Italian premiere for “Over Dance”
The evening featuring performers aged 65 to 79, consisting of Rachid Ouramdane’s Un jour nouveau and Angelin Preljocaj’s Birthday Party, received almost triumphant acclaim in Paris and Aix-en-Provence.
Now it’s Italy’s turn. The national premiere will be Sunday, March 12, 4 p.m. at the Arena del Sole in Bologna, one of the venues of Emilia Romagna Teatro ERT/National Theater, co-producer of the evening.
Creating by looking at life – and especially the real lives, those of the performers – is not for everyone. One must start with a great awareness of one’s expressive means, a choreographic talent, and then arrive at a desire to tell us something.
Rachid Ouramdane does this by intruding with subtle nostalgia the awareness that we are always waiting, perpetually waiting, for something that will come. Perhaps.
Angelin Preljocaj enters with irresistible irony, mixed with a radical affirmation of beauty, into the lives of his performers. Dancers or non-dancers, their story is one of relationships, encounters and the strength that arises from them. Which is projected into the future and not into the past.
(Gigi Cristoforetti – director FND/Aterballetto)
FND Aterballetto – Birthday party by Angelin Preljocaj – ph. Christophe Bernard (1)
“It took talent to grow old without becoming an adult,” sang Brel/Battiato.
Perhaps it takes talent to just grow old. To enhance physical resources that fade but can still hold returns or even unheard of new designs, to build weavings of relationships as if they were light laces after a lifetime of interlocking.
The theme is that all this should not be seen as individual miracles within a disintegrating mush, difficult even to support – from the economic, to the symbolic, to the relational – but requires becoming a grand – and certainly in some ways new – collective story. Collective and global.
(Felice Scalvini – director Fondazione Ravasi Garzanti)
This project seemed magical, daring and liberating to me. I found my body and dance…. I accepted my body and the changes due to the passage of time. ELLI MEDEIROS (Montevideo, 1956).
It is a project that contained from the beginning a kind of balance between ethics and aesthetics. You have to commit yourself, literally: pledge yourself. At the same time, Preljocaj asked a lot of us, of us personally. MARIO BARZAGHI (Milan, Italy, 1954)
I am a doctor, anatomopathologist, and about 10 years ago I met clowning, which made me realize that there is more beyond my own experience. This was a new experience, a challenge with myself. I reunited the mind and the body and vice versa into one whole. ROBERTO MARIA MACCHI (Milan, Italy, 1951)
Physically I can endure, thanks to Tai Chi, but remembering all the dance steps in my eighties? Thanks to the mutual support of the whole group and the perfect understanding between us dancers, it is an incredible and unique experience for me. MAÏ-THÉ PRIOU (Hanoi – Vietnam, 1943)
