Homo Turbae

Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio/Mòra

Teatro Herberia, Rubiera (RE)

10/10/2009 ,  21:00  
11/10/2009 ,  21:30  

direction Claudia Castellucci
sound orchestration Scott Gibbons
lights Romeo Castellucci
master of rehearsals Eugenio Resta

with
Marco D’Agostin,Gloria Dorliguzzo,Rob Fordeyn, Antonella Guglielmi,Beatrice Mazzola, Benedetta Mazzotti, Andrea Sassoli,Marco Villari

Shadows: Compositions for organ by Olivier Messiaen, The story “The man of the crowd” by Edgar Allan Poe (1840) and the aquarelle “The Professor’s dream” (1848) by the architect Charles Robert Cockerell

On stage: you, dancers, athletes of the time; followers of a spiritual structure into whom only the rhythm’s metronomy can attempt to enter; experts of an essential interpretation, which can be only expressed by a total identification between the being and the self.

production direction Gilda Biasini, Cosetta Nicolini
organization Valentina Bertolino, Silvia Bottiroli, Benedetta Briglia, Alba Pedrini
administration Michela Medri, Simona Barducci

production Festival delle Colline Torinesi, Espace Malraux/Scène Nationale de Chambéry et de la Savoie, Théâtre de la Place/Liège–centre européen de création théâtrale et chorégraphique, Charleroi/Danses–centre chorégraphique de la Communauté française de Belgique, Emilia Romagna Teatro Fondazione, Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio
in collaboration with
Amat/Associazione Marchigiana Attività Teatrali and Civitanova Danza
Project CARTA BIANCA

Running time 50'

Mòra is a dance company which is born out of the experiences and the studies carried out with Stoa, the school about the rhythmical movement founded by Claudia Castellucci, within the Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, with aims of pure research. Mòra means to fulfil an expression of dance mainly linked to the dimension of time. The most evident consequence of this option is the metronomic link with the music which sets the measure for each movement on stage. Main authors of this link are the lower limbs, which – like the pistons of a music instrument - have a steady contact with the soil which is marked by the feet’s beating. The most recurrent movement of the dance is jumping, because, although moving in the space, the person doesn’t really move and often insists on the same point.
What expressively characterises the dance is a sentimental dryness which leaves room to an outside apathy: dancers are the interpreters of the movements, therefore each inside motion is exclusively entrusted to the preciseness of the steps which are as much efficacious as more describing and mimed they are.
The dance of Mòra is linked to the time both through the observation of its regular cadences and through the chance which breaks into the time and upturns its repetition, with a forecasting capability. The dance is therefore attracted by the double polarity of the time: measure and chaos, and it lives in this tension.
The ideal dancer is the athlete of the time who knows the rhythm and who is very good at practising the usual steps. The high technical standard required is the reason why Claudia Castellucci has started a dialogue with the classical dance world. Another element characterizing the dance of Mòra is the adoption of a theme, for the nearly mimed description of a narration. Although this has no real narrative trend, it is possible to perceive a speech divided into chapters and paragraphs and its trend can be followed.
The dance uses the thread of the narration like the basis for its movements, a sound and weighted basis just like the earth on which they stand.

The first dance of Mòra
The story Mòra refers to for its first dance is The man of the crowd by Edgar Allan Poe, an incredible story about the indistinction of the crowd which, nonetheless, coagulates in just one type. The crowd bounces back and makes its hapeless foam float, but this flows into one person who is the quintessence of the very crowd, without nobody being ever able to catch him. This man is a dark and sinister soul who is made looking like this by the whole crowd around him, without him being able to understand it. The time is the black wizard who, by making everybody look alike and replaceable in front of him, lets the face of all faces come out of the foam consisting in a never ending list of faces.
In each meeting, from the most casual to the most innocent one, what comes out from the interstices between an individual and the other, what really fills the holes of the crowd, is just the soul of the abomination which slackens all moorings of responsibility and scumbles the appealing contours of the faces.
This crowd is eternal, it has been living since the beginning of the world; new people continuously replace each other, in the hours and in the centuries; and it is just this eternity, this quantity which annihilates us: it is the perception that our individual existence is part of a system which has always included it, only to be able to exclude it, only to be able to pass to another one.
The music which shapes and covers any step of the dance is mainly taken from the opera for pipe-organ by Olivier Messiaen and its passages are supplemented with the texture made by Scott Gibbons.
The pipe-organ is the most powerful music instrument that the history of the world has ever produced. It’s a bellows which takes on the quantity as a human burden and cry, from the first cry to the blasphemous roar. It contains all registers, pitches, timbres and volumes. Its grave notes reach telluric perceptions while high-pitches are mineral darts projecting on the stars. The genial opera, so powerful and extremely sophisticated and crazy by Messiaen has taken moments of filamentous suspensions and celestial shakes from the pipe-organ.
The dance stands among Poe’s story and Messiaen’s music, in the same sleep and in the same awareness of a wake which is extremely doubtful.

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