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.