hosted at Teatro Biblioteca Quarticciolo on Jan 20 with Anna Cappelli and on Jan 21 with METAMORPHOSIS Trilogia – Atti di Metamorfosi Contemporanea
Larva, Blatta, Sapiens
- The title of our season is “Vertigine”. What is vertiginous to you?
VERTIGO is by its etymology a “distortion of an individual’s sensory perception.” What word can better describe nowadays? In a constant alteration of the “I,” discombobulated by events, circumstances, changing political, social, and environmental arrangements, we find ourselves unable to read reality and don’t really know what tools to use to deal with it. Like “little beasts,” we lean out to look over the fence, get enveloped by an invisible vortex that shows us our personal abyss and it begins a dance suspended between risk and fascination with the unknown: a “vertigo,” a “chasm.”
To this word belongs an extreme physicality: we can physically experience it, represent it, be bearers of it. It is a state that simultaneously involves mind and body in its entirety, leading us to a different reading of the tangible, calling into question thoughts, actions. I feel a strong correspondence between the term “vertigo” and my current research on Metamorphosis. I think they are part of the same root related to inner transformation. Vertigo is a whirlwind that agitates perception, while Metamorphosis is the process of deep change, both represent a journey into the dimension of personal and social transformations.
Actually theater is a “vertigo.” I believe that this expression relates strongly to the role of the artist, a generator by nature of vertigo for himself and the audience. Without the triggering of a real vertigo, it will be difficult to find the key to the translation of the “real.” I believe that what is needed first and foremost is a personal “vertigo” within the creative process, followed by the precise construction of a solid narrative “vertigo” in which to immerse the viewer.
2) You are hosted with two works that somehow portray transient body states. In Anna Cappelli between movement, voice, lucidity and madness. In Metamorphosis between the animal and the bestial. What kind of bodies emerge or would you like to see emerge from your research and practices?
For the past few years I have been implementing a path of research and creation on the different principles of Metamorphosis. Both creations are related, albeit differently, to the same field of inquiry. I would like to invite viewers to reflect on the multiple layers of the soul.
I feel the need to remember and reaffirm the wonderful three-dimensionality of bodies and spaces. In this time of investigation and action I am attempting to narrate, with no little difficulty, a multitude of bodies, a flowering of shifting forms, a kind of “wunderkammer” of the human species.
The two performances are representative of this flux and include a transdisciplinarity of languages: choreography, the use of spoken and sung word, and a strong dramaturgical component. The metamorphic theme is approached with different declinations: starting from the pure and physical larval image that transforms into a cockroach and later into a human, we move on to the oscillation between necessity and needs, useful for human survival, we cross the theme of the “ego” as the pivot of action and needs coming to deal with contingent environmental issues and the consequent climate change. The bodies that have emerged from this first period of research are surprisingly all different, but united by the alternation between an internal/external static linked to the past and events and the strong desire for transformation. I believe that, more than ever now, there is a real need for a human renaissance.
3) What power do dance practices have to change the imaginary and/or act the world?
As long as we just talk sectorially about “Dance”, I think its power to communicate and our power to act as artists in society are really limited. I would rather talk about Art making and its power to influence individual and community thinking. I think that recently there has been a big misunderstanding between what Art and entertainment are, that this does not help to understand the true evolutionary power of the former. It is up to us artists, with responsibility and honesty, to act out a thought and make it a living matter.