In 1975 Guido Ceronetti published his vibrant Italian translation of “The Song of Songs” with Adelphi, followed by an extraordinary essay on the subject. Virgilio Sieni, author for Oriente Occidente and the Centro di Santa Chiara in Trento of a creation inspired by Solomon’s text, refers to Ceronetti’s enlightening reading. Already a guest in Rovereto in 1989 with “Studi su Nijinsky”, Sieni, who is undoubtedly one of the most intelligent contemporary Italian choreographers, is the author of research on gesture that has developed through a journey through time that is faithful to itself. His is an abstract, metaphorical dance, in which movement is strongly immersed in the “rite”, because – as the author himself wrote in 1988 – “it has the same purpose of reminding us of the archetype”. In Sieni, gesture does not need narrative supports, because it already “contains within itself the narrative energy” (Proceedings of the Modena Conference “Le Forze inn Campo”, 1986). His sign, contrary to autobiography, tends towards a symbolic abstraction, inscribing forms that transcend the everyday in space. Trained in Florence, Amsterdam, Tokyo and New York, he worked from 1978 to 1983 in Katie Duck’s Group/O company, and then collaborated, once back in Florence, with Federico Tiezzi’s I Magazzini theatre group. With Parco Butterfly, the company he founded in 1983, he initially created theatrical pieces such as “Momenti d’ozio” or “Shangai Neri”, and then moved more and more towards works with a choreographic register. In these ten years he has signed many creations: among them we can mention at least “Fratello Maggiore” (’87), “Duetto” (’89 – in collaboration with Alessandro Certini), the frequent improvisations on live music (composer partners such as Steve Lacy and Evan Parker), “Apollon Musagète” (’89), “Pulcinella” and “Trait d’union” (’90) and “Chi vuole essere lieto sia” (’92) for the Balletto di Toscana. Lately he has worked, under the new name Compagnia Virgilio Sieni Danza, on a three-year project on the figure of Ulysses, understood as a contemporary character, of which “L’Eclisse”, dedicated to Michelangelo Antonioni, is one of the most significant stages. Finally, his choreographic readings inspired by King Lear and the recent Hamlet/Ophelia are deeply suggestive. From his introduction to the creation that will debut in Trento, it is worth quoting at least a few of the most significant excerpts: I think of dance as poetry, where every word and sound, every interval and pause, the score and the metrics, acquire an “other” value, weave a direct thread, full of vital energy, with the world of imagination. Imagining becomes that act where discipline and sacredness meet. The word cannot describe dance; the language of dance, in the scientific and metaphysical nature of the body, in the complexity and clarity of the movement that is born, cannot be compared with the word except as a “rhythmic/arrhythmic” element, as the material of an internal resonance. Thought and dance, the word and movement, what the word means and the movement perpetuates, what the movement means and the word does not equal. The garden of Querelle in Fassbinder’s film is perhaps that garden full of smells and colors narrated in the “Song of Songs”. One wonders if every fragment of life, which precedes writing, includes that erotic and sensual garden, that smell that emanates from the whole “Canticle”, “surpassing every perfume”. “You water me with kisses your mouth”: a couple of young oriental nomads in their blue tent, Catalan boys under a starry sky; but also boys from the suburbs. Two dancers who pass and stop in empty space. An action that is born there, that from there, in continuous evolution, in the unrepeatable moment, inebriates every particle with movement. The reading/sound of the “Canticle” brings us closer to the subtle currents that pass when a movement is performed for the first time, to that silence that includes both chaos and order, the disharmonious and the harmonious, hate and love. “…the emptiness of the Canticle is to confirm its sacredness. Everything that is empty, the Lucretian “vacuum”, a desert, a pit, a room, a carcass, a little box, is a part of the Great Mystery, it means waiting for Someone or an occult Presence… THE SONG IS EMPTY / THE SONG IS SILENT / THE DARK NIGHT”.
