Characters

"Super vestimentum meum miserunt sorte"(Upon my robe they cast my fate). Psalms 22:19

This text is carved under the statue of one of the angels found on the western side of The Bridge of Sant'Angelo in Rome. The baroque statue wearing a garment and dice. Using four distinct costumes, the performer and designer Thomas Bradley moves through various places of Hadrian’s Mausoleum (Castel Sant’Angelo) using the Japanese butoh technique. Bradley considers his costumes fundamental elements in revealing a typically invisible nature of the body which regards sensory incarnation. Wearing a costume produces a freedom for the dancing body, a similar effect to that generated by a mask: when the face is covered the body shows itself.

A similar, though more subtle process occurs between the atmosphere of a given environment and its effect on the body. The physicality that comes from the encounter between performer, space and costumes, based on sensations and imagination, can be described as evocation or exorcism of the nature of Being, death as a constant in the omnipresence of transformation.