WORLD PREMIERE
SITE-SPECIFIC CREATION
CO-PRODUCTION / ORIENTE OCCIDENTE & TRENTINO SVILUPPO
Architecture is an experience of the everyday, and the dance that intertwines with it embraces a dual experience: historical and spectacular. Among the pioneers and leading figures in Italian vertical dance is Wanda Moretti with her Venetian company, Il Posto. Since 1994, Moretti has been studying social, cultural, and architectural spaces to engage them in dialogue with choreography on vertical and aerial planes. Suggestion and impact, thanks also to the music of Marco Castelli, who performs with his saxophone and live electronics, are part of the DNA of her works, now created in various cities around the world. “Vertical dance,” Moretti explains, “proposes a different standard of observation of the place, which is not merely a container for the event but becomes an integral part of the performance.” For Oriente Occidente 2018, she conceived a site-specific work for Progetto Manifattura: a project aiming to reinterpret the history of the place through the present and the innovative language of vertical dance. The dance harnesses the power that arises from the union of different energies produced by the spaces, the moving bodies, and the live music. The interaction with the surrounding environment is close and references all aspects of its identity, from history to architecture, from spatial structure to its current vocation.
Il Gigante draws from research around the industrial past of the Manifattura Tabacchi in Rovereto, as well as poetic suggestions from Paul Klee's painting Angels Novus and reflections by philosopher Walter Benjamin in his eponymous publication about the work: “[…] an angel who seems to be in the act of moving away from something on which it is fixing its gaze. It has wide-open eyes, an open mouth, and outspread wings: its face is turned towards the past… but a storm is blowing from paradise, caught in its wings, and it is so strong that it cannot close them. This storm irresistibly propels it into the future. What we call progress is this storm.” Moretti associates these sources with the mission of the Manifattura: a collection of (industrial) architectures now transformed into a factory aimed at achieving the highest levels of sustainability and innovation. The characters embodied by the dancers will sensitively represent the Manifattura itself, souls of a place transformed into a library of narrating bodies among evoked voices of zigherane (the female workers) and other characters like ‘the new angel’ looking to the future.
Based on existing documentation, the performance reinterprets the places and the characters that inhabited them through the historical idea of progress, which, on one hand, relentlessly advances toward the future, overcoming the past and erasing its original form, and on the other hand, presents itself in a cyclical form as apparent growth that always brings us back to the starting point. Between these two ideas of progress emerges a third possibility focused on the idea of sustainability for humanity in harmony with the resources the world offers and overcoming inequalities. The question of progress remains open between the desire to carry forward the past and the wish to transcend it, and through the arts, we can look to the future as a positive growth of humankind.
ilposto.org
