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Filatondi, Francesca (2024) Undine: creative artistic swimming practice: towards a training and choreographic strategy for contemporary artistic swimming. Doctoral thesis, London Metropolitan University.
After more than thirty years since its Olympic debut, the July FINA (Federation Internationale De Natation) Congress, held in Budapest in 2017, decided to rebrand "Synchronized Swimming" as "Artistic Swimming" (FINA Communications Department, 2018). In this context of transformation, my research foregrounds an artistic opening that is implicit in the configuration and history of this sport.
Riding the wave of this recent change and aiming at better identifying the essence of the discipline as artistry, I suggest here a training and choreographic process which focuses on the individual artistry of swimmers as opposed to the rhythms, bodily synchronization and "kinaesthetic intelligent machines" (Sydnor, 2014, p. 259) as required by the high competitiveness and performing demands of the sport. In response to this limiting image of swimmers, I propose the development of a "thinking body" with its unique narrative and idiosyncrasy.
The human body serves as an evolving repository of experiences, associations, reasoning, and inquiries. Its narrative unfolds from lived, repeated, and embodied experiences, which the choreographer interprets, questions, and contextualizes within various environments and settings. The choreographer shapes the bodily story told by performers through a creative system of training and choreographic techniques.
In this process, I advocate for a creative system tailored for artistic swimmers who, beyond being deemed "intelligent kinaesthetic machines" (ibid.), exhibit individual and unique responses akin to developments in contemporary dance-theatre and somatic techniques applied both on the surface and underwater.
Water transcends its role as merely a scenographic backdrop to become a fluid, emotional, and above all, somatic medium aimed at self-discovery.
Consequently, choreographic the practice involves experimenting with a range of choreographic and somatic methodologies inspired by key modern movement/dance-based performance makers, working with a group of artistic swimmers well-versed in standard Artistic Swimming protocols. My goal is to explore new avenues for collaboration with swimmers/performers in the creation of original choreographic works.
With this in mind, I established Undine Aquatic Theatre in 2020, a company dedicated to researching choreographic techniques aimed at liberating swimmers from conventional Artistic Swimming approaches. The innovative discoveries made through this work will inform my own choreographic interest in developing a Contemporary Artistic Swimming practice.
My intention is that the application of this proposed creative system, while complementing the standard one, increases the swimmers/performers' capacities for emancipation, potentially impacting the sport itself and its choreographic possibilities.
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