Between parody and attempt to bring on stage those dances really contemporary and anthropological as the latest generation disco dance, Salvo Lombardo photographs a moment of extreme topicality, a youthful and alienating nocturnal excerpt, creating a funny but deeply tragic documentary in which the human seems to cancel itself to the rhythm of digital beats. (Benedetta Colasanti – Recensito)
Conceived, choreographed and directed by Salvo Lombardo
Performers Cesare Benedetti, Lucia Cammalleri, Daria Greco, Salvo Lombardo
Collaborating choreographer Daria Greco
Lighting design Loris Giancola
Sound design Fabrizio Alviti
Production Festival Oriente Occidente
Co-producers Chiasma, Versiliadanza
With the support of DiD Studio – Ariella Vidach AiEP, Versilia Danza, Anghiari Dance Hub, Teatri di Vita
Special thanks to Studio Azzurro – Area Ricerca Progressiva
Duration 40′
Premiere September 2017 – Festival Oriente Occidente
After having collected the movements and gestures of passersby with the project Casual Bystanders and developed game and social dynamic standards with the project Twister, Salvo Lombardo continues with Present Continuous in his research into the relationship between memory, perception and movement by observing real life. In this case, the choreography is “derivative” once again and often calls upon “ready-made” gestures.
The performance is based on the shared memory of the same experience – an evening in a night club – during which, performers observed and appropriated a system of postures, motor-actions and relational means of those present. In every daily act we produce tracks that attest to our being in the world. We immortalise surrogates of reality, bodiless mists, which nail events to an eternal present, spreading themselves on our behalf and reproducing a fixed condition that excludes any real relationship with their original subject.
Present Continuous simply seeks to mark the points of a choreographic narrative that has been developed on the basis of the negotiation of memory through the sharing of reproducible motor sequences. The memory of real movement intertwines with a subjective micro-narrative that reveals the emotional life of the performer in their attempt to reconfigure a shared memory of movement and the experience it created, which, exploding from its actual re-enactment, leaves the “now” and becomes bounded to a future in the making.
Salvo Lombardo is an italian perfomer, coreographer and director who bases his work on a constant research of a relation between theatre, dance and visual art. He lives and works in Rome. He is the artistic director of the Chiasma Company whose works were presented in the main Festivals and Theatres in Italy.
In 2015-2016 he was resident choreographer at Anghiari Dance Hub where he worked at the project “Casual Bystanders” based on a choreographic pattern representing an archive of “not-extraordinary” gestures proceeding from kinetic fragments of common people observed in public places. From 2016 till today Salvo Lombardo is supported by the Festival Fabbrica Europa that produces many of his dance pieces.
From 2017 he is one of the associated artists of the Festival Oriente Occidente, the principal co-producer of the performance “Present Continuous” inspired by a memory system of gestures which stem from a night’s work at a music club and also the interactive installation in augmented reality titled “Reappearances” conceived for the MART Museum of Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto, involving the participation of the local community.
In 2017 he is guest choreographer at Aura Dance Theatre of Kaunas (LIT) for which he conceived the performance “Twister” studying the relationship between gestures memory, play and sociality. In 2018 he worked on the project “L’Esemplare Capovolto”, aims to generate a series of performative actions, installations, conferences, workshops and the creation of the show “Excelsior”, co-produced by the Théâtre National de Chaillot of Paris and the Romaeuropa Festival.
