Flavia Dalila D’Amico: In music In Levare is placing the accent on a weak note, that relieves us for a moment from a continuous beat. In Levare, however, is also to rebel, to rise up together. For your vocation and artistic research, do you find yourself more in the first or in the second definition? What does ‘In Levare’ refer you to?
Piergiorgio Milano: In my opinion, In levare refers to that visceral feeling of not being able to sit down, that almost uncontrollable urge to keep rising up. In this sense a rebellion seems to me metaphorically the most correct image. In my imagination, levare is linked to a repeated and marked suspension, to an accent that, taking the thrust from below, strikes the upper space of the body, forcing it to a partial detachment from the ground: a rebellion therefore, of lightness.
FDD: How did Fortuna come about and how does it tie in with your research into the relationship between nature and the human?
PM: Fortuna stems from my previous experience in the mountains working on the themes of sport, natural environments, and the search for the self. In this case, the analysis was conducted on the seascape, on the introspective and reflective relationship that human beings have always had with the sea, and on sailing.
Fortuna allowed me to address some of the themes that have always been dearest to me, linking them in a profound way with a choreographic language on the borderline between circus and dance that I have been pursuing since the beginning of my career.
Fortuna has important roots in a series of marine literatures, some older and some more contemporary, ranging from Moby Dick to the Roots of the Sea, to the Long Route. The urgency of Fortuna was to recount in parallel the different reasons that drive human beings to undertake a sea voyage aware of all the risks involved, trying to highlight how the sea always represents a necessary route to freedom, be it physical, political or spiritual.
Fortuna has become a performance about the passing of time, self-consciousness, courage and fear, and how these elements are always, beyond our will, linked together in an indissoluble form.