This year, the Oriente Occidente Festival is dedicating a retrospective to the Neapolitan choreographer Paco Dècina, who has been active in Paris since 1984. The Festival will host three of his works, all from his most recent creative period: Lettre au silence, a solo from 1998; Neti-Neti (Neither This, Nor That), a duo from 2000; and the quartet Summa Iru, his penultimate creation dated May 2001.
Since the founding of his company Post-Retroguardia in 1986, Paco Dècina's choreographic writing has progressively leaned towards simplicity and purity, abstracting from the more concrete themes that inspired earlier works like Carnet de Voyage (1986) and Circumvesuviana (1988). Starting in the 1990s with Scilla e Cariddi (1990), Vestigia di un Corpo (1991), and Ciro Esposito fu Vincenzo (1993), more intangible elements linked to dreams and evocation became the main lines of his works, along with the essentiality of the body on stage, immersed in a space sculpted by light.
Paco Dècina, dubbed the "dancer of the immobile," reflects his dance in introspection, far from narrative. His work invites estrangement from the world's noise to surrender to silence. Dècina states about Neti-Neti: “I am at a stage in my research where I need to let go of all words, projects, and constructed ideas to invent and project onto the body a 'white space.' A space dedicated to what is neither affective nor psychological, free from desire and fear, and attuned to movement. Every movement is a change, and in a growth process, change passes through breaking solidarity with memory (the material). Danced movement emerges from the tension between a subtle energy that needs a form to establish itself and a compact organization that instead seeks to vaporize (memory). Therefore, dance is the place of the form seeking the freedom of the formless. It is a return to the shores.”
In Lettre au silence, the dancer’s body evolves in the search for form and posture. Inspired by the works of Italian sculptor Raffaele Biolchini—letters presented as terracotta tablets on which the artist has engraved abstract signs—the performance deepens the experience of the solo as a compositional form, accentuating the creative need for a different type of expression, more intimate and silent, where the performer, Dècina himself, moves through space like a secret hieroglyph, maintaining mysterious relationships with the entire sensitive world.
The third and final work featured at the Festival is a group creation. Summa Iru, in the Tamil Nadu language, means "stay calm: because nothing can be done." Far from being a renunciation of the world, this pedagogical formula, used by Vedic masters, invites the researcher to be permeable so that the relational space around him can reveal itself as a field of free forces unfolding beyond any personal projection.
This same freedom is transferred to dance, which should be nothing but “movement” in the service of the “drama of emptiness.” Throughout the work, the choreographer manages to lead his four performers to that source, that space from which dance originates, and where the audience's attention is drawn to the contemplation of silence.
