Alberto Spadolini - Galeotto fu il lenzuolo review

Marco Travaglini, Alberto Spadolini - Galeotto fu il lenzuolo. Arte, amore e spionaggio nella Parigi Anni Trenta, Youcanprint, 2019. 

It is not easy to write about Alberto Spadolini: his archive includes heterogeneous documents, such as articles in different languages (among them French and Flemish) and photographs that it is difficult to place within his career. Marco Travaglini, his nephew and biographer, has uncovered material on his uncle since 1978 and has been studying it at least since 2004. Thanks to him Spadolini’s life has emerged from the fogs of oblivion. Alberto Spadolini - Galeotto fu il lenzuolo. Arte, amore e spionaggio nella Parigi Anni Trenta [Alberto Spadolini – It all started with a sheet. Art, love, espionage in 1930s Paris] is Travaglini’s latest book, a novel mostly based on documents. The title refers to Spadolini’s 1932 debut as a dancer. As he did not have a costume to wear, he chose a sheet which was valued for its originality. In many photographs, included Dora Maar’s refined portrait that has been chosen for the book cover, Spadolini wears various kinds of draped fabric (scarves, cloaks, etc.) as ornament, maybe as a memory of that debut.

Spadolini (1907-1972) was a famous music-hall dancer in 1930s Paris and, after that, an appreciated painter both in France and abroad. He was also decorator, singer, actor, restorer and director.

Travaglini opens the book quoting another novel on Spadolini, Il Gioco di Spadò [Spadò’s Game] by Augusto Scano, published in 2015. Spadolini is dying in a hospital and somebody (Death? A friend?) asks him to dance and invites him to do so as he has never done before. This is a significant introduction because, as I stated in 2007, dance represents a fil rouge in Spadolini’s career, even after he stopped dancing, in that it constantly returns in his paintings.

The narrative is divided into two main threads: one set in 2015 and dedicated to the fictitious character of Dora, an Italian American PhD in Renaissance art who is given the task to write a book about 1930s dance in Paris; the other is centred on Spadolini’s life that spans from the 1920s to the 1970s. Dora’s publishing house asks her to find “a key, a protagonist, something or somebody who can become the subject for a book”. Surprised, Dora discovers the exhistence of an unknown figure who has her same surname, “‘Josephine Baker and...Spadolini?’ But it is my same surname!”. Thus begins her adventure in search of Spadolini that will bring her to Italy and France in the company of archivist Maurizio.

Spadolini’s life flows through the pages thanks to recurrent flash-blacks that move the action to when the artist met Gabriele D’Annunzio and Anton Giulio Bragaglia in 1920s Italy, when he became a famous dancer in 1930s France, when he danced in front of Hitler in 1940, when he performed with Walter Chiari in Italy after the Second World War and so on till his last years.

Many of these flash-backs stand out for their historical interest. For example, the Spadolini-D’Annunzio connection poses some reflexions. On the one hand, historian Giordano Bruno Guerri considers it a possibility, on the other, he highlights the fact that there are no documents about it. In truth there are, but they do not come from the period during which they met, that is the 1920s [1] but from a lot later, 1971, when Philippe Jullian published his biography on the Italian poet. Maybe Guerri refers to the lack of primary sources (precisely those closer to the period of the event) and not to the presence of secondary sources as Jullian’s book is. A debate on sources would imply a long digression, but we can briefly analyse this one.

Jullian thanks Spadolini in the acknowledgment page but does not name him in the episode about his encounter with the poet at the Vittoriale. One wonders why. Did Spadolini explicitly ask for his name to be omitted? Why would he do that? Jullian was not an amateur writer: born as illustrator, he wrote some novels to then focus on art history and biographical studies. His book on Symboism, Esthètes et Magiciens [translated into English as Dreamers of Decadence] contributed to the rediscovery of that art movement. Some of his books, including his biography of D’Annunzio, have been translated into Italian. Jullian dedicates a couple of pages to the encounter between Spadolini and D’Annunzio, pages that do neither represent a fundamental aspect of the poet’s life nor a considerable portion of the book itself: he could have simply taken them away, but did not. Furthermore, as Travaglini has specified, this source has been confirmed by Patrick Oger who knew Spadolini well.

Considering Jullian from another perspective, we could look at what he actually does not say. In fact, when he thanks Spadolini, he calls him “the famous dancer” without saying anything about his paintings. Why? Exhibitions on Spadolini’s work had been organised since the 1940s, why did he omit this aspect? At present it is not clear, but we know that Spadolini had been deeply attached to his paintings since the 1920s, when he was studying art in Rome.

