With Ciro Esposito fu Vincenzo, Paco Dècina succeeds arguably one of the most beautiful choreographies of recent years, composing a kind of opera where the collected rumor of bodies takes the place of lyricism, or the nudity carried as an offering is imprinted as an indelible act of human warmth.
Paco Dècina offered to the viewer on Tuesday evening on the stage of the Zaragoza theatre a Ciro Esposito fu Vincenzo bathed in strangeness as paintings touch grace. And it is not the only parallel that has been drawn, throughout this hour and a quarter, between the art of movement and that of posing. A confrontation that does not leave to be surprising and whose light remains the essential hyphen.
For Paco Dècina, dance is not a matter of choreography, it is a way to be there a little more than the others, to take the light and exaggerate it. And even if the dancers do not dance in the sense that one would hear, this way of being there, of wearing one's body on one's face like a garment, is undoubtedly the essence of dance. If it were a painting, we would call it a vanity. If it were a story, we would be talking about a Yugoslav city. But it's the most beautiful dance, it's almost unbearable, and it's great.
It was cold, it was raining that night in Paris and it must be said, some must have bitterly regretted their outing at the Théâtre de la Ville to see Paco Dècina and his Ciro Esposito Fu (fire in French) Vincenzo. It was also raining on stage or rather, it was as if a hole in the roof let a trickle of water collected in a basin flow. On this point, the program is clear: "Imagination is a place where it rains" (Italo Calvino). One could thus, through the multiple images and signs, dissect the ballet like a laboratory rat and play the scholars.
Since Nijinski was inspired by Greek frescoes for his "Fauna", the choreographers have served us the master painting and the "Byzantine" at all costs. Either, it flatters the eyes and the discerning spirits but that it is long (an hour and a half) and how bored one is. Note that boredom is not a dented in dance where the idea of entertaining is far exceeded. That said, Decina does not seek to provoke boredom but at best hypnosis with his swinging movements, his falling drops of water and his Mona Lisa looks. It also excels in the effects of slowness and immobility distilled against a background of fly hum and small Neapolitan airs.
Then, patatras, it's the punctuation: alarm clock noise, a song in English (always the same newspapers, the same, etc.). Women in bodices and high heels grab their shovel, spread the mortar. It's not all about slumping into subtle poses. We also have to work. But hey, it lets you watch. to advise escying, however, to the most allergic to the unbearable slowness of being, or even nothingness.
Like these drawings of Ernest Pignon-Ernest glued to the walls of Naples and lacerated by time, beautiful figures spouted from the shadows, lyrical bodies playing with a sigh or an alley, the dance of Paco Dècina seems haunted by death. A death that, strangely, is here familiar, tame, almost smiling.
A pagan death, like the city that inspired the painter and saw the birth of the choreographer. But the religious impregnation being in the latter as strong as paganism, she maintains with him an insistent dialogue whose dance is the place of election.
As if, from the preserved childhood, from the studies at the Jesuit college, the young Neapolitan had learned a most paradoxical lesson. Starting with a keen sense of loneliness. Fine Arts, sport, later dance, he