Revelation of the new Italian performance scene, Marco D’Agostin signs a generational biographical story entrusted to the talent of the dancer Marta Ciappina.
Bologna, Arena del Sole
Bologna, Arena del Sole October 14 h 23.00
October 15 h 21.30
duration 50 minutes
by Marco D’Agostin
with Marta Ciappina
sound LSKA
lights Paolo Tizianel
conversations Lisa Ferlazzo Natoli, Paolo Ruffini, Claudio Cirri
costume Lucia Gallone
set elements constructionPiccolo Teatro di Milano- Teatro d’Europa
promotion, care Damien Modolo
organization Eleonora Cavallo
administration Federica Giuliano
production VAN
coproductionCentro Nazionale di Produzione della Danza Virgilio Sieni e Fondazione CR Firenze, Piccolo Teatro di Milano – Teatro d’Europa, Emilia Romagna Teatro ERT / Teatro Nazionale, Festival Aperto – Fondazione I Teatri, Tanzhaus nrw Düsseldorf, Snaporazverein
supported by L’arboreto – Teatro Dimora, La Corte Ospitale Centro di Residenza Emilia-Romagna, CSC/OperaEstate Festival Veneto
with the support ofIstituto Italiano di Cultura di Colonia/MiC-Direzione Generale Spettacolo e Tanzhaus nrw Düsseldorf, nell’ambito di NID international residencies programme
After the success of First Love presented at VIE 2019, the choreographer, dancer and performer Marco D’Agostin should have presented Best Regards in the folllwing edition of the festival, unfortunately interrupted by pandemic. GLI ANNI, his new work, sees him engaged as author-director, while the stage is entrusted to the mastery of the dancer Marta Ciappina.
GLI ANNI evokes, through its title, the personal and generational tale of Annie Ernaux’s novel, as well as the very popular song of the Italian group 883: the narrative trend of the first will be redeemed, that includes a cover of details in an historical “we”; of the second, the nostalgic but light plot will be replicated. The show, constructed from a playlist of pop and rock songs from the 60s to today, will project us in an overview of environments, scenes and various shreds of family life, in an attempt to rescue as many images as possible from oblivion.
Stage and auditorium will breath jointly, in a collective journey back to that point of the life that has marked in all of us a before and after. The memory, a maniacal prop master, will practice in a dance that explores the chasm between “the bewilderment reality of what happens in the moment it happens and the strange unreality that, years after, cloaks what happened”.
Describing the project, currently still under construction, D’Agostin tells us: «In the Italian dance panorama, Marta Ciappina is a singular performer: her dance always springs from the meeting point between the rigour of the technical gesture and a bloody emotionality, at the full disposal of the spectator.
As an author with Marta, I always witness a strange phenomenon: even when the movement tends towards sublime abstraction, her organs and joints overflow with some subterranean, turbulent and painful form of life, grafted onto her memories and history. Marta has the incredible ability to place and vibrate her secrets in the body: the flexion of one of her hands is able to evoke the memory of an afternoon in the sun or the death of a father.
In recent years, my works have increasingly taken on a narrative pace, but what are the non-explicit forms that a story can take in a choreographic environment? The ambition that I am pursuing is that of finding signs and mobility that are detached from our iconography and reference schemes, and that also carry the specific weight of a story towards the spectator. I am looking for devices, formats and dances that take on the weight of biographies, generating broad and popular readings and interpretations.
Marta masters exact logics to translate the page of a private diary into a dance sequence. More generally, I am interested in observing the system of production and transmission of a tale, real or imaginary, even that of a family, a lineage, or the whole of humanity, and I wish to observe it in choreographic circumstances. Marta provides an author with an overwhelming existence and invites the audience to enter the darkest corners of her story; the challenge is therefore to question the tools of narration, which do not have to order facts, events and descriptions in the same way as literature, oral storytelling, music or theatre do. Here we need to organize a body with a complex and at the same time stripped architecture, and a choreographic writing that makes the spectators breathe with the time of a life, and with the times of the years, of the seasons, of the days.
I would never dare to venture into such territory if I did not know that this work can be done with and for Marta, and that her biography, duetting with that of her family and of mankind, can become a dance that is both enigmatic and accessible to all, as exciting as an Ocean Vuong novel and as mysterious as a Rothkian grey. The time has come to take me the responsibility for a choreographic novel that proudly claims its own sentimental afflatus, without giving in to any rhetoric.
We’ll look for the point of view of the Benjaminian narrator that, first of all, is the one who listens to the others’ tales, and only then the craftsman who knows how to mix, recombine and rewrite the stories he has learned. We will observe the tools of narration, first of all in relation to time, to its specific function of progressively stratifying memories and creating consequentiality between facts and events in the body, generating affection for things. The body will have to move like a back and forth between a full of stimuli and information present, a dense and noisy past, and a future that looks us from the precipice, with surprise and terror. Thought and its rhythm, constantly overlooking the audience, will give punctuation to the story. The shadow of a novel will always be cast on this flow, long and dense even when the writing is fragmentary.
Together with the audience, we’ll observe the intangible reality of a festive banquet, rekindling in us a childlike joy: a table set on which, maybe, a thunderbolt is ready to hurl itself. »