Two of Ailey II’s performances are now available on the Ailvin
Ailey website and YouTube until October 2, see this link.
Ailey II, as The New York Times has stated, is the younger version of
the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and is characterised by
likewise energy and brilliance. The performances in question are
Robert Battle’s The Hunt (2001) and Takademe (1999). Battle is the
current artistic director of the Company and, in this case, has
devised a refreshing change for both these works: The Hunt was
originally danced by men while in this version it is performed by
women and Takademe was a solo which is now danced by the whole
Company.
The
Hunt is an “athletic work for six men” that “reveals the
predatory side of human nature and the primitive thrill of the hunt”.
In this version danced byfour
women and restaged by Elisa Clark, the movement quality is
different and there is a body fluidity absent in the initial work.
The opening image recalls the rarefied atmosphere of an Edward
Hopper’s painting thanks to Burke Wilmore’s striking lighting.
The high-paced and percussive music by Les Tambours de Bronx
immediately starts, creating a stark contrast with the dancers’
initial stillness. Then, as the dance begins, a vigorous pulsating
energy emanates from the dancers’ bodies. They move in circles,
bend their torso, walk, run and go to the floor mainly in pairs, but
also all together. Mia McSwain’s costumes consist of long black
skirts with red under layers and red tops. The skirts move along with
the dancers’ movements creating a dazzling visual effect.
The
title of this piece recalls Tero Saarinen’s Hunt (2002), a solo
which represents his version of Nijinsky’s Rite of Spring, set to
Stravinsky’s celebrated music. There, Saarinen plays with a long
and wide skirt as well, a sort of white tutu made of panels of fabric
where, at one point, images of himself are projected. There is a
moonlike and hypnotising atmosphere. Saarinen’s intent was to focus
on the giant quantity of information with which we are bombarded
every day. In Battle’s TheHunt there is a raw energy and a
physicality that bring the dancers to perform a tour de force without
rest. We are almost left out of breath at the end of it. That is also
why it is so brilliant!
Takademe “mixes humor and high-flying movement in a savvy
deconstruction of Indian Kathak dance rhythms”. Restaged by Kanji
Segawa, it presents the whole Company instead of a solo interpreter.
This means that the movement of the initial version is amplified and
it reverberates through a collective group of dancers. In this case
there is a more delicate and precise movement quality with respect to The Hunt. The dancers, for example, cross their arms, perform a
small kick and bend in a flowy way. Sheila Chandra’s music
contributes to this lighter atmosphere, highlighting each dancer’s
move.
This
dance reminded me of Martha Graham’s Satyric Festival Song (1932),
a playful solo made of irony and wit, where the dancer jumps and
walks tossing her hair up and down. Both these works are elegant and
refined and humorous. I wonder how Graham’s solo would look like if
it were performed by a group as Takademe was. Food for thought, thanks
Ailey II!
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.
Nearly a year ago my book in Italian, Alberto Spadolini, Apollo della
danza[Alberto Spadolini, Apollo of the Dance] was published by
Affinità Elettive. Here is the translation of the book summary:
Alberto Spadolini
(1907-1972) was a painter, dancer ad a lot more, but dance
constitutes the fil rouge of his career. Born in a turbulent Ancona,
he spent his formative years in Rome and had his debut in France in
1932, becoming famous as a music-hall dancer in La Joie de Paris,
with Josephine Baker. In an interview he defines himself as
‘anarchist’ and in 1933 he performs in the Gala de danse, a
performance of ‘pure’ dance where we can perceive an authorial
line that distances him from the music-hall. In spite of the fact
that he wears costumes of different kinds, he is classified as a
‘nude dancer’ by the press. This is due to his statuesque body
that he shows in some dances. From the 1940s he begins to paint a
series of paintings dedicated to ballerinas, recalling, in some
aspects, Edgar Degas. Analysing even very rare documents, the present
study explores the relationship Spadolini had with dance,
illustrating another name with which he was known: Apollo of the
Dance.
“Le scissure del covid” [The scissures of covid] was a three-days
event that took place at La Mole, in Ancona on 18, 19 and 20 August
2020. Created by choreographer, dancer, dance teacher and dance
critic Stefania Zepponi, in collaboration with myself and librarian
Giorgia Sestilli, it explored the relationship between dance and
covid-19. It was part of the call Off-Line launched to promote
non-internet-based events at La Mole.
The term ‘scissure’
has to do with fissures and openings, even small ones, and has been
used to exemplify the act of looking at the coronavirus through the
lenses of dance. It is also the name of a Podcast in Italian on the world seen through dance, that Zepponi, myself and Clementina Verrocchio are publishing every Thursday.