One of his first notable paintings was a San Francis he completed in 1925. At that time he could not keep it safe at his place in Rome and left it in Ancona, at his parents’ house. Unfortunately, his father Angelo, who had refused to join the Fascist Party, lost his job and decided to sell it. When he discovered it, Spadolini became very angry. He tried to recover his work and discovered that it had been sold to a church in Bradford, New York, USA. When he went on tour to the States, he hired a photographer to have a picture taken of his painting and this is all we have of it today. His attachment also emerges from his decision to join the Third Order of San Francis, probably after the Second World War. Travaglini dedicates an intense page to his uncle’s devotion for the saint, quoting his own words: “Francis has taught me to give for the joy of giving, to be happy with what I have, to consider the rich as the real poor because they are often poor in their spirit and soul”.

Spadolini’s words return in other parts of the book, as in his 1935 article, “Impressions of America”, that Travaglini published also in his 2012 book, Spadò – Il danzatore nudo. Spadolini talks about the United States after coming back from a tour there, “an American city shows itself as a continuous example of human velocity”. He compares the Parisian music-halls with those in the States, highlighting the fame of the French capital, “in general, when the production shows a French label, it is skyrocketing”. He then criticises North American racism, after noticing its “unspeakable repulsion towards the yellow and black races” while dining with black artist Alma Smith.

Dora and Maurizio discover information on Spadolini thanks to this and other documents, commenting them and formulating questions on his life. In this sense, Travaglini’s book is as much about Spadolini as it is abut the complex act of writing a book on him. Connected with this aspect, there is another character, a blogger who publishes superficial articles on Spadolini. His work, inspired by an exhisting book, Ignazio Gori’s Alberto Spadolini – Danzatore, pittore, agente segreto [Alberto Spadolini – Dancer, painter, secret agent], shows the great difference between a fourteen years (and counting) long study, as Travaglini’s book is, and Gori’s work, where Travaglini’s findings are mentioned (beginning with the 1978 box of documents) but never acknowledged. One could recognise its unprofessional approach even only from the book cover, where a beautiful photograph of Spadolini is turned upside down (what are possible readers supposed to think of it? That Spadolini danced that way?). Worse still, the book is described as the ‘study’ that gives back “its right weight” to Spadolini’s work , creating a false idea in those who do not know anything about either Spadolini or his nephew, a very grave and disrespectful act. Through the blogger character, Travaglini questions and deconstructs Gori’s book, reclaiming the respect that his own work and his uncle deserve, “‘Your blogger – vehemently said Dora - ‘alludes to something, but what proofs does he offer?’. ‘None!’, replied Maurizio”.


NOTE

[1] There is an indirect source from that period that attests Duilio Cambellotti’s presence at the Vittoriale. According to Pierfranco Andreani, who wrote a brief biographical introduction on Spadolini in the brochure of his Roman 1967 exhibition, Spadolini became Cambellotti’s apprentice while studying at the Art Academy in Rome. It is therefore plausible to think that Spadolini went with him to the Vittoriale.

Martha Graham's choreosophy - talk

On October 12, 2019, I delivered a talk titled "La coreosofia di Martha Graham" [Martha Graham's choreosophy] at B-Nario in Montecosaro (Macerata), Italy, as part of Sostantivo femminile, a series of events and exhibitions dedicated to women artists. There were some technical problems and an unforseen delay in my talk, but I had some very intersting feed-back from the audience.
On the term 'choreosophy' I have already written about in this blog, see here and in my book on Graham's Letter to the World [the link leads to a detailed synopsis in English, but the actual book is in Italian]. I would like to thank Marco Di Pasquale who organised the event, for having invited me and for his help.

Afrofuturist Degas essay

My essay, "Afrofuturist Degas" has been published on the visual arts magazine Roots - Routes. It is an Afrofuturist analysis of Ken Browar and Deborah Ory' photographs of Misty Copeland posing as Degas's ballerinas, photographs that were published on Harper's Bazaar in 2016.
I had been wanting to write about those photographs for a long time and am very grateful to Roots - Routes for having allowed me to do that. I cover different topics throughout the essay, such as the absence (until fairly recently) of black ballerinas in ballet history, blackface and the notion of both ballet and photography as technologies. I wish I could have explored these aspects a bit further but I could not due to reasons of space.
The essay is available online here.

Presentation of Spadolini documentary

On Tuesday 27, August 2019, in the Pinacoteca in Jesi (An), I presented an evening dedicated to dancer painter Alberto Spadolini where Riccardo De Angelis and Romeo Marconi' documentary, Spadò - Il danzatore nudo (2019) was showed, followed by a chat with the directors and Spadolini's nephew, Marco Travaglini. Here is my review of the documentary.
The Pinacoteca is becoming a reference point for the rediscovery of Spadolini as, thanks to my collaboration with them (mainly thanks to Simona Cardinali) on November 10, 2012, I organised and presented another event to celebrate Spadolini, Dalla tela al palco - Vita, pittura e danza di Alberto Spadolini, which consisted in a lecture performance done in collaboration with dj Nooz and dancer and choreographer Roberto Lori, and an interview with Travaglini and sculptor Massimo Ippoliti.
In February 2017, the directors shot the video interview they made with me in the Pinacoteca as well.
I therefore thank them for their help and kindness.

Martha Graham's Letter as a dance adaptation essay

My essay, "Martha Graham's Letter to the World: A dance adaptation of Emily Dickinson" has been published last June on the Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance, Vol 12, Ns 1-2, 1 June 2019, pp. 33-48. 
In it I analyse Graham's Letter as a dance adaptation, to show how she converted Dickinson's poetic (and not just poetic) material into dance. I also briefly focus on the notion of dance adaptation itself.

Spadò – Il danzatore nudo: a documentary on Alberto Spadolini

 Official trailer of the documentary.

Attics sometimes reveal entire worlds, dusty and long forgotten. Spadò – Il danzatore nudo [Spadò: the nude dancer] opens in an attic, with a dusty, somewhat vintage atmosphere and a double bell alarm clock. Because this is a journey through time, the time when Alberto Spadolini, (1907-1972), a young boy from Ancona, Marche, went to live in Rome in the 1920s, where he studied painting and then moved again to France, where he became a famous music-hall dancer in 1932.

Spadolini’s rediscovery began in 1978 precisely in an attic, where his nephew, MarcoTravaglini found a box filled with documents of all sorts (photographs, articles, posters etc.) about his uncle’s life in France. Spadolini did not really talk of his role as dancer and Travglini was surprised at what he discovered. He went back to this material in 2004 when he methodically started to search for his uncle’s secret past. The documentary creates an evocative atmosphere as Travaglini speaks in the attic, “every now and then our particularly mysterious uncle would come (…) he was very loved and would come to visit us once or twice a year. He would come in a big enormous American car" with presents for his nephews.

Riccardo De Angelis and Romeo Marconi have directed the first documentary on this little known artist, in collaboration with Marco Travaglini, who is also the director of Atelier Spadolini. Spadò was the nickname with which Spadolini was called by his friends and sometimes by the press. The title also refers to the fact that he often danced almost nude and should not be confused with Travaglini’s homonymous 2012 book title. This documentary is a fascinating journey divided into three intertwined planes: one centred on material on and by Spadolini, another represented by people who either knew him (his nephews and a friend) or know about him (a journalist, a writer, an art historian, myself as dance historian etc.), and the third one made by the Nicoletta Fabbri Quartet’s Paris-inspired music (one member of the Quartet is Stefano Travaglini, Marco's brother).  

Journalist and writer Alberto Bignami brings us to Spadolini’s birth as a love child: his mother, Ida, was working as a maid in the house of an aristocratic family, had an affair with her master, got pregnant and was fired because of that. She was about to leave Ancona, when railway worker Angelo Spadolini, earned her trust and welcomed her and her baby in his house.

Writer and philosopher Antonio Luccarini tells us that young Alberto showed a gift for drawing and started studying painting with local artist Armando Bandinelli. He then moved to Rome to study with Vatican painter Giambattista Conti. In the capital he attended Anton Giulio Bragaglia’s Teatro degli Indipendenti where many avant-garde artists were. According to art historian, Stefano Papetti, Spadolini “surely deserves (...) to be better investigated”. There is a dynamism pervading his painted figures that may come from his contact with the futurist painters that he probably met at the Teatro.

A good part of the documentary is devoted to the supposed friendship betweeen Spadolini and Gabriele D’Annunzio, about which Travaglini has talked since his first book on his uncle, Bolero-Spadò: Alberto Spadolini, una vita di tutti i colori (2007). Art historian, biographer, illustrator Philippe Jullian thanks Spadolini in the acknowledgment page of his 1971 book on Gabriele D’Annunzio, “Spadolini, the famous dancer, has told me about the trip he made to the Vittoriale when he was very young”. The Vittoriale degli Italiani is a set of constructions promoted by D’Annunzio in Gardone Riviera in the North of Italy. There he spent the last part of his life and there he apparently met Spadolini in 1924. Jullian does not explicitly name him, in the book, but when we read of a young decorator who becomes D’Annunzio’s friend and then goes to France, we can easily make the connection with the reference the author has previously made in the acknowledgment page. This connection has been corroborated by one of Spadolini’s friends, Patrick Oger who has confirmed to Travaglini that the young decorator in Jullian’s book is Spadolini. In the documentary, historian and biographer Giordano Bruno Guerri, who has written on D’Annunzio, highlights the possibility of this encounter even though the sources are not consistent enough.

