotle, in his Poetics, Mimesis and storytelling are the basis of human evolution. From infancy, humans imitate their surroundings, thereby procuring their first knowledge of the world. In particular, the stories of oral culture were able to convey ἡδονή “pleasure” and at the same time μάθησις “learning.”
Since the dawn of our species, the arts have enabled us to exercise emotions and empathy. Denis Dutton points out how these are evolutionary adaptations on which our very survival would have depended. In all of this, a central role would have been occupied by narratives. In the Poetics, Aristotle states:
“The main topic of tragedy will be the disruption of normal family and love relations: a son who kills his father, two brothers who fight to the death, a mother who murders her children to spite their father. For Aristotle this fascination with stresses and ruptures of families represents a permanent feature of human interest, not merely a local manifestation of Greek cultural concerns, and he would find clear validation today in the continuing story lines of drama, pulp fiction, and soap operas across the world.”
In general, then, telling stories-or listening to them-are pleasurable activities that increase our chances of having experiences. Art represents all these attempts to communicate and share with other members of the human species the creative processes of each organism, allowing for an empathic approach. In particular, narratives exemplify our organism’s ability to experience roles other than its own, thus changing its skin and immersing itself in unexpected worlds.
We are able to empathize with the whiteness of Snow White, but also with the jealousy of the wicked witch; to smile with the clumsy Puppy, but also with the gruff Grumpy. Similarly, when we are little we can play at being a policeman, a cook, a cow, a dragon and even a stone or a robot. Thanks to our innate ability to imitate each other, thus thanks to Mimesis, we are able to change our skin and live many other lives, even lives far from our own.
Thus, we are able to have many experiences. We can imagine breathing underwater and make like-if we were swimming in the depths of the ocean, or we can fantasize about being on a spaceship and make like-if we were without gravity. The ability to become “other-than-us” that arises spontaneously from childhood constitutes a great evolutionary advantage for our species, allowing us to have experiences beyond our mere factual experience.
As I have argued in the book The Shift. Ethics and Design of Storytelling Experiences, this capacity unlocks the possibility for our organism to live multiple lives and to connect not only with the world, but also with possible worlds. Mimesis, a human capacity that is naturally active since childhood, is the subject of continuous study and investigation by the Mimesis Lab in Rome, which founded the research track in Pedagogy of Expression at Roma3 University, under the direction of Prof. Gilberto Scaramuzzo and the collaboration with very interesting professors and researchers in the fields of pedagogy, theater therapy, music therapy, art therapy, dance therapy and sporter therapy. Within the master’s course I am also making my own contribution to research, which will result in the forthcoming book.
The role of emotions in the experience of dance FÜYA
Our organism, from the first waking, lives in relation to its context. From the moment we begin to kick in mother’s belly and cry when we activate our first ventilatory mechanics, we demonstrate an original orientation to the expression of the feeling of pleasure or displeasure, attraction or repulsion, acceptance or threat that we experience in the course of our experience with the world.
Our inner world is related to the outer world and vice versa. Existence, therefore, is based on a principle of constant exchange between our body and the world. In all of this, emotions are the rudder that steers us in the world.
Let’s take an example: imagine the dialogue at dinner between husband and wife after a long day of work. It is not difficult to recognize the variation of emotions in the conversation depending on the topic discussed. From recounting the day spent, to discussing the news on television; from bargaining over household chores, to plans for the summer vacation. Emotions constantly change depending on the intonation of the voice, body gestures and moods as they are solicited, orchestrating the continuation or interruption of the dialogue.
Emotions, according to John Dewey, are criteria for discriminating among existing energies, which coordinate and develop the aesthetic qualities of which we have constant experience. Emotions involve, therefore, an awareness that makes conscious the organism’s participation with the surrounding life and nature. Since they belong to a relationship, to an experience, they are not something subjective, but are qualities of the rhythm of interaction.
According to the American philosopher’s perspective, therefore, the organism emerges in experience when it experiences a responsibility for what it does, in response also to social and not only natural instances. Emotions in turn are subject to transformations in the course of experience, determining themselves and determining new experiences. Paraphrasing Art as Experience, each organism’s need coincides with a lack in adaptation to the world. If the gap between surrounding and living being is too wide, the latter dies. But life springs from a momentary lack of balance, which sets in motion the energies of environment and organism in achieving a new eurythmy. This is precisely a rhythm in which emotion is a vehicle for change, as a sudden emergence from experience. When this emotion is linked to an idea and action on a material that becomes a medium, then a properly aesthetic expression and emotion is produced. What we call art coincides with the transformation of these energies at play into a new emotional relationship. Momentum.
The FÜYA method looks with interest at this kind of experience, in which emotion is not an emergence from the daily routine as an end in itself, but becomes the impetus to break that routine and create a newness in our usual clothes of behavior.
FÜYA is an experience-based method. In formulating the vocabulary for the construction of this artistic method, I am largely indebted to the philosophical thought of John Dewey and, in particular, his texts Art as Experience and Human Nature and Conduct. In order to share my research on the web, I have decided to curate this blog with a series of insights into the Integral Body Method and the thinking underlying the development of the method in the studio and in nature. In this short article I will try to summarize what “experience” means to FÜYA.
What is experience? How does the human organism relate to its surroundings?
These are some of the questions to which the American philosopher John Dewey devoted some of his writings at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Since “no organism lives under its own skin,” but its organs are made to connect with its surroundings, for John Dewey our experience of the world naturally spreads out in a multitude of interactions.
Sometimes we perceive our experiences as comforting, other times as threatening and hostile. This experiential continuum aesthetically qualifies our daily living and gives our feeling a quality that we can immediately perceive as “healthy or unhealthy” for our organism. Since our ability to feel is involved in experience, for John Dewey experience is aesthetic.
Experience is called “aesthetic” because in the Greek etymology of the word αἴσθησις means “perception, sensibility.” Experience involves our ability to communicate, share and participate, qualifying the relationship between our organism and the world. Experience is a continuum because it never stops. In fact, our organism does not live under its skin, but is made to be constantly in relationship with everything inside and outside its body. Embracing this view, the environment in which we live comes to be constituted as a creative, qualitatively pregnant whole of happenings, relationships and stories, which are also embedded in things. Human organisms are part of these “things.”
“Life is enlightened at the moment when a transient lurch allows movement toward a more fertile balance between the energies of the organism and those of the conditions in which it lives,” it is a conflicting rhythm of sometimes hazy, sometimes iridescent emotions.
Our experience of the world is not always the same. Sometimes our relationship with the world has an opaque quality and continues with a more or less established routine; other times, however, the experience becomes vivid and takes prominence over our experiential continuum.
In a musical chord, on the colors of a canvas, between the pages of a book, in the texture beyond a film, in gestures on stage, in front of a sunset, in the arms of a lover, between taste buds and fork, at the birth of a child, an aesthetic quality illuminates the relationship between organism and world. The FÜYA Method is based on activating these kinds of experiences.
Discover the FÜYA Sessions vlog.
Damiano Fina presents the new project with which he inaugurates a video blog on dance, alchemy and queer pedagogy. “Maybe one day we will stop calling everything by its right name” With this quote from my book The Dance of Eros and Thanatos for a Queer Pedagogy I inaugurated a path along which there will be no lack of insights on alchemy, queer theory, philosophy, dance and performance. Subjects that I have been studying and grounding in my artistic projects for years. Subscribe to my YouTube channel to follow this project.