Each day was divided
into three parts each set in a specific part of La Mole, which is an
ancient construction near the sea: the first part took place at the
courtyard where there was a talk given by Zepponi and myself; the
second at the OSB wall near the courtyard where a covid line was
created together with the audience; the third part at the Sala Boxe,
where Zepponi improvised a dance, while Santilli read extracts from
an 1837 book on cholera in Ancona. After this last part the audience
moved to the next room where I gathered some feed-back.
Dance is about space
and bodies in space and that is why it has become particularly
relevant during the pandemic. In regard to this I wrote an article
titled “Coreografare il presente” [Choreographing the present]
which served as the basis for the project.
Photo Ennio Pennacchioni.
This was a
participatory event, centred on the interaction with the audience from
the beginning. How do you measure the distance of a metre? How did
you feel during the lockdown? These were some of the questions we
asked during the talk to gain some key words and turn them into
gestures for the line.
The line took
inspiration from Pina Bausch’s Nelken line, also known as the
Season March, as its gestures are inspired by the four seasons. First
presented in 1982 in her work Nelken, it has now reached global fame
and has brought the Bausch Foundation to launch a Nelken line project
where a tutorial has been given to allow everybody to learn and do
it.
The last section was
the performative moment where the audience could choose whether to
look at a tablet or look at the perofrmance of the two women.
The audience gave
different feed-back to this event, stating, for example, that the
first two parts were liberating while the third, given that it was
organised in a closed space that needed heavier security measures,
was oppressive. All were happy to have taken part to it and found it
appealing for its focus on space in this difficult time.
We thank La Mole and
all its staff for having accepted this project and having helped us
to bring it to life.
On August 18, 19 and 20 I took part to Le scissure del covid [the scissures of covid], an event promoted by La Mole in Ancona, Italy, its own project Presente and its call Off-Line. It was organised by choreographer, dancer, dance teacher and dance critic Stefania Zepponi and her Hexperimenta association, in collaboration with myself and Giorgia Sestilli, librarian at la Casa delle Culture [Culture's House] in Ancona.
It was a project to talk and dance and watch dance in relation to the coronavirus. Here is its website.
Alberto Spadolini, Tau – L’ultima colonna del tempio, 1960s. Courtesy of Marco Travaglini.
In front of the supermarket you need to take a number to stand on line. Then
inside another number will be given to us, on a yellow laminated card. Sometimes
this card does not have a number. A number which is not a number. About two weeks
have passed from the last time I went shopping and I did not know about the line
outside, least of all about the numbers. I wait. I start noticing that when
people arrive, they directly go to the little machine that dispense the numbers.
It is the same that is usually used to queue at the counter where cold cuts,
ready-made food ad bread are. In front of the supermarket there is a wide
rectangular area so that (so that?) people do not stand in a line but are spread
here and there. The metre is between us. One metre distance. Minimal security
measure. How long is a metre? I need to visualise space. Margaret Atwood has
shared the image that Health Canada recommends, a moose that is two metres long
[1]. And in Italy? In Italy we are left with the abostraction of metres.
However, in the area, there are those who do not care about it or are not fully
aware of it and walk too closely to people waiting in order to reach the machine
dispensing numbers. Everybody wears masks and gloves, except for me. They are
mainly disposable masks. There is a great talking about masks. I ask myself
whether those worn by these people are sufficient to protect them, to protect us. I keep the distance placing myself a bit outside the group. Two men
are too close and are chatting. Why? Distance, what distance? Masks and
security? Space. The body. Bodies. Years ago I read somewhere (or maye I
listened to) a choreographer, maybe Mark Morris, complaining about the fact that in
the underground people do not have a sense of space, that is of their body in
space. Dance, I think, teaches this. Can teach this. The awareness of the body
and bodies in space. Rudolf Laban, theorist of the early twentieth century,
talked of the kinesphere, “the personal space” [2], that we occupy with our body and
that surrounds it. That is the one that, while standing, we can occupy extending
our limbs, like arms and legs. Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man comes to mind
and also the new Vitruvian Woman Rosi Braidotti talks about [3]. This space
could exceed the metre if, for example, we opened both our arms laterally at the
height of our shoulders. Well, we could not go around with our arms open. O
could we?
Health Canada image twitted by Margaret Atwood.
Another person arrives, without a mask. She goes straight to the number machine
even though close by there is a woman. Why? I recall the famous pas de quatre of the cygnets from Swan Lake (1875-95) where four ballerinas dance holding their
hands [4]. It requires coordination ad syncronicity and it is an example of
kinesphere sharing, that today is not possible. When I studied dance (centuries
ago, now I write about dance, which means nothing to most people), I remember I
had to be careful about the distance between me and the people near me, because I
could have kicked them or hit them with my arms. Even though at the time I did
not know Laban, I was nevertheless beginning to know my kinesphere.
At this
point I understood that I need to take a number, otherwise I will never enter
the supermarket. To be sure, I ask the man closest to me. He confirms it. Then I
ask how can I reach the number machine if clsose-by there are two people. He
shrugs and adivises me to go around them, making a long round and passing outside
the group to reach the machine from behind. It is an excellent choreographic
intuition that I immediately put into practice. Then I go back to my position.
Still, standing, in place. The queue which is not a queue looks like a
choreography of standing in place. It could look a very limiting posture, but it
is not so. For Martha Graham, posture recalls stillness only on the surface, as
“the body is poised for most intense, most sublte action” [5]. If I decide to
stay still with my legs, I can move my arms, hands, shoulders, neck, head, torso
and so on. It is what Linda Rickett-Young defines as gesture [6]. If there is no
shift of weight, our body can still move a lot. And I think of Virgilio Sieni’s
hands and arms in Nudità [nudity] (2018) [7], of his art of gestures. If I then
decide to move my legs, a set of kinetic possibilities opens while standing in
place.
The cygnets' pas de quatre, Swan Lake, Royal Ballet
The first that comes to
my mind, due to my education, is flamenco. I could slightly bend my
knees and have my calves go to hit the floor, dancing a zapateado
with my planta, punta y taco. I do not do it. They would think I am
crazy. And then I think that in this absurd period, we would absurdly
need some choreographers to deal with, teach and coordinate people’
movement. And I think of all the dance teachers who have been hardly
hit by the pandemic [8]. They are used to deal with moving groups of
people (children included) and if they usually do it to get ready for
their final year shows, they could do it also on the streets and in
closed places and most of all they could teach and transmit this form
of knowledge to those who do not have it. We need a choreographic
sense of space, we cannot expect people to have sporadic
choreographic intuitions each of us can already have. I know, it
sounds absurd. Precisely.
Dance scholar Alessandro Pontremoli, talking of body
techniques, points out, quoting Eugenio Barba, that we can consider
the movements we do every day, like getting up and walking, as “daily
body techniques” [9] and the movements that go beyond this range,
as lifting one leg upwards, as “extra-daily techniques” [10].
With the coronavirus, people are implicitly asked to reconfigure
one’s own daily technques in extra-daily techniques, as standing in
palce in an area at the distance of at least one metre (?) in front of
a supermarket and walk that bit that allows the queue which is not a
queue to proceed, always keeping said distance.
Virgilio Sieni in Nudità.
In phase one we would
have already needed experts in choreography (absurd, what am I
talking about?), think of phase two where a lot more people will be
around. Will they/we be capable of self-organising? I do not think so,
because, contrary to what Gia Kourlas provocatively says [11], we are
not all dancers, but perhaps we should all become dancers. There are
probably other body practices (!), I talk about dance because this is
what I know a bit. If it is true that it is now a question of life
and death (rhetoric sometimes helps) to keep a certain distance, then
developing an awareness of the body in space and therefore the
ability not just to keep the distance of at least one metre (?!), but
also to keep this distance while we move (in the supermarket, for
example) becomes a fundamental requirement. And ignoring (in the
sense precisely of not knowing) this aspect could continue to bring
people infringing this ethereal distance to take the damned number
and enter the circle of queues which are not queues. We cannot give
this kinetic knowledge for granted. Many people will have it, many
others will not. Kourlas herself, and in this I agree with her,
quoting choreographer Ori Flomin, affirms that those who deal with
dance, deal precisely with this, organising “people in space”
[12].
It comes to my mind the enigmantic painting Tau –
L’ultima colonna del tempio by Alberto Spadolini, an almost unknown
painter and dancer, who has tansformed many of his paintings in
oneiric choreographies. The depicted figures are all at a certain
distance. At the centre a man, maybe a dancer with his back to the
viewer, in one of his hands a mask (a mask?). The atmoshere is
rearefied and surreal. Is it the way we will live now? Maybe. But if
we have to reinvent the way we stay together, we have to do it also
in choreographic terms (et voilà, I have said it) and not only that.
As the architecture scholar, Marta Magagnini has highlighted, “let’s
invent new jobs in this covid-19 times! We have many experts 'walking'
inside their houses!!!” [13]
I stay standing, feet together, firm and nervous. I
ask who has the number before mine, but nobody replies. Maybe
somebody has given up. The queue which is not a queue slowly moves
with people entering and people standing and taking their place in
the front line before the entrance. It is almost a magnetic, funnel
movement, where the entrance constitutes the magnet toward which each
of us is attracted. Apart from the two men chatting too close to each
other, the others are all silent. A woman has a terrified look as if
this standing like this, keeping the distance, were still something
incomprehensible and nonsensical. And it is. I am terrified.
When Graham was on a small unstable plane, she said
to have rehearsed in her mind her choreography, Errand into the Maze
(1947) to placate fear [14]. It is a choreography where a woman
fights against her demons. Inspired by the Theseus and Ariadne myth,
it concentrates on the female figure (Ariadne? Ariadne and Theseus)
who fights against the Minotaur, called the Creature of Fear. It has
a technical and interpretative depth, alternating the protagonist’s
solos and her duets with the Creature. I rethink of its beginning:
the dancer stands in place at the back of the stage, her look
downward and her hands crossed on her womb. And she breathes. She
breatheees. The movement of the inhaling and exhaling torso has
inspired Graham in the development of her technique based on
contraction and release. If I think about it, a mixture of bitter,
very bitter irony grips my stomach. Now that many, too many people
are dying of resporatory disease. I think about all this horror that
could be avoided and was not [15]. It is an unbearable situation. I
do not know if I will be able to stand still, in place, in balance on
this labyrinthine present.
It is my turn to enter. I am about to when the person
with the number prior to mine appears from the side street. Another
choreographic intuition. I take some steps backward and let him pass.
NOTES
[1] Margaret Atwood, “Proper Social
Distancing” Tweet posted on 28 March 2020. [2] Rudolf
Laban, Choreutics, edited by Lisa Ullman [1966] (Alton: Dance
Books, 2011), p. 10. [3] Rosi Braidotti, The
Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), p. 21. [4]Swan
Lake, chor. Marius Petipa, Lev Ivanov, music Pëtr Il’ič
Čajkovskij revised by Riccardo Drigo, dancers Pierina Legnani, Pavel
Gerdt and the Imperial Ballet (Saint Petersburgh: Mariinskij Theatre,
27 January 1875). [5] Martha Graham, “A Modern
Dancer’s Prime for Action” in Dance – A Basic Educational
Technique, edited by Frederick Rand Rogers (New York: MacMillan
Company, 1941), p. 181. I already talked of postures and the
act, even political, of standing in 2013. See https://storiadelladanza.blogspot.com/2013/08/stare-in-piedi.html (in Italian) 15 August 2013,
(accessed on 22 August 2020).
[6]
Linda Rickett-Young, Essential Guide to Dance (Londra:
Hodder&Stoughton, 1996), p. 75. [7]Nudità,
chor. and interpretation Mimmo Cuticchio,Virgilio Sieni (Firenze:
Teatro Niccolini, 11 October 2018). For more information:
http://www.virgiliosieni.it/schede/nudita-2/ (accessed on 13 April
2020). [8] See the plea made by Alessandra Celentano:
“Covid19,
Alessandra Celentano lancia l’allarme: ‘Il settore danza è al
collasso’”,giornaledelladanza.com, 15 April 2020
(accessed on 16 April 2020). [9] Alessandro Pontremoli,
La danza – Storia, teoria, estetica nel Novecento (Bari:
Laterza, 2004), p. xviii. [10] Ibidem. [11] Gia
Kourlas, “HowWe Use Our Bodies to Navigate a Pandemic”, The New York
Times, 31 March 2020 (accessed on 13 April 2020). See also the
article by Jason Kottke, “We
Are All Dancers Now – Mindful Movement is key to Social
Distancing”, in Kottke.org, 2 April 2020 (accessed on 16
April 2020).
The new Vitruvian woman.
[12] Ibidem. [13]
Marta Magagnini, Post on facebook, 16 aprile 2020. [14]
Martha Graham, Blood Memory – An Autobiography (New
York: Washington Square Press, 1991), p. 267. Errand into the
Maze, chor. Martha Graham, set Isamu Noguchi, music Giancarlo
Menotti, costumes Martha Graham, lights Jean Rosenthal, dancers
Martha Graham, Mark Ryder (New York: Ziegfield Theatre, 28
Febuary1947). [15] See for example the video
investigative report “Il
virus è un boomerang”, Indovina chi viene a cena,
edited by Sabrina Giannini (Rai 3, 29 March 2020), available for now
on RaiPlay (accessed on 13 April 2020). Or also the “Video
conferenza con Emanuele Leonardi”, edited by XRItaly, 5 April
2020 (accessed on 10 April 2020).
This is the English translation of the article I published on 19 April 2020, here.
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