A special case in the latest generation of Italian contemporary dance is that of Kinkaleri, a Florentine collective formed by Cristina Rizzo, Gina Monaco, Luca Camilletti, Marco Mazzoni, Massimo Conti and Matteo Bambi. Since their foundation in 1995, Kinkaleri have attracted the attention of critics and the public for their singular editing and approach to different stage projects, for the clear and glacial quality of their gesture, focused on the relationship between form/space/communication, for the constant presence of elements whose matrices range from dance to theatre, to the visual arts, to performance. In Albanian, kinkaleri means trinkets, odds and ends to be displayed in street markets. The choice of this word is symptomatic, in wanting to underline the possible use of every type of object, material, structure, costume, idea. The works created to date are therefore very different from each other: the editing, the scenographic choices, the light design, the gestural timbre, the use or non-use of the voice, are collectively decided not on the basis of a pre-packaged style of performance and movement, but in a very free response to the theme of the individual project. In Amras, the group's first work based on Thomas Bernhard, the group chooses the theme of mental illness, using an artifice that highlights a disturbing situation. The effect is given by a stroboscopic light shot on the two characters acting on a suspended platform. Clearly more linked to Doom dance, remade at the request of Karole Armitage also by the MaggioDanza company, and of which Kinkaleri produced the dazzling and incisive video version Doom Window. It takes place in a white box measuring 6 by 6 meters, in which the three dancers are a body that exposes an emotional state through the excessive quality of vision, a sort of inorganic physicists, flattened in a candor of overexposed lights.
Childish mechanisms, proposed with a gaze that leaves no room for sentimentality, govern the gestures of 1.9cc GLX, a work dedicated to Pinocchio in '98, in which the dancers move around a terrifying yellow house that no one can enter. Childish mechanisms that the audience is forced to relive: placed around the house, it sees the show from only one angle. It scrutinizes the house hoping to understand what happens beyond its gaze, involved in a tale full of pitfalls and sides that will remain obscure to it.
At the festival, Kinkaleri are staging Super, a work from 1997 that starts from the idea of collage and materializes in a visionary process regulated by a photographic scan of the image. The dancers-actors-performers of the show are bodies constantly waiting for something. They give shape to a condition of expectation that is never resolved. Super is a condensation of deliberately disconnected forms, of lucid rages, of unaware ghosts. Declarations of self, poured out onto the audience by separate individuals. They act in a structure of iron tubes, marked by violent lights, also projected onto the audience by large spotlights. In an epiphany of the labyrinthine void full of questions. Kinkaleri point out: “Super is a cycle of forces, forces that draw the map of an intensity that develops entirely on the surface, a carnal surface. A body waiting, traversed by waves. A body that does not go beyond, is itself and presents itself as made of contours, tunnels, orifices, caverns and folds; the body moves, suspends itself, lends itself to a fragmented vision that allows very little to evolution. It fantasizes about the ghost of the result and becomes a revolt, suspends time, denying action, entrusting its future to a world made of acts and journeys”.
