Like every year, the Incontri Internazionali di Rovereto opens its program with a show by an Italian choreographer and co-produced by the Festival. For the 1991 edition, the choice fell on Paco Dècina, a young Neapolitan artist who has been living in Paris for several years and is the founder of the Post-Retroguardia company. After the choreographic tests “Palm trees on Colva beach”, “Carnet de Voyage”, “Myself and I”, in 1987 Decina signs what he considers his first real show “Tempi Morti”. With this work, already indicative of his particular poetics, he wins the first prize for choreography at the Ménagerie de Verre in Paris. The following year he creates “Circumvesuviana”, confirming the choreographic talent of this young author who, despite having chosen to live in France, certainly does not forget his origins in the brilliant flash of his creations. “Ombre in rosso antico” (1989) and “Scilla e Cariddi” (1990) are the most recent works. For “Vestigia di un Corpo”, the production presented as a world premiere in Rovereto, Dècina does not want to give explanations that are too precise or “summary”. “While in the first shows there were easily readable stories, over time I moved to a more pictorial, unconscious dimension. With “Vestigia” I would like to be able to take the spectator into another world of emotions, making him experience his own intimate journey. At the origin of this new creation there is also the idea of the body as the repository of the memory of all bodies, of all eras. We proceed from prehistoric times by stages, by cycles of evolution with respect to which man tends by nature to accumulate, to cling to what already exists, as if he wanted to block the process of advancement. Today we are perhaps at another step of evolution and social man is living in such a sclerosis that I think there is a need to affirm something less materialistic”. Dècina writes:
“When in obscurity the body, the body here is trahit, in the obscuritè, seuls, in the souvenirs here in our belonging pas, the silence comblé de flammes, the jambes collapse the hearts out and on if réveille c’est alors qu’on les retrouve.”
These rediscovered vestiges, these re-emerged traces of time are the reason for a setting in which - says Dècina again - "sunlight is mediated by the inevitable".
