Can you introduce yourself?
My name is Lea Moro, I live and work alternately in Berlin and Zurich. Moro is my ‘artistic name’: it’s my mother’s family name that she was not allowed to keep when she married my father.
What drives you to be creative?
Creative thinking and working allows me to open up spaces, desires, and movements that are personal yet accessible to possible others. Sometimes I consider creativity almost like a tool, an instrument that subverts rational logic. It allows intuition to take the lead, followed by wondering and constant learning.
What role did theatre/dance have for you when you grew up?
I would say it played quite a ‘classical’ role. I did ballet as a child and lots of different sports. My parents introduced me and my sister to the Zürcher Opernhaus, Schauspielhaus, Theater am Neumarkt. They were open to the arts, and have always supported my trajectories in the theatre world and later to dance and choreography.
Humour plays an important role in your performances. Why is that? And how would you describe your sense of humour?
Humour is wonderful, unique and personal. I consider myself a very ‘serious’ investigator but at some point in my work something needs to break through in order to disturb the seriousness. And maybe it’s humour, which is at the same time light, profound and irritating. Humour allows me to touch on the ironic or pathetic and transgress into entertainment. I aim to create humoristic gestures or movements not to place them outside the given material, but to let them act within it. As such they are sometimes not taken for granted by everyone. To witness and share humour, even if it’s just something subtle, is generous and simply wonderful.
You are inspired by Baroque still lifes and use music by Mahler. Why do you work with these historical cultural references?
I feel Baroque still life paintings and Gustav Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony are just so much bigger than I am. They are overwhelming works to discover. The still life paintings fascinate me in many ways, for example in the question of how to animate the seemingly immobile composition. The objects in the paintings linger in a suspended moment, in which the composition is full of oppositions. Some ungraspable movement is manifesting itself to the beholder. These compositions inhabit another temporality and demand to be looked at with full attention. Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony is bombastic and driven by constant dynamic changes. There is no stillness. I guess I am interested by the juxtapositions. They challenge me. How to choreograph to such an overwhelming piece of music? And how to create a space where such seemingly contradictory elements can co-exist and mingle?
You had an education in physical theatre (mime), before you studied dance. Why did you find dance as your artistic medium?
That’s right, I studied at the Accademia Teatro Dimitri in Ticino (the Italian part of Switzerland) for three years. During this time I explored mask play, acrobatics, singing, pantomime etc.
I always wished to go further with ‘dance’. It’s my simple desire to move, to discover physicalities and to explore the body’s presence and states of expressivity. But my fascination was never driven by regular dance classes or a certain style. My work in dance has been shaped instead by different somatic practices, lots of sport, meditation and simply the physical learning of new skills (for example roller-skating in my solo The End of the Alphabet).
If you hadn’t become an artist, what would have been your profession? And why?
I have to think about this one for a while, it’s not an easy question.
I can’t name a specific profession. I think there are so many things I would like to do in life and I assume they will be always driven by an artistic thinking. I wish to not get stuck, to be courageous to take on new challenges and to explore my work in different surroundings.