« Circumvesuviana », choreography by Paco Dècina The Pina Bausch style in Neapolitan style
Rome. It's so rare to meet a new, true choreographer, that - when that happens - you'd really want to scream, celebrate, shoot firecracker braids. Specially relevant firecracker braids, moreover, from the moment this choreographer , Paco Dècina - is a true Neapolitan and his show, at the Trianon, is called Circumvesuviana.
In Italy, Decina had danced with Vittorio Biagi. Then he went to Paris where he founded his own band and where he quickly became famous, in the world of contemporary dance, especially after winning the choreography competition "Glass Menagerie". Five other dancers work with him, all good, both from a technical-stylistic point of view and from the point of view of expressive intensity.
Paco Dècina's show presents itself at first glance as a kind of Neapolitan distancing of Pina Bausch: the six performers wear clothes of an absolute, normal bourgeois daily life; but they have bare feet and metaphysical or surreal behaviors. This, in itself, already creates a wonderful atmosphere of ambiguity and tension. Then the true originality, probably very Neapolitan, of Paco Dècina is felt: here is a "routine" - a series of gestures and repeated steps - inspired by the common places of Neapolitan song and parthenoean gestures (Neapolitan) in general. Gestures and not being used as "found objects" in a pleasant and bizarre way. And then again, here's a series of short dances, which have one or more scales like Element Bearing. Each scale is, it is presumed, a mountain, a Vesuvius, an aspiration, a flight to heaven. All men and women have a kind of "sacred heart" on their chests, a clear allusion to ancient and new rituals now meaningless. But curiously, as the show unravels, fluid and fast, we think less and less about Naples and more and more about our daily adventure of life, between reassuring traditional vocations and wild and destructive instincts.
Among the performers, we found with satisfaction two valiant young Roman dancers: Donata D'Urso, already a collaborator of Marco Brega; and Andrea Battaglia, elegant and very focused, who seems to have matured sufficiently during the years of working with Decina, after his debut with Vittorio Biagi and Bob Curtis.
Paco Dècina had already emerged in previous encounters as one of the most lively and original talents. At this annual "Dansa e dintorni" meeting, he confirmed that he had acquired a complete choreographic maturity. All the works in his repertoire start from experience, then detach themselves from it in search of a metaphysical reality.
Even "Circumvesuviana" is a symbolic journey around the villages of Vesuvius, but the author specified that "there will be no extended linen, nor spaghetti" because he is not interested in the Naples of tourist postcards and he does not want to show it to us. Rather, his will is to restore the essence of it to us, through evocation and by constantly remaining vigilant not to fall into the banal. The city of Naples is suggested by stairs, hula-hops that turn spiritually to a music of Carosone, by ex-voto attached to the chest of the dancers.
The music is based on an idea of the body in harmonious relation between the ground and the air.
The audience cheered the show with many live encores. Perhaps Milan itself has appreciated a talent that France has already recognized for a long time.
Paco Decina for the first time in Rome
What is the "napolitanity" selon Paco Dècina? Nothing too predictable: no mandolin, no extended linen, no polish. No garish color, no postcard. Naples is something else: a mental event, a fantastic theory of signs. Passionate and engluing melancholy, want to flee elsewhere, beyond the shadow of Vesuvius. Far from the trap of a railway belt, the Circumvesuviana, which serves all the villages at the foot of the volcano.
And there, in this tunnel without sun, without the glare of the Mediterranean light, in this Circumvesuviana translated into the memory of dreams, "napolitanity" is above all a world of shadow made up of the tasty and burning caresses of a secret and talkative body, physical languages born of so many emotions, messages emitted by a way of walking or running, sitting or climbing stairs, crossing legs or squatting on the ground.
A network of signals: female rounds that swirl slightly, the emergence of relaxed and arrogant boys, a woman's gaze like a Madonna ecstasy, the body of a man suspended in the air without apparent support, mysterious emblem of a strange Christ in a cross-jacket, like a fantasy captured in our daily lives. It is from these rapid and fleeting breaches, without the slightest trace of roughly or tinkering, that the show Circumvesuviana by Paco Dècina, who is a young Italian choreographer successfully adopted by Paris, is composed. Hosted last spring at the Théâtre de la Bastille (which co-produced it), already invited to prestigious European events (holland Festival, the Festival of Arles), and now visiting Rome for the first time (for the review of Italian groups at the Trianon), Circumvesuviana lives on chiaroscuro and nuances, on the basis of a poetic and intimate dance that knows how to play on transparency, precision and intensity of details.
Orchestrating with taste movements never banal or stereotyped, Paco Dècina builds an expressive dimension of his own, in which he demonstrates that he has been able to imagine with a personal eye both on German dance theatre and on the "lightest" new French dance. The result is fresh and captivating, punctuated by a collage of "popular" music still alive, very well lit and interpreted with a tender conviction by the three dancers (tight in small silky and floral costumes of the 50s) and the three impetuous dancers (in dark cross-jacket): they are Donata D'Urso, Sophie Lessard, Claire Rousier, Andrea Battaglia, Carlo Diaconale, and Paco Dècina himself.
Each exhibits, exactly in the place of the heart, an ex-voto Pinned: it is a small scarlet red heart, a small prayer of love. And in the last scene, swirling, where ex-votos travel from one breast to another in a sinuous braid of figurative feelings, this shuddering melodrama of Latin nostalgia that runs through the whole show, finally explodes explicit, formally declared.
It moves forward strongly and loudly, like a little train on this bad railway line which, like an old crown, surrounds with its arms the sovereign heart of Naples.
Arles: 'Circumvesuviana' is a raunchy dance from the South. This must happen in a distant time, which fled like a bicycle thief. The three women roll hula-hoops on their beautiful hips. Men in dark suits only ride mechanics. We hear an amazing peninsular boogie-woogie: "Si voi far l'Americano mericano mericano... " that recalls the days when the Italian boot was swinging with the rangers of these Yankee liberators. "Circumvesuviana" , named after the little train that surrounds the volcano of the Bay of Naples, is a beautiful choreography by Paco Dècina. "An excuse to talk about the men and women of the South." "No linen or spaghetti," warns the program.
Here, the South hangs from a more subtle thread. Of course, the boys have the carriage-like locks and the eye of the smoky, and the girls have dark open dresses in farm satin. But geography is rapidly disable. We wait for the mandolins, we come across a paso doble Derailed. We go from the contours of Vesuvius to the ramparts of Seville. Other South, same languor, same nostalgia. We will even see the sobs of a gypsy violin.
The staging itself often blurs the steps. Some paintings are set like a squadron of carabinieri: of the ten dancers, we only want to see one body. Others are bathed in a beautiful anarchy, inseparable from Latinity. A mysterious frac character drags a stool. Another drops a ladder. A dancer runs around the stage. But, as we know, as silence is musical, disorder is choreographic.
POLVERIGI - In Naples at the Porta Capuana, there is a watchmaker. Inside, the machines of time chant the minutes and old pendulum swings in perpetual motion. Circumvesuviana, Paco Dècina's show seems to have come out of this artisan shop; phlegmatic, mellow, Latin, with a course that puts you in suspense and abstract gestures that follow one another, separate, in a musical composition Expanded to everything. Memoirs of a South African, Partenoean, Sicilian who dances between an image and a mirage, the balances born of the Latin belly.
Aesthetic, languid, animated by a hidden passive energy that pulsates as in the rhythm of some dervish dances, 'Circumvesuviana' offers a recognizable form. The movements of the dancers evade the character, their looks are disenchanted, impenetrable, almost absent. Three women and three men dance to a syncopated rhythm, one action succeeds the other without variation in intensity, but, from scene to scene, the movements acquire some "allotrope" element, which seems to come from far away.
A precise composition appears, which loses the visual and temporal traces of the beginning, condenses the emotions, seduces, unexpectedly, in the space of a dilated time.
Women sketch "recalls"; a dancer sits on a staircase, ironically evoking the adoration of Our Lady, two other actors on the ground look at her blissfully: but she could also be a whore, a street girl or some places buried under the rocks at the foot of Vesuvius.
Men, often in groups and separated, move with imperceptible seduction. Everything happens without anything new happening.
But this apparent boredom is precisely the key to reading the show, which uses almost stereotypical expressive codes, which are housed within everyday, fluid and recognizable gestures. The expression of the faces is minimized, the dance is patron of the stage, the intimacy flows gently over all the choreography of Decina.
A southern feature marks the whole scene: it is an ex-voto heart that the six dancers wear on their chests and lace at the end on a steel staircase.
With Paco Dècina, Andrea Battaglia, Donata D'Urso, Sophie Lessard, Claire Rousier, Carlo Diaconale and Camille Le Prince, who danced to the music of Carosone, Tagliaferri, Toshi and ... Mr. Doors.
Circumvesuviana by Paco Dècina
Paco Decina, a rising name! After a first choreography for the Paris competition in 1985, a first prize at the Menagerie de Verre in June 1987 (replacing the Bagnolet competition), the public found for the fifth time this Italian in his thirties, who willingly drew his inspiration from his Neapolitan childhood. Her latest play, "Circumvesuviana", premiered in Ivry at the end of February, is inspired by the women of Southern Italy. Machist, Paco Decina? No, rather realistic, with a good portion of humor, musical memories of the sixties, and a penchant for city costumes emphasizing the difference of the sexes.
Paco Decina had the vision of a Madonna suspended high. The Adoration of Mary (Sophie Lessard) settles ironically: she brings a metal ladder, climbs up and sits down. Donata d'Urso and Claire Rousier, on the floor, look at her blissfully. They've already made us smile with their sexy sway. For the image of these women hesitates between the Madonna and the whore, under the gaze of men,
For three quarters of an hour, Paco Dècina evolves the three women and three men into separate groups. It is only at the end that couples form: each takes off his red badge (a heart resembling that of the Society of Jesus) to stick it on one of the six ladders brought by the dancers.
The gestures are abstract, the movements jerky and angular, performed on a varied musical montage. A special mention for the lights of Dominique Mabileau, who colors the floor pink and the ladders in blue: and even dares to put us in the eyes full of stars above the plateau. to fall backwards.
When the play starts, you think that it may be enough to invent a succession of actions to sum up the show. It is thought that this Energetic ensemble movement that inaugurates the space v sign too quickly a piece that would only dilute its main assets. It is to forget that Paco Dècina is Italian of body and soul, that his dancers have the look of embers and practice the art of being desired, that his dancers have velvet eyelids and promising swaying and that, despite this, he will not hesitate, in order to "heat" the room, to arrange all around the stage heated ramps In: Vesuvius obliges.
It must be noted that after a very choreographic first scene of exhibition, finely written, it becomes impossible to accurately spot substantial changes in gestures. The universe is installed, the codes defined; for the most part, these gestures are known, the proposed forms recognizable and it is only in their subtle composition, in their singular arrangement that a surreptitious poetry will be born.
A few obliques here and there, a few physical tricks and some tricks of actors come to brighten a general atmosphere passionate but languid, relaxed but thrilling. While a woman runs in a circle, her arms restlessly by a start, a man rests vertically on the ridge of a ladder, balanced on her stomach, and a couple embraces. Later, the three women will undulating from the pelvis in a hula-hoop contest behind a trio-macho of more beautiful men. Elsewhere, a woman is perched on a ladder and men, inexorably, cross the plateau with a clear air.
The dance of Paco Dècina requires a considerable stage presence that not all performers have yet. Nevertheless, we feel that the human relations of the team of dancers have been able to find an anchor just inside this atmosphere sometimes melodic, often ironic, but never cruel. The embers of the eyes seem nourished by the tenderness, that of the choreographer for his dancers, that of the dancers for their compatriots and for the public too. Then they can show their heart, beat lashes, play dimple, sincerity trumps the cliché and nothing has more charm than this ballad around Vesuvius accompanied by the sweet melodies of a bel canto singer detoxifying. But this obvious-looking dance sometimes hides dark, deep accents.
in the image of the composition that spreads, makes the visual and temporal cues lose, verges on boredom and then catches the eye with a sudden condensation of emotion, the dance follows this syncopated rhythm, settles into a proposal, exhausts it and moves on to the next without variation in intensity. Drained underground, the poetic moments then surface with confidence, as if they were long awaited, denouncing previous actions as possible false leads.
It will be enough for a man to tilt ladders in balance on each other to put an end to what we never really saw begin: Circumvesuviana.