“In the music and in the actus tragicus of Bach's St. Matthew Passion, I still find the quintessence of all poetry and every artistic expression.”
Hermann Hesse
Emio Greco, one of the stars of contemporary dance who has made his home in the Netherlands, returns to the festival that hosted him in 2002 (his first time in Italy, his country of origin) with Double Points: One & Two, a performance acclaimed by both the audience and critics that earned him the Dance&Dance Award for Best Choreographer and Performer of the Year, and again in 2003 with Rimasto Orfano. Starting from a rigorous classical discipline, he revolutionized the choreographic language with Pieter C. Scholten. At the Melotti in Rovereto, Greco returns as the protagonist with the visionary force of the body: “I must tell you - Greco and Scholten write in their dance manifesto - that my body is curious about everything, and I: I am my body.” It is this search that embodies Passione in Due, the “pas de deux” between dancer Emio Greco and French composer and musician Franck Krawczyk. A performance in which, over seven different sections corresponding to seven different rhythms, Greco's physicality and Krawczyk's piano (and accordion) engage in a close dialogue on the notes of Bach's St. Matthew Passion, blending into suffering, sensuality, and self-denial. Dance and music together take distance from the idea of the "athletic" body, counterposing it with the richness and vitality of a "visionary" body, learning to look beyond the surface of gesture and discovering the impulse that produced it: the "why" of a movement rather than the "how" of a technique. In the subtitle The Strength of Vulnerability, the idea is indeed translated that every person is at the same time fragile and strong, in a constant tension returned to the audience with equal intensity.
Emio Greco | Pieter C. Scholten is a brand that took root in 1995 when Greco and Scholten began to work together on new forms of dance: for both artists, the search for a new dramaturgy of the body is a highly stimulating factor; together they wrote an artistic manifesto that establishes the seven principles of dance and their impact on the body and the spectator. Emio Greco (IT) studied dance at the Centre de Danse International Rosella Hightower in Cannes and danced with the Ballet Antibes Côte d’Azur, directed by Patrick Tridon. From 1993 to 1996, he danced in the creations of the director and visual artist Jan Fabre, and from 1996 to 1998, he collaborated with the Japanese choreographer Saburo Teshigawara in numerous productions. Pieter C. Scholten (NL) studied theater and initially directed plays about historical figures such as Oscar Wilde, Yukio Mishima, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. He has collaborated with many choreographers as a dramaturge for dance. Together they directed for the Edinburgh International Festival the works Orpheus and Eurydice and The Assassin Tree; they staged Teorema by Pier Paolo Pasolini; they created a trilogy inspired by Dante and the Divine Comedy. The company Emio Greco | PC has received numerous national and international awards (Philip Morris Arts Prize, 1999; Sonia Gaskell Prize, 2001; Herald Angel, 2001 and 2004; Dance&Dance Award, 2003; Prize from the Syndicat professionnel de la Critique de Théâtre, Musique et Danse of Paris, 2006). Since 2009, Greco and Scholten have directed the International Choreographic Arts Centre (ICK) in Amsterdam, a platform for contemporary dance.
Franck Krawczyk, born into a family of self-taught musicians, pursued classical studies in Paris and Lyon with Gilbert Amy, where he teaches chamber music with Jacques Aboulker. The Festival d’Automne encouraged him to develop his activity as a composer, and many of his creations have been awarded. He has collaborated with, among others, Christian Boltanski and Jean Kalman, Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne, Emio Greco and Pieter C. Scholten, Sonia Wieder-Atherton, and Laurence Equilbey, experiences that have led him to deepen the relationship between music and other art forms.