Poster of the documentary.

Another aspect of Spadolini’s life which lacks consistent sources is his possible role as secret agent. Writer and essayst Fabio Filippetti, states that when one talks about the secret service “it is difficult to gain information”. However, Spadolini was a known artist and could move in different places without arousing suspects. And the intersting thing is that “we find him (…) in strategic cities in particular during the [Second] World War”. Travaglini explains his view on the matter quoting, among other elements, the friendship between Spadolini and codex enthusiast Ives Gilden. It is possible that further material will emerge with time.

I had the task of speaking of the role of Spadolini as dancer. I was quite nervous during the interview and did not say as much as I wanted. I called Spadolini a primitivist dancer as he performed in various acts inspired by those cultures that at the time were seen as primitivist. Primitivism is a complex, colonial and controversial notion that invests various fields such as art and literature. At the turn of the twentieth century it had to do with Westerns’ fascination for the Others whose works began to be considered as art and inspired many Westerners’ artistic forms. Pablo Picasso’s Les demoiselles d’Avignon is the recurrent example, in this sense. I did not refer to these aspects in my interview, but De Angelis and Marconi focused on one of Spadolini’s few recorded primitivist performances, his solo in 1936 Pierre Caron’s film, Marinella. There Spadolini moves nearly nude on a small stage in the shape of a drum, recalling perhaps a primitivist culture ritual and mingling diverse dance techniques such as classical dance and flamenco. Spadolini was also famous for his Bolero that he probably presented in 1933 and that was set to Maurice Ravel’s music and was noted for his interpretation in Gigue to Bach’s music, the same year.

In the documentary Luccarini emphasises how Spadolini became a dancer “without any technical knowledge” and before that I quote Jenny Josane’s 1941 article where Spadolini himself confirms that. However, there are other sources that state otherwise and it is very likely that he studied dance during his Roman period. Furthermore, after his 1932 debut at the Casino de Paris, he also started taking classes from two ballet teachers, Alexandre Volinine and Blanche D’Alessandri.

Of particular interest is Sergio Sadotti’s testimony. He knew Spadolini in the years 1957 and 1958 when the artist would go to Porto Sant’Elpidio to visit his sister who lived under his flat, “Alberto immediately stood out for his personality, a great personality and elegance (…). I saw him paint paintings that he would quickly roll and send to his gallerist in Paris.”

These and other interviews are all blended in with beautiful images of Spadolini’s statuesque presence and of Paris. More specifically, video fragments from his own black and white 1950 documentary, Rivage de Paris, flow and reveal monuments of the city such as the Eiffel tower as well as its musicians, like an accordion player whose image is elegantly juxtaposed to that of the Nicoletta Fabbri Quartet. One of the songs the Quartet plays is Josephine Baker’s 1930 “J’ai deux amours”, which is apt for Spadolini too, as it recites, “I have two loves, my country and Paris”.

De Angelis and Marconi have done a really significant and at times superlative job thanks also to Travaglini’s archival support. Spadò – Il danzatore nudo, which is also available with English subtitles, is an important work, another step towards a better comprehension of Spadolini’s enigmatic figure.

"Not I": Autobiography by Wayne McGregor

A scene from Autobiography, photo Andrej Uspenski.

“What does it mean to write one’s own story?” recites the programme of Autobiography (2017) by contemporary dance Company Wayne McGregor. It is a complex question and dancers and choreographers have responded to it in different manners. Modern dance pioneer, Isadora Duncan, introducing her 1927 autobiography, remarked on the difficulty of writing, “it has taken me years of struggle, hard work, and research to learn to make one simple gesture, and I know enough about the Art of writing to realise that it would take me again just so many years of concentrated effort to write one simple, beautiful sentence”. More recently, ballet dancer and choreographer Carlos Acosta has dealt with the question of autobiography in various ways, that span from his semi-autobiographical 2003 work, Tocororo, to his 2008 book No Way Home to the weeks-old release of a film about his story, Yuli, where autobiographical elements intertwne with the film narrative.

McGregor has opted for another path, that of science, technology, fluid kinetism and some ‘seeds’ from his past. The genesis for this choreography, as David Jays from The Guardian has pointed out, began with his fascination for artificial intelligence and with what role could it have in his work. This brought McGregor to focus on his genetic code and on how he could transform it into another form. He also took some personal aspects from his life, “family things, photographs, poetry I have written” and turned them into what he calls ‘volumes’, sections that are assembled at every performance according to an algorithm created by Nick Rothwell. In this way, every performance has a different sequence.

The one presented at the Ponchielli Theatre in Cremona, Italy, on Saturday 13th of April, began with “1 avatar”, where a bare-chested male dancer moves across space, articulating his arms up and down, kicking one leg backwards, extending his legs and then going down in deep second. It is an intense solo that seems to create a sharp contrast with the geometric structure above him. Designed by Ben Cullen Williams, it covers the whole stage ceiling and it consists of metal poles in the shape of pyramids pointing downwards. It is a huge structure that will move down and up during the performance. As in “6 sleep”, when it dramatically moves down almost touching the stage floor and ‘forcing’ the dancers to assume a horizontal position (the one we take when we sleep).

The dancers are all exceptional. I remember watching McGregor’s work years ago (probably around 2008) in London. I think the choreography was Entity (2008). His company at the time was called Random Dance and was again made of great dancers. However, I noticed a kind of unsmooth quality in their movement, something that disappeared when I saw his Infra (2008) performed by the Royal Ballet. In Autobiography, the dancers command both the grammar of classical dance and that of more torso-oriented techniques. The arms, for exmple, cut the space in numerous directions, taking the shapes of balletic port de bras or magnetic and quick unfolding and retracting lines. It is a real pleasure to watch this fluid approach to movement.

The other aspect that stroke me is the masterful light design by McGregor’s long time collaborator, Lucy Carter. In some moments one can only say “Wow!” to what she has elaborated. Like in volume “19 ageing”, when a pink-haired female dancer, arms in second, is enveloped by a beautiful red light or in “8 nurture” when blinding lights from the back of the stage are repeatedly turned on dirupting the audience’s sight.

Autobiography is and is not about McGregor. It is about his genetic code, fragments from his life transmuted into movement, lights, music, set, dramaturgy and so on. One of the volumes is called “13 not I” and is paradigmatic of his approach. It is not about his own individual self in traditional narrative terms. In the programme note he talks about the body as archive, a notion that has been under scrutiny by dance scholars for some time now. One of them, André Lepecki, has analysed it in relation to some examples of re-enactment, stating that it is “a system of transforming simultaneously past, present, and future”. And McGregor considers it along these lines, “not as a nostalgia-fest but as an idea of speculative future. Each cell carries in it the whole blueprint of your life.”

Long Live the Wilis: Dada Masilo's South African Fearless Giselle

Teatro Storchi, photo Rosella Simonari.

The Storchi Theatre in Modena is a late nineteenth century theatre with a nice simmetrical façade. It is a beautiful evening and people are gathering together to see Dada Masilo’s adaptation of Giselle (2017), a work on changing the symmetries of gender relations. The poster of the performance shows Masilo as Giselle in a high kick with her flex foot in front of a red dressed dancer with a whisk in one of her hands. Masilo’s kick is emblematic of her version as it exemplifies her intention to focus on the wilis’ viciousness, their strength and deadly power.

The story of the ballet Giselle (1841) is the quintessential Romantic story of love and loss. The countrygirl Giselle falls in love with Albrecht who hides his noble origin and his noble fiancée. When Giselle discovers the truth thanks to Hilarion, her would-be lover, she goes mad in an epic dramatic scene and dies only to be born again as a wili, a nightly spirit destined to kill those who enter her realm in the forest. However, Giselle loves Albrecht after all, and decides to save him from death when he ventures into the forest to pray at her tomb.

Poster Giselle, photo Rosella Simonari.

Masilo’s Giselle is the fruit of numerous changes. Firstly, her Giselle is not as fragile and shy as the classic one. One example is when she rejects Hilarion (Tshepo Zasekhaya)’s flowers. Secondly, there is the style through which the choreography is organised: contemporary, mingled with classical and African. It is an explosive mix of energy that give shape to vibrant ensemble phrases, Masilo’s best achievements, lyrical duets, especially between Giselle and Albrecht (a stunning Lwando Dutyulwa), and piercing solos. Third, there is the fundamental story twist in the second part of the work: Giselle’s revenge against Albrecht.

Masilo works on characters and narrative in response to today’s society, its injustice, violence and discrimination. She has decided to set her work in rural South Africa and has drawn elements from its culture and tradition. The revised role of Myrtha, the queen of the wilis, is compelling and revealing, in this sense. Powerfully danced by a male dancer, Llewellyn Mnguni, dressed as the other wilis, Myrtha is a Sangoma, a South African healer, who confers a sacred tinge to the role. Mnguni has long light-coloured braided hair, and holds a hairy stick, a sort of whisk, which is traditionally used in ceremonies and which enters into a visual dynamics with his often whisked hair. His movements are curved and dense with his rear end off-axis. Other South African elements include the funeral hymn chanted after Giselle’s death at the end of act I, “go to heaven my heart, for there is no peace on this earth”, highlighted by a slow paced procession of the members of her community.

Dada Masilo and the other wilis in Giselle, photo Stella Olivier.

The queer element is also implemented by the presence of male wilis among the female group. Masilo has already dealt with homosexuality in her Swan Lake (2010), but here it is as if the theme is inserted underground in a kind of implicit statement whch make it discerete and consistent at the same time. Male, female, neither, both, whatever...gender fluidity seems to be one possible answer.

For the revenge theme, Masilo has pushed the “original narrative”, highlighting the wilis’ “vicious, dangerous” character. A chromatic anticipation can be discerned in the choice of deep red instead of ghostly white for the wilis and Myrtha’ costumes, “I wanted the Wilis to look like they had been drenched in blood”, affirms Masilo, recalling in this the connection that sometimes is made between wilis and vampires. Designed by Songezo Mcilizeli and Nonofo Olekeng, the costumes consist of a patterned sleevles top, a below the knee wide skirt and short layers of tulle sewed at the back. This contrasts with the vitreous green lights by Suzette le Sueur that appear with the wilis’ arrival.

When Albrecht arrives in this uncanny place, he briefly dances with red-dressed Giselle, but the tone is rather different from the pas de deux they interepreted before. In this case, Giselle is angry and pushes him away. It is the beginning of the end, Albrecht dances with three wilis a beautiful pas de quatre where they remain grouped together and he stands apart either to the front or the back. Soon he suffers from acute fits, and is then surrounded by the wilis, until Giselle kills him with a long whip. His body lies down lifeless, while the wilis move from right to left (he is on the left) throwing white dust in the air. Giselle is the last, lights go down and she leaves him there, alone. Revenge has been accomplished and a perverse justice given to all those women who have been wronged by men. The often percussive music by Philip Miller and William Kentridge’s rural-inspired drawings which at times is projected at the back, complete this choreography, profoundly thought-provoking in style, interpreters and narrative.

Inside the Gesture of Nature - Celeste by Raffaella Giordano

Raffaella Giordano in CELESTE appunti per natura, photo by Andrea Macchia.

Round arms, slow-paced steps, torquise, yellow and blu dress-shaped surface. These are some of the snapshots we are left with after watching CELESTE appunti per natura [CELESTE notes for nature], the solo choreographed and danced by Raffaella Giordano, co-director of Sosta Palmizi. 

Sosta Palmizi is one of the historic contemporary dance companies in Italy. It had its debut in 1985 with Il Cortile [The Courtyard] and, as Ambra Senatore has noted, it emerged as “a turning point phenomenon” in Italian dance history. CELESTE appunti per natura throws an imaginary lasso to Il Cortile because its music is composed by the same musician, Arturo Annecchino.

Created in 2017, the choreography was presented at the Mecenate Theatre in Arezzo (near Florence) on Sunday March 17th as the last performance of a series titled “Invito di Sosta" (XI Edition) [Sosta Invitation] that took place from October 2018 to March 2019. A “closing for an opening”, affirmed Giorgio Rossi, co-director of Sosta Palmizi together with Giordano. The auspice refers to the Company’s intention to organise a new calendar of performances for the autumn, but also and mainly it refers to the solo itself which represents the opening towards a rich microcosm of steps, gestures and images. For instance, when Giordano knees down placing her hands and head on the stage floor, or when she puts the wooden log characterised by two holes (one of the three props) behind her neck, recalling perhaps medieval tortures like pillory, it is a moment, but a really striking one.

And then there is silence, the grades of silence alternated with music and sounds (these last ones by Lorenzo Brusci). Giordano often shows her back to the audience and covers her face with her hands, until she wears a mask made of paper, a simple page with three holes, two for her eyes, one for her mouth. As she explains in the after performance talk, she has worked a lot on invisibility, on the sense of drawing away in order to leave room for something else: a gesture, a calm rhythm, the moving body, the crossing of space.

CELESTE appunti per natura is in part based on an unusual book, The Hill of Summer (1969) by J. A. Baker, an almost unknown writer who “only talks about and describes nature”. Giordano follows the author’s intention to remove himself from the text in order to let nature emerge. The dancer choreographer’s reiterated gesture of covering her face appears curious and intimate at the same time. And in today’s intemperate world of facebook (the book of faces, we could say), this gesture becomes dense and offers a different gaze, a gaze focused on details and embodied identities where faces are just one component among many, not social media’ directive.

Last but not least, her dress, the movement of her dress and inside her dress. Painted by Gianmaria Sposito, it has a round neck, long slightly puffed sleeves and a bell-shaped skirt with side slits. It glows, gets compressed and expanded during the choreographic path, interacting with Giordano’s bare feet and emphasising the posistion of her hands, often joined or placed on the fabric. It is a microcosm within the microcosm, another “service to the action”, the careful attention Giordano has for her work.

William Forsythe's Black Flags and the Elephant in the Room

Black Flags is a large installation William Forsythe created in 2014 for one of his projects called Choreographic Objects. Forsythe has been revolutionising the language of dance since the late 1980s, with his radical deconstructive approach to ballet, and, in 2005 he pushed his creative drive further by asking himself questions like, “is it possible for choreography to generate autonomous expressions of its principles, a choreographic object, without the body?” (Forsythe, no date). The result were the Choreographic Objects, a series of challenging installations which could differ in size, material and structure.

Black Flags is one of them, is huge and it consists of two robotic arms holding and moving two black flags. The big dark fabric of each flag moves sometimes in unison with the other, sometimes according to a different direction or angle, “there is a distribution of forces which is really unique” says Forsythe, praising the “beauty and precision” (Forsythe, 2017) of these objects. The noise of the robots in action is the only ‘music’ in the piece.

I have not seen it live, but I felt a deep sense of uncanny bewilderment watching the video of this performance and I begun to think about the reasons why. The first thing that has come to my mind is the Italian ‘sbandieratori’, flag twirlers, artists who move flags in various directions and even throw them in the air in acrobatic compositions. It is not clear what their origin was, but nowadays, there are numerous Medieval-inspired spectacles which include the exhibition of the flag twirlers whose work can certainly be seen as a type of choreography. Here are a couple of examples, the first is a live recording of the sbandieratori from Lanciano, a town in the South of Italy, the second is a video portray of the sbandieratori from Acquapendente, a smaller town in the Centre of Italy:

                                                                                                                                           

Watching Forsythe’s flags and the flag twirlers one can notice the creepy (Forsythe used the term ‘creep’ himself, see Forsythe, 2017) calmness of the formers with respect to the upbeat of the latters, there is a connection in the dexterous flags manipulation, but a sharp difference in dynamics.  

The bewilderment continues, there is something out of place in this installation, but I still do not know what it is. Then , the second association emerges, it is is with the Anarchists’ flag, which was black towards the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth. First made popular by Louise Michel in France in the 1880s, it then recurred in other countries like the United States (afaq, 2008). According to Howard Ehrlich, the colour black was chosen for its association with various elements:

"Black is the shade of negation. The black flag is the negation of all flags. It is a negation of nationhood which puts the human race against itself and denies the unity of all humankind. Black is a mood of anger and outrage (…). Balck is also a colour of mourning. (…) Balck is also beautiful. It is a colour of determination, of resolve, of strength, a colour by which all others are clarified and defined. Black is the mysterious surrounding of germination, of fertility, the breeding ground of new life which always evolves, renews, refreshes, and reproduces itself in darkness" (Ehrlich, quoted in afaq, 2008).

I am getting there. This sense of bewilderment is connected with the idea of nation/group the flag incorporates. And I think of the United States flags planted on the moon in 1969 or, moving backwards, of the flag in Eugène Delacroix’s painting Liberty Leading the people (1830), where the allegory of the female form (Warner, 1985) representing the ideal of Liberty, guides a group of people through war (more specifically, the 1830 July Revolution). That same three-coloured flag would later became the French national flag. 

Forsythe, talking about Black Flags, has affirmed that they worked hard “to de-anthropomorphise these robots in their actions and we’ve done everything we can to take away the idea of dominance or submission or purpose although it does creep in” (Forsythe, 2017). I am not sure I agree with this idea. Flags are highly overloaded symbols connected with human history, politics, culture and various other fields (there is also a field dedicated to them, it is called Vexillology, from the Latin word ‘vexillum’, flag) and they bear within themselves patterns of dominance and submission. Choosing flags for an installation without engaging with these patterns means to perpetrate them in some way. George Balanchine, for example, has choreographed two ballets devoted to flags, Stars and Stripes (1958) and Union Jack (1976), choosing a celebratory tone and “patriotic touches” (Balanchine Trust, no date).

Wlliam Pope.L’s Trinket, a 2008 installation, where a huge flag is being moved by large industrial fans and illuminated by several lights, is quite different in this sense. It looks like a United States flag but it is not as Pope.L has added a star, which is a small detail that disrupts the pattern. In a similar way, the title poses a sharp contrast to the majesty of the symbol the flag has, “when speaking of big things use small words” he says (Pope. L, 2015).

Christopher Knight summarises the work as follows:

"The egalitarian promise of the flag's symbolism is easily acknowledged, but what makes the sculpture great is its layered depth. More difficult to represent is the symbol's power, whose source is counterintuitive: The symbol is dynamic because its egalitarian promise has not been fulfilled" (Knight, 2015).

According to Pope.L the flag “is a space of disagreement and agreement” and this condenses the layered discourse on flag symbolism, especially for the use of the term ‘space’, as it recalls the geopolitical root of many conflicts.

Another artist, Roberto Longo, has created in 2014 a big sculpture of wood, steel and wax which recalls a partial United States flag, except for the fact that it is black and built as if it were a “sinking ship” (Longo, 2016). The erect (almost phallic) position of a flag hanging from its pole is deconstructed and reshaped according to a disturbing diagonal. Titled Untitled (Pequod) it recalls Ahab’s ship in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), a ship which in the end sank as did Ahab’s obsession with the white whale. “Moby Dick is like the genetic code of America” says Longo, in that the ship crew members came from different cultures but were led by white guys. And Ahab “has this incredible hubris which is very much like American hubris right now” (Longo, 2016).

Robert Longo, Untitled (Pequod).

Both Pope.L and Longo engage with the symbolism connected to flags, Fosythe does not. That is probably the cause of my bewilderment, I feel something important is missing. I appreciate Forsythe’s choice of two flags so that movement does not have a central focus, but two. However, this recalls the anthropomorphic image of two arms, even though the robots are placed on the floor and not attached to a unifying object. I also found the fabric moving through the air particularly interesting, with the three elements in this installation, interacting with each other: one is the robots, the second is the flags and “air is the third invisible player, you have to basically choreograph the air and the flags” (Forsythe, 2017). This aspect reminded me of two performances: Loïe Fuller’s Serpentine Dance (1891) and Martha Graham’s solo "Specter 1914" from Chronicle (1936). Fuller used metres of costume sewed together with two wands which were used to extend the length of her arms and amplify the volume of the moving fabric. Her body disappeared and was replaced by curves and spirals shaped by the costume. Here is an example danced not by Fuller but by one of her rivals and filmed by the Lumière brothers:

Graham’s solo is less high paced in fabric manipulation. The costume is made of a tight long-sleeved black top and a very long black skirt open at the back. At one point, the dancer begins to move the skirt from its laying down position upward, revealing its red inside colour (another version of the Anarchist flag was red and black). She repeats this gesture several times and, as in Fuller’s case, her figure seems to be reshaped by the moving fabric. Here is the solo danced by former Martha Graham Dance Company principal dancer, Katherine Crockett:

Flags, huge flags, moving flags, flags performing a choreography, flags as controversial symbols. Black Flags is a thought provoking work, a fascinating display of choreographic elements, with one missing point, a statement (of any kind) about flag symbolism, which I consider as the elephant in the room. As poet John Agard has written in his poem “Flag”:

What’s that fluttering in the breeze?
It’s just a piece of cloth
that brings a nation to its knees (Agard, 2004).



REFERENCES

afag, "Appendix - The Symbols of Anarchy", in Anarchist Writers, 11 October 2008, http://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/append2.html (accessed 16 March 2019).

John Agard, “Flag”, in Half-Caste and Other Poems (London: Hodder Children’s Books, 2004), consulted in The Poetry Archive, https://www.poetryarchive.org/poem/flag (accessed 16 March 2019).

The George Balanchine Trust, “Stars and Stripes”, balanchine.com, no date, http://balanchine.com/stars-and-stripes/ (accessed 16 March 2019).

William Forsythe, “Choreographic Objects – Essay”, no date, williamforsythe.com, https://www.williamforsythe.com/essay.html (accessed 15 March 2019).

William Forsythe, “William Forsythe: Choreographic Objects”, Gagosian, 23 October 2017, youtube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgQYc5xJc5w (accessed 16 March 2019).

Christopher Knight, “William Pope.L sets the U.S. flag waving at the MOCA/Geffen”, Los Angeles Times, 24 March 2015, https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-pope-l-moca-review-20150324-column.html (accessed 15 March 2019).

Robert Longo, “I Will Strike the Sun”, Out of Sync – Art in Focus, 18 May 2016, youtube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-jZFOAw46I (accessed 15 March 2019).

William Pope.L, “William Pope.L: Trinket”, MOCA, 15 April 2015, youtube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5wdIAtO4pU (accessed 15 March 2019).

Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens – The Allegory of the Female Form (London: Picador, 1985).