Di fronte al dolore degli altri
The work was created in 2006 as a reflection on the atrocious tragedies that struck civilians in the wars of those decades. To this day, history perpetuates this scourge, and the revival of Sonate Bach takes the form of a ceremony that dedicates the time of dance to the declinations of gift and compassion. There are 11 choreographies that burst into the gesture of pain and painting, reminding us of as many tragic events that occurred in recent conflicts: Sarajevo, Kigali in Rwanda, Srebrenica, Tel Aviv, Jenin, Baghdad, Istanbul, Beslan, Gaza, Bentalha, Kabul. Eleven emblematic dates gathered around the 11 movements that make up the three Sonatas of Johann Sebastian Bach. Hundreds of photographs from war reporters’ archives provided the dramatic frames that compose the score of a choreography that assimilates those postures—photographs of bodies dissolving as they pass through dynamics and form—seeking an unresolvable approach to horror. Dance here affirms the effort to evoke, from these ruins of existence, an impossible and paradoxical beauty, to be carved with the quintessential ethical and political instrument: gesture. The focus returns to the question of the body, its meaning, complexity, and relevance. As Susan Sontag points out in Regarding the Pain of Others, the only response offered is still that directed toward the gaze of the 14th-century painter: the sublimation of tragedy into artistic transfiguration without commentary, involving both the human and the sacred, the singular and the universal. The 11 dances that follow one another take on the aspect of ballads; at the same time, they are a continuous dedication to memory, referring to events that iconographically mark the choreographic fabric.