In the images of the exhibition Toï Toï Toï., created by photographer Ninni Romeo, there is the profound grace of Pina Bausch and her apparent disorder. In truth, nothing was disordered in Pina's scenic world. Time after time, in each of her pieces, everything that the pioneer of Tanztheater created ultimately converged into the “sensitive” laws of a solid and coherent dramaturgical structure. Choreography and direction impart structure, rhythm, and internal logic. This happens frequently in Pina's work. But in life, order and predictability are missing. Life is a web of fates advancing over time, constantly testing our expectations and challenging our resilience beyond any banality. Life is a continuous process of fine-tuning that aims for harmony and symmetry, which are contradicted by the instability and dynamism of events.
Once the myths of external reproduction and the Western canons of so-called Objective Beauty were shattered, contemporary art — and Pina knew this well — sought to find direction within the richness of that disorder, without disregarding or attempting to evade it. An author deeply rooted in the languages of her time, Bausch decisively avoids any project of mere decoration. What interests her is what genuinely communicates, not the stereotype, not the absence of expression.
Ninni Romeo (who worked as an assistant on “field research” in Pina Bausch's Italian productions, and was present, among other moments, at the presentation of Nelken in Rovereto, during a time of powerful theatrical revelations that led her to refine her photographic style) always maintains this respect, characteristic of the artist who most inspired and influenced her. Ninni never seeks out effect. She avoids polished or glossy visions. She chases the wingbeat, the uneven breath of life. Her “stories” are sometimes skewed, oblique, and transversal, like the days of our lives. Often dramatic, and always deeply human. There are never “poses” in her work. In the photos depicting Pina, for example, we see the choreographer moving through transitional or minimal situations fluidly and naturally, without paying attention to the lens. The bodies of the performers in Kontakthof — an iconic Tanztheater production that Pina re-staged for “ladies and gentlemen over sixty” — reveal their long individual stories: they are vivid maps of lives explicitly reaching the third or fourth age. And certain unusual accents, revealed or highlighted in the photograph, avoid the central focus of the stage, placing us in a neutral zone of perceptive indeterminacy, much like the experience of attending a Pina Bausch performance. The viewer's eye is never steered toward a single choice, as the direction asks them to freely choose a personal point of view. To do so, they must wander, with an unsettling subjectivity of perspective, among the numerous fragments of the stage action, where the puzzle of simultaneous events is meaningful in all its components.
A gesture, a light, a grasp, an abandonment, a violence. There is a worn, authentic air in Ninni Romeo's photographs that suits the peculiar “Bauschian” beauty well. They never indulge in aesthetic complacency. Instead, they convey the thinning of memory and the delicate poetry of the moment. They are not “photos of performances” but moments of being.
Leonetta Bentivoglio
