As Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s 1917 manifesto on Futurist dance had suggested, Giannina Censi’s aim was to express the lyricism that the second-wave Futurists saw in the aeronautical technology of the day; starting with their first touring performance, Simultanina (1931), she employed geometric, rhythmic, jerky gestures that gave the entire body a unique plasticity. In her famous Danza aerofuturista (1931), Censi wore an aviator’s suit and cap designed by Enrico Prampolini out of metallic fabric; it looked like chrome on the chassis of a cyborg, a celestial vision that was half woman, half machine. Dressed in this costume, the dancer moved to scattered notes of music, jerking her legs and arms in time to the Marinetti’s recitations of parolibere (liberated words). She sometimes struck unnatural, sculptural poses that, captured in an extensive series of photographs, express the athletic ideal upheld by the Futurists. In more radical experiments called Tereodanze, Censi would improvise in utter silence against a backdrop of Futurist paintings, seemingly immersed in dizzying celestial vistas. In this setting the dancer’s body could be definitively transformed into the flying machine celebrated by the movement, or convey the emotions of a pilot, expressing what Futurism’s Aeropainters called the “extraterrestrial spirit.”
Stefano Mudu
