Seven years later, Rui Horta, the Portuguese choreographer who has been living in Germany for some time, returns to Rovereto. Known for his energetic dance and original creations, Horta began dancing at the age of 17 in the Ballet Gulbenkian. In the meantime, he studied physical education and architecture and then moved to New York for a few years, where he devoted himself to the practice and teaching of contemporary dance. Back in Portugal, he directed the Lisbon Dance Company, after which he founded his own group, with which he began to tour and make a name for himself in Europe. In '91, he was invited to follow, as artistic director and choreographer, the S.O.A.P. Dance Theatre at the Künstlerhaus Mousonturm in Frankfurt, with which he began an intense activity. His first work is Long time before the end ('91), a dance with violent contrasts that suggests, also considering the significant historical period, a reference to the fall of the Berlin Wall. In '92 with a homage to Mozart's music entitled Wolfgang, bitte... he won the Bagnolet competition. Rui Horta collaborated with the Goethe Institut on various international projects and created and staged works for major companies, such as the Cullberg Ballet, the Nederlands Dans Theatre II and the Ballet National de Marseille. In '96 he tried his hand at the staging of Stravinsky's opera The Rakers Progress at the Theatre Basel, where he also designed the lighting and scenery. Since '97, he has been working as a resident choreographer in Munich, at the Muffathalle, with the support of the Munich Department of Culture. In the same year he received an award for his first independent production, the solo Bones and Oceans, which he developed for the dancer and actor Anton Skrzypiciel. Horta's collaboration with the Muffathalle in Munich, with whom he created Zeitraum, the performance presented in Rovereto, continues to this day. And as happens in the Portuguese choreographer's performances, also in Zeitraum there is no real beginning, so the spectator takes a seat while the performance proceeds with the slow movements of two dancers. The choreography is inspired by the works of the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaus and Italo Calvino's latest book Six Memos for the Next Millennium, those American Lessons focusing on topics such as lightness, speed, precision, visibility, multiplicity and coherence. Of each of these 'themes' Calvino emphasises how the opposite must always be kept in mind: speed and slowness and gravity and so on. In this minimal set design consisting of a series of stacked tubes and a small aquarium filled with water, the performance comes to life through a continuous "construction" and "delimitation" of space that touches both the horizontal and vertical dimensions. "We all live surrounded by certain architectural components," writes Rui Horta, "At all times this conditions our freedom. The vertical horizon of our cities assaults the freedom of our senses' and so we have no choice but to take refuge in the imagination 'the last refuge of the soul'. The projection of the image of a flowing river throughout the performance is a symbol of the flowing of time, 'the time of space', where everything is unknown and uncertain and where past and future have broken their balance. The choreography is dynamic and full of energy and sees the alternation of short solos in which the six dancer-individuals, each with a strong personality, move in their own universe made up of "contrasts", "balances", "falls", "dives", "swims", "flights".
