Marcos Morau and Alessandro Sciarroni at FOG Pageant Milan | evaluate

Phrases by Giordana Patumi.

Two faces of the identical medal? Fairly the opposite. I’d relatively say two gold medals of our era that have a look at the physique, choreographing the house in distinctive and delicate methods. Every particular person, every lovely! On a heat Sunday, I attended two exhibits, totally 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 pageant 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 improbable 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; virtually on stage the complete time. Demarcated by three massive luminous panels, the performers take us again to an archaic world the place faith, folklore, mysticism, rituality, and transfigured actuality are combined with seductive songs and sounds from the folks custom of geographical areas of the world – Greece, Russia, Mexico, Latin America – combined with Wagnerian notes and digital sounds. At first, they slide as quick as mechanical dolls of their ample skirts that cowl their toes; they twirl like dervishes; they drag huge trunks that they open and shut as if to extract recollections that materialise within the change of garments; two of them put on huge wrinkled faces of outdated ladies, misplaced and wandering till they’re locked contained in the field to bid farewell to life.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 in opposition to 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. All the efficiency is accompanied by a steady and lengthy listing 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 in the present day, 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 hanging is the excessive tightness, the extraordinary length of a stage organisation that’s finally easy, virtually 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 one among La Veronal’s greatest 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 energy lies in its plasticity and within the investigation of the chances 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 crammed, 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 pageant d’Automne à Paris, DREAM, Alessandro Sciarroni’s new challenge, 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 up to date repertoire as if he had been dreaming. The viewers is free to return and go as they please, to strategy, to face between the performers, to maneuver away.

It’s a shifting set up relatively than a efficiency, a site-sensitive work, imagined for areas aside from the theatre context, a whole work when it comes to sound, gentle and physique, to be seen and skim. 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 toes planted within the right here and now and on the similar time within the elsewhere.

By means 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 by them. As time passes, the evolution of the dramaturgical path permits the opportunity of 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, except the musical moments. Music is the one potential illustration of the soul, which just like the soul is immaterial and has no that means. The music carried out by the pianist – in the same state to the opposite performers – urges them to hear to one another in an try to compose themselves in unison. Till a brand new silence.

Between 2019 and 2020, Alessandro Scarroni took an intimate and personal strategy 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, virtually with tenderness and calm pleasure, the failure of man’s dominion over nature and decides to voluntarily extinguish itself.

Header picture: ANNA FÀBREGA HONORARFREI