Aterballetto gets back to Teatro Valli

STANZE \ ROOMS

SITE-SPECIFIC ITINERANT PERFORMANCE

Choreography and concept: Diego Tortelli
Lighting design: Diego Tortelli and Paolo Bonapace
Music: various artists

Staging and creation specially conceived for the Teatro Municipale Valli

ANOTHER STORY / 2021 – Premiere – site specific version
PRELUDIO / 2021 – Premiere – site specific version
DOMUS AUREA – 2018 creation – excerpts

Works in exhibition:
Domus Aurea – installation by Massimo Uberti
LASCIA CH’IO… – video – installation by Diego Tortelli

After 221 days, we finally get back to dance for the audience of our Reggio Emilia.

The resident choreographer of the Fondazione Nazionale della Danza / Aterballetto, Diego Tortelli, custom-designs an original creation for the spaces of the Teatro Municipale Valli. A tribute to a special place of the town, a message of artistic vitality in one of the most difficult periods experienced by the citizens and a reaffirmation of the central importance of the collaboration between two of the major Italian cultural institutions, I Teatri and Aterballetto.

Stanze \ Rooms is a site-specific itinerant performance. Tortelli starts from the suggestions of the foyer, the stage and the rooms of the Ridotto of the Teatro Valli and imagines a choreographic and musical tour, which starts from the work Domus Aurea by the visual artist Massimo Uberti, set design for Tortelli’s first creation of the same name for Aterballetto, a luminous drawing of an ideal house within the context of an Ideal City. The spectators will enter into an exciting close relationship with the dancers of the company and will experience in a special way spaces usually dedicated to representation and conviviality.

The performance consists of excerpts from Domus Aurea, a 2018 creation set to music by Bach, and two world premieres: the duo Another story, which tells a new story of embrace, and Preludio, choreography for five dancers to the unmistakable voice of Nick Cave.

The tour ends with LASCIA CH’IO…, a poetic video-installation created during the lockdown in co-production with Fondazione I Teatri.

 

Choreography Diego Tortelli
Music Spiritualized
Music consultant Federico Bigonzetti

Duration 13’ – For 2 dancers

Another story wants to tell the new story of the most feared and at the same time desired gesture of 2020, suffering from a global epidemic: the hug.
A gesture as simple as a hug has now been reinvented by adding infinite variations to its most basic meaning, transforming itself into the most hidden desire and, on the other side, into an almost “terrorist” act, without losing its deep meaning of actual carnal sharing.

Another story thus becomes a solitary hug, a shared hug, a violent, painful, tiring and also desired, hidden, intimate, idolised hug… the only prediction we cannot rely on is how this simple gesture will continue its mutation; what choreographer Diego Tortelli intends to do is to write another story for it to be felt and watched by both performer and spectator.

FND/Aterballetto – Another story – ph. Celeste Lombardi

 

Choreography Diego Tortelli
Music Nick Cave
Assistant to the choreographer Casia Vengoechea

Duration 16’ – For 5 dancers

PRELUDIO is a creation for 5 performers designed around some of the most intense songs by Australian singer-songwriter Nick Cave, one of the greatest exponents of Post Punk.

In his songs, Cave explores the interplay of themes such as love, “belief”, addiction, obsession and loss, crossing over each other as if he were telling a story, an experience that can be perceived by everyone through his use of notes or tone of voice. His strength is that it is not essential to fully understand the content or the source of inspiration in order to ‘hear’ and ‘be heard’. Through his work, Cave argues that we should not go to the theatre, to a concert, to a museum, in order to understand, but in order to ask questions and to enrich ourselves, to analyse ourselves.

In one of his pieces I found the question I wanted to ask myself for this creation: MAH SANCTUM (my belief).

What do I believe in? I believe in the ‘body’, I believe in its fragility and strength, in its limitation and expansion, in its capacity for change and constant transformation, I believe in its contemporaneity, but also in its capacity to continue to feel those emotions that have been handed down to us; I believe in its violent beauty and frightening fragility. In this work I research above all on these obsessions, compulsions, addictions, contrasts, transforming the bodies of the five dancers not into men and women, but into emotional impulses; impulses that are part of written poems of which it would be enough to understand that they do not end there on the stage.

PRELUDIO is my profane prayer, my love letter to the body, my credo for today.

Diego Tortelli

FND/Aterballetto – Preludio – ph. Celeste Lombardi

Choreography Diego Tortelli
Music Johann Sebastian Bach, Suites Francesi, transcribed by Giorgio Colombo Taccani
Eugène Ysaye, 6 Sonatas for Solo Violin, Op. 27: NO 2, Sonata in A Minor
Georges Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, Prayer of Gratitude

Domus Aurea is a space created through a continuous interweaving of the rational and the irrational.
This is the condition we live in, always poised between the certain and the uncertain, driven by the desire for change and the utopia of being able to at least touch perfection and freedom. And perhaps today this belongs only to art.

Fondazione Nazionale della Danza / Aterballetto – Domus Aurea – ph. Lorenza Daverio

Published On: 5 May 2021