Marcos Morau and Alessandro Sciarroni at FOG Competition Milan

Phrases by Giordana Patumi.

Two faces of the identical medal? Fairly the opposite. I might moderately say two gold medals of our technology that take a look at the physique, choreographing the house in distinctive and delicate methods. Every particular person, every stunning! On a heat Sunday, I attended two reveals, completely different and poetic on the similar time. Marcos Morau and Alessandro Sciarroni had been invited with their performers at FOG Performing Arts Festival in Milan.

Marcos Morau’s Spanish firm La Veronal returned to the FOG competition on the Triennale in Milan with Sonoma, a piece impressed by the works and lifetime of director Luis Buñuel, grasp of surrealist cinema. Sonoma is the title of the present by the good Valencian director and choreographer (born in 1982), succesful, like few others, of taking us on a journey right into a surreal universe dense with theatricality, unique visionariness, and incredible frescoes that evoke cinematographic, literary, and pictorial climaxes. The title combines the Greek phrase soma (physique) and the Latin phrase sonum (sound).

The scenic machine is ideal, in lots of particulars: 9 extraordinary ladies performers: Lorena Nogal, Marina Rodríguez, Sau-Ching Wong, Ariadna Montfort, Núria Navarra, Àngela Boix, Laia Duran and Anna Hierro; nearly on stage the complete time. Demarcated by three giant luminous panels, the performers take us again to an archaic world the place faith, folklore, mysticism, rituality, and transfigured actuality are blended with seductive songs and sounds from the folks custom of geographical areas of the world – Greece, Russia, Mexico, Latin America – blended with Wagnerian notes and digital sounds. At first, they slide as quick as mechanical dolls of their ample skirts that cowl their ft; they twirl like dervishes; they drag monumental trunks that they open and shut as if to extract recollections that materialise within the change of garments; two of them put on monumental wrinkled faces of outdated ladies, misplaced and wandering till they’re locked contained in the field to bid farewell to life. As they slowly compose and decompose, they articulate crisp and complicated poses of palms and arms, of legs within the air, mendacity on the bottom or kneeling, in rows with a domino impact, carried out in unison or in fulminating single sequences. They’re sharp, jerky gestures with a plastic high quality of motion, of convulsive canons that decelerate and resume.

There’s a bucolic sequence within the calm and playful pause of the ladies towards the backdrop of a portray lowered from above by Pieter Bruegel representing the Earthly Paradise, and a musical reference to Debussy’s Apres midi d’un faune. Your entire efficiency is accompanied by a steady and lengthy checklist declaimed in French, poured out in refrain or by particular person voices, during which every little thing man can think about of the library of existence, of yesterday and at this time, is contemplated in these phrases taken from texts by El Conde de Torrefiel, Violeta Gil, with the Blessings of Carmina S. Belda and Celso Giménez. Quotations (together with musical ones) naturally comply with each other and overlap, however what’s most placing is the excessive tightness, the extraordinary period of a stage organisation that’s in the end easy, nearly elementary, even un-choreographic. Within the sense that the gesticulations, in addition to the dense paths and entrances with excellent costumes, are intensely repeated however solely by spatial association not by kinetic design.

The sisterhood between physique and sound has given us considered one of La Veronal’s finest works. It’s a delight for the senses and a voracious imaginative prodigy. It goes additional than the present ethnic-based dance as a result of its power lies in its plasticity and within the investigation of the probabilities of delving into the depths of the collective imaginary to assemble the confrontation between custom and the avant-garde with a way between folkloric weight and dream. Excellent, which deserved the collective applause of the standing viewers.

With our eyes and hearts stuffed, we left the theatre to take a brief break, seize an espresso and prepare for the subsequent expertise…

After its debut final autumn in the course of the competition d’Automne à Paris, DREAM, Alessandro Sciarroni’s new venture, has arrived in Italy.

Six performers; Marta Ciappina, Matteo Ramponi, Elena Giannotti, Valerio Sirna, Edoardo Mozzanega, Pere Jou, inhabit an area for lengthy sufficient to lose the notion of time. The pianist Davide Finotti in entrance of a piano breaks the silence by taking part in items of music from the worldwide classical and modern repertoire as if he had been dreaming. The viewers is free to return and go as they please, to method, to face between the performers, to maneuver away.

It’s a transferring set up moderately than a efficiency, a site-sensitive work, imagined for areas aside from the theatre context, an entire work when it comes to sound, mild and physique, to be seen and browse. In DREAM, a relationship of proximity is established between spectator and performer that alters and transforms the state of the performers. Of their proximity to the spectators, the performers give life to an empathic restitution made up of sluggish micro gestures borrowed from on a regular basis life: they’re figures that the spectator is allowed to go to as in the event that they had been inside a museum, works within the flesh like sleepwalking our bodies with their ft planted within the right here and now and on the similar time within the elsewhere.

By way of proximity, the presence of the spectator can alter the state of the performers who organise their discipline in relation to the gaze that passes via them. As time passes, the evolution of the dramaturgical path permits the potential for encounter, of communicative methods that elude the oneiric dimension. The passage of the spectators is the generator of the vitality that drives them to remain and/or transfer, in a path that for every one stays particular person, aside from the musical moments. Music is the one potential illustration of the soul, which just like the soul is immaterial and has no which means. The music carried out by the pianist – in the same state to the opposite performers – urges them to pay attention to one another in an try and compose themselves in unison. Till a brand new silence.

Between 2019 and 2020, Alessandro Scarroni took an intimate and personal method to the follow of writing. The textual content, initially conceived as a script for a theatrical staging, slowly takes the type of a novel. The narrative, sensible and fictional on the similar time, approaches a humanity that serenely accepts, nearly with tenderness and calm pleasure, the failure of man’s dominion over nature and decides to voluntarily extinguish itself.

The viewers depart the house with a replica of the books DREAM. Written by the choreographer himself. Sciarroni’s ebook, is poetic, sensitive and effectively written, resembling, or higher dialoguing with a Virgina Wolf type of writing and homaging her work “The Waves”. Would have been extra fascinating to learn it earlier than?! No concrete reply, it’s not wanted.

Header picture: ANNA FÀBREGA HONORARFREI