The second Italian "emigrant" author present at the Festival, Emio Greco, is one of the leading choreographers of the new European generation. Born in Brindisi thirty-six years ago, he lives and works in Amsterdam, a city he reached after a long journey that led him to dance with, among others, Jan Fabre and Saburo Teshigawara.
Since 1995, he has worked in tandem with Dutch theater director and playwright Pieter C. Scholten, from whom the "PC" in the name of the Company comes. Together, they have created several works and received prestigious international awards such as the Philip Morris Arts Prize for Dance in 1999 and the Herald Angel awarded to them at the Edinburgh International Festival by the Scottish newspaper The Herald in 2001 for Double Points: One & Two.
The artistic partnership between Greco and Scholten is perfect, based on the search for a balance between pure movement and the construction of pieces centered on the relationship between body and thought. This began with the trilogy Between Brain and Movement, which includes two solos, Bianco (’96) and Rosso (’97), and a duet, Extra Dry (’99). Both proponents of a poetics that sees movement as self-sufficient with respect to a theme, they focus their original research on an exploration of the body suspended between spontaneity and intellectual reflection.
With Double Points: One & Two, the penultimate creation of Emio Greco PC – last May in Brussels, they premiered Rimasto Orfano, a work centered on the theme of absence and abandonment – the pair of artists explore external influences on the body and the theme of the double through the concepts of simultaneity and fusion. Structured in two parts, One, a solo danced by Greco to Ravel's thrilling Bolero, and Two, a duet in which Greco performs with Spaniard Bertha Bermudez Pascual, the show is a true challenge for the choreographer to overcome the temptation of being "the only one" on stage, a mode of work he has always experienced and one that suits his unique and charismatic presence.
The theme of the double develops here in a constant confrontation with the music and with "the other self": in the first case, there is a search for the boundaries and the permeability-resistance to the invasion of music, in the second, the successful attempt to achieve a utopia, that of perfect synchrony and unison in movement.
"Faced with Ravel's Bolero," writes Greco about One, "one cannot remain within the scope of a solo because a continuous clash with the music develops. It is the story of a man confronted with a force that transcends him, the tragic reality of a single dancer in front of a symphony orchestra. To exist, I need to enter the musical system, to curb the tragic dimension of this relentless crescendo of power." Thus unfolds a dance in a visual and sonic outline of great intensity, nourished by steps borrowed from classical ballet interspersed with the minimalism of an entirely new gestural search: rapid, precise movements that cut through space and Ravel's insistent music.
The same stylistic hallmark extends to the second part of the work danced in a duet with Bertha Bermudez Pascual, which takes the form of a mirror dialogue, even annihilating the male-female dichotomy in favor of a contamination of bodies in dance and a symmetry of great dramatic intensity.
