De Anima
Virgilio Sieni
26/05/2013
, 
21:00
direction, choreography, set design, costumes Virgilio Sieni
interpretation and collaboration Giulia Mureddu, Sara Sguotti, Jari Boldrini, Nicola Cisternino, Andrea Rampazzo, Davide Valrosso
music J.S. Bach, Schubert
lights Roland Van Ulden
sound Francesco Canavese
staging Filippo Papucci
costume elaboration Giulia Bonaldi
hats Antonio Gatto
dressmaker Emma Ontanetti
set elements Chiara Occhini
produzione 2012 La Biennale di Venezia, Compagnia Virgilio Sieni
the Company is supported by Ministero per i Beni e le Attivitŕ Culturali - Direzione Generale per lo Spettacolo dal vivo, Regione Toscana, Comune di Firenze
Durata 1h
The dances are like a collection of notes. They come out from the darkness, from the background, very near. The dancers move in attraction to one another. They enter in flurries, and seem family groups, games among friends, existences left behind and then cradled: it all holds together amid bodies giving way. Flurries that bring forth a collection of pictures – all notes, margins, folds of the soul. Each picture, like a short story, is intended to raise questions, following the thread of the narration: they are dancers made up of accelerations, declinations and suspensions into pauses. Compassionate figures that distantly resemble the tumblers, jugglers and harlequins of Picasso. Figures that seem to evaporate from water, from moisture.
This rising from the bottom, this emergence onto the stage, is an attempt to show a cycle of figures around the edges of rooms immersed in shadowiness, where realism melts away, continually falling into forms of the soul.
Rooms of experience, always waiting for the Other.
The soul as a form of the living (Aristotle) opens up to passages of human-ness. In this context, the figures of the performance emerge, apparently melancholic. A deep darkness, a human instability that nurtures, in this case, the smiles and original inventiveness of the dancers.
Tactility acting as a transparent substance is the true origin of every frame or picture, thinking of the light of the gesture that always arises from the heat of rotations.
Each dance is also conceived on the basis of a few guidelines drawn from Aristotle’s De anima on “sensitivities” common to various senses – movement, calmness, the number, the figure, greatness – that envelop us in a general awareness of other bodies, like the medium of every sense, that channel that organically ties us to the dense flow of the invisible.
And finally, who are these pallid youths emerging from the background, slanting with energy and abandon into the gesture of the dance, and who we meet along the impervious path of everyday life? They involuntarily show us the time enclosed in the particles of movement that form the fragile figure of a passage in the transparency of the wood: like woodsmen, they see in the dense forest the wandering paths that edify the body in its evaporation into the childish game of adulthood.
Virgilio Sieni
www.sienidanza.it
Virgilio Sieni
Born in Florence, Virgilio Sieni received his training in Amsterdam, New York and Tokyo. He has been a leading figure in Italian contemporary dance since the early 80s. His most recent work include the Lucretius trilogy (La natura delle cose, Oro and Ultimo giorno per noi) and Tristi Tropici. In 2007 Virgilio Sieni founded the Art of Gesture Academy, at the Cantieri Goldonetta in Oltrarno Fiorentino: an innovative context aimed at the transmission of artistic practices.
