Constructing a garden made of kinetic hendecasyllables: Virgilio Sieni's Paradiso

 

Photo by Renato Esposito.

Going back to the theatre to watch a dance performance has been a great experience, filled with emotions and excitement. I therefore immediately thank my friend Stefania Zepponi for having convinced me to go with her. We went to Pesaro, at the Teatro sperimentale to watch Virgilio Sieni’s Paradiso [Paradise] on October 13th. It was a cold and windy night that did not diminish our will to experience live perfomance.

Sieni’s work is only formally inspired by Dante’s Paradiso, in that it takes his use of hendecasyllables and turns then into movement, the choreography “is the construction of a garden. Everything happens by searching for the measure to build a garden where one can deposit in the breath of the plants the memory of the dance”. It is a minimal narrative, but very effective. It presupposes a sort of symbiotic relationship between dancers and plants and more than once the dancers perform the headstand with bent legs, as if to recall the plants’ flourishing.

The dance can be divided into three parts:

1 – Five bare-chested men dance with four plants in their hands;

2 – Five men wearing t-shirts dance together without plants;

3 – Five bare-chested men dance with a lot of plants, constructing a garden.

The first part opens with an almost dark stage where, little by little, some plants become visible. Soon we realise they are plants placed in vases held by dancers. They initially form a cluster where it is difficult to see either the dancers or each single plant. Then the cluster gets disentangled even though the dancers often remain grouped following the one dancer who is without a plant. The music, composed by Paolo Damiani, is hypnotic. It is a bit static section but highly evocative of the love Sieni is advocating.

As he writes in the programme notes, the dance “does not report the word of Dante’s Divine Comedy, it does not attempt to translate the text into movement, but it places itself on the threshold of a suspension, it tries to gather the primordial, liberating and vertiginous gesture of love”. Is he talking about love in general? Or love between humans? Or even love for nature?

In the second part there are more dynamic phrases, with some of them slowly performed as if the audience were asked to look at every single detail the body does while moving. The music becomes more high paced.

The third part presents many plants in the background with the dancers slowly taking one plant at a time to bring it forward on the stage. It is a coral section with some solo moments where the music is again quite hypnotic.

“The choreography is built upon hendecassyllables made of gestures” and the measured phrases, some of the sequences which are repeated and the grouping and ungrpouping of the dancers may represent the work Sieni has done to trasmute Dante’s hendecasyllables into movement. There is more as “the verses of the dance find back the resounding of the rhyme from a tercet to the other”, thus recalling Dante’s interlocked tercet. It is a daring but convincing approach. The idea of the garden construction is also very interesting and the dances with the plants poignant and suggestive.

However, it is not clear why did Sieni choose five men to perform this piece. Women seem to be banned from his Paradise. Even though he does not write about it in the programme notes, his choice stands out as weird and unclear. As Ramsay Burt has highlighted, the representation of gender in dance is not irrelevant and even a mainly formalist approach to dance should take it into account as dance is not a neutral art.