The MM Contemporary Dance Company dances two great titles of the musical repertoire. Emanuele Soavi‘s Carmen immerses us in the plot made up of subtle relationships and tensions of Bizet’s famous work. Michele Merola confronted the obsessive and repetitive music of Bolero, staging the variety of moods that circulate around and within the couple’s relationship.
The evening is part of Danza at Chiostri, by the Fondazione Nazionale della Danza / Aterballetto for the billboard of REstate 2019.
Carmen Sweet is an exclusive creation by Emanuele Soavi for the MM Contemporary Dance Company, conceived taking into account the composer’s original intention to create an opera-comique: this is how Georges Bizet defined his Carmen, presented in Paris in 1875.
In this work, drawing inspiration from and revisiting the traces of the legendary plot, the action, deliberately permeated with irony and sarcasm, begins in the arena where Carmen, Micaela, Frasquita, Mercédès, Don José, Zuniga, Escamillo give free rein to their emotions. Thus giving space to the strong technical and theatrical virtuosity of the performers on stage, Soavi plunges us dramaturgically into that plot made up of subtle relationships, balances and embroideries, between tension and suspension, where movements and gestures must be read beyond the apparent elegance that is over the top. All accompanied by the famous notes of Bizet, sometimes interrupted by the songs of the singing group Los Panchos, in whose texts antagonism, jealousy and desire are the omnipresent subjects.
In Seville’s Plaza de Toros, the characters meet for the day of the bullfight. Everyone is waiting for Escamillo, the Escamillo who believes that Carmen is her own and does not care about the warnings of Mercedes and Frasquita. Covered in dust, confused in their vices, the characters, like a group of histrions, stage Carmen’s passion in the metaphysical square of the stage.
Sarcastic and bizarre in their gestures and movements, these comedians try to avoid the perennial clash between Don José and Toreador, while Micaela, alone in the shadows, hides and shows herself, trying to steal their hearts and their attention in vain. But Don José is soon around. Ignoring her friends’ advice, Carmen meets him and José begs her to come back with him. José threatens the contemptuous rejections and, while the crowd applauds Escamillo victorious, blinded by anger, José kills Carmen.
In this moving fiction, a story is revealed to the public that can be true and not just imaginary, made of physical beauty expressed by the bodies of the dancers, where the narrative of the scenes is marked by the relationships between the senses, which repeatedly ignite with passion the protagonists on stage.
Choreography Emanuele Soavi
Music Georges Bizet, Los Panchos
Lighting design Cristina Spelti
Costume design Alessio Rosati with the collaboration of Nuvia Valestri
Bolero (1928) is still one of the best-known and most listened to pieces in the history of music. In creating a new choreographic version of Bolero, Michele Merola confronted himself with this obsessive and repetitive music, trying to understand its identity, reason and function: at the end of this path, the choreographer’s inspiration focused on the inexhaustible range of human relationships, in particular those of couples, within which we often record the reciprocal and irreconcilable distances between men and women, that “transparent wall” that divides them. Thus, in the different shades assumed by the dance, the choreography declines the variety of moods that “circulate” around and within the couple relationship.
Stefano Corrias intervened on this same music, with the “license” and inventiveness that are the true sign of every artist. As a refined and expert composer, Corrias has created his own musical score, freely inspired by the original version of Ravel’s piece. The new score was composed by carefully analyzing the pages of Bolero, and integrates perfectly with it, placing itself in three different moments. Within the choreographic writing, the three fragments underline the most intimate, and truest, moments of each of us, when we are far from the looks of others, and far from the deafening noise of the world.
In Merola’s version, Bolero is therefore described as a non-history, fantastic but possible, however pertinent to the real world. From the allusive initial drum strokes to the final “explosion” of the entire orchestra, the dance, in close symbiosis with the music, conveys a sort of abstract “bitter fairy tale”, an allegory of the pain of living and misunderstanding between human beings. Thus Bolero becomes a metaphor for our existence, caught in the double tracks that each of us experiences during our lives, between contrast and dialogue, seduction and disillusionment, surprise and bewilderment.
Choreography Michele Merola
Music Maurice Ravel, Stefano Corrias
Light design Cristina Spelti
Costume design Alessio Rosati with the collaboration of Nuvia Valestri
Tickets
Full 12 euro
Reduction 9 euro for under 30, dance schools DanzaRE (Arcadia, Danzarte, Eidos Danza, Let’s Dance, Progetto Danza), Liceo Coreutico Matilde di Canossa, over 65
Reduction 3 euro for under 8
Info, reservations and tickets withdrawing
tel. +39 0522 273011
cell. and whatsapp +39 3341023554
email info@aterballetto.it
Reserved tickets must be collected by Friday, July 19th at the ticket office of the Fonderia, in via della Costituzione 39.
Uncollected tickets will be resold.
Purchase at ticket office
Fonderia, headquarters of Fondazione Nazionale della Danza / Aterballetto, via della Costituzione 39, Reggio Emilia
Monday and Friday from 10.00 a.m. to 1.00 p.m.
Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday from 3.00 p.m. to 5.30 p.m.
Chiostri di San Pietro, via Emilia San Pietro 44, Reggio Emilia
Only Sunday 21 and Tuesday 23 July from 7.30 p.m.
Online purchase
Tickets purchased online can be collected at the ticket office of the Fonderia in via della Costituzione 39, during opening hours, or on the evening of the shows (Sunday 21st and Tuesday 23rd July) at the ticket office of the Chiostri di San Pietro in via Emilia San Pietro 44, from 7.30 p.m.
