Orvieto per la Danza. - Teatro Mancinelli and Palazzo Caravajal Simoncelli, Orvieto, Italy - dance reviews

Dance Magazine, May, 1995 by Maria Elisa Buccella

December 7-11, 1994 Reviewed by Maria Elisa Buccella

The Orvieto dance festival has always been a short but intense event. "New Italian Tendencies," the fourth edition,

included programs presented in the Mancinelli Theater, reopened after a careful restoration to its early nineteenth-century splendor, plus several performances staged before the eighteenth-century frescoes decorating the main hall of the Palazzo Caravajal Simoncelli. It is here that Rossella Fiumi, who created the festival in this picturesque small town overlooking the magnificent hilly countryside of Umbria, has her headquarters.

Orvieto per la Danza, which included well-attended workshops and seminars as well as performances, opened with a piece by Fiumi, who temporarily put aside her activity as a promoter of culture to offer her audience a fine example of her skills as dancer and choreographer. Her very personal style combines introspection, gentle irony--a quality rarely found in Italian choreographers--and a highly technical choreographic language. My Feet Are Not Long Enough is based on an idea from neurologist Oliver Sacks, the author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Sacks writes of a patient's capacity for movement appearing and disappearing suddenly and without warning. Building on that idea, Fiumi created a series of choreographic phrases linked with recited texts in an alternation of contrasting rhythms and atmospheres.

So, right from the start of the festival two tendencies in contemporary Italian dance clearly emerged. One is dominated by "the urge of speech," which combines gesture with the spoken word, while the other is a search for a pure, rigorous dance, more or less vivid but always aiming at an unquestionable formal beauty.

Several of the performances in Orvieto were excellent examples of these trends. Balocco, by and with Giorgio Rossi, is a work of compelling poeticism, in which texts by Isadora Duncan and Giuseppe Ungaretti, a great Italian poet, are combined. Rossi founded the Sosta Palmizi company, one of the earliest contemporary Italian dance troupes.

The rigorous beauty of dancing forms was the focus of Ariella Vidach's Elicon Silicon, which explored the concepts of "natural" and "artificial." The choreography was supported by an effective assembly of electronic images behind three splendid dancers, including Vidach herself, who appeared as part women, part androgynous dummies, part bionic beings.

Pure dynamism in an evolving geometrical pattern--this was the hallmark of Elogio dell'Ombra ("In Praise of the Shadow") by Virgilio Sieni, a highly talented choreographer who was not well represented by this effort.

Other choreographers presented in Orvieto were Claudia Pescatori, Alessandra Palma di Cesnola, and Brunella de Biase, all with excellent technical training and seriously engaged in the search for new codes of expression.

The festival closed with a highly enjoyable jam session of music and dance by some of the best Italian jazz musicians. In doing so this new chapter of Orvieto per la Danza brought to light yet another tendency in Italian contemporary dance: the search for a new, perfectly integrated relationship of movement with music.

RELATED ARTICLE: INT'L VIEW

At the run-down but still somewhat glamorous Metropole Lausanne, Bejart Ballet Lausanne presented "Ce que l'Amour Me Dit: l'Art du Pas de Deux" ("What Love Tells Me: the Art of the Pas de Deux," December 9-10, 1994), twelve scenes of love, all but one choreographed by Maurice Bejart. Three were excerpts from his longer ballet of the same tittle based on Mahler's Third Symphony.

Returning to his roots, Bejart renounced the overloaded, chaotic pieces seen too often in recent years to present pure, imaginative dancing. Ensemble scenes, accompanied by a text of Friedrich Nietzche, were confined to the introduction and the finale. The former had a clear structure and paradoxically dense atmosphere which were fascinating, but I found the latter, with its endless, maudlin passages bathed in an apricot light, regrettably tedious.

Most of the program had a convincing force of expression, staged with inspiration and expertise and performed by a company with outstanding technical ability, vigor, and versatility. Emmanuelle Berard and Martyn Fleming showed an admirable purity of line in Ce que la Nuit Me Dit ("What the Night Tells Me"), while Chiara Tanesini and Julio Arozarena gave proof of an extreme flexibility and precision in Heliogabale. Parsifal was rendered with expressiveness and fluency by Christine Blanc and Igor Piovano.

Irene Wydler-Roth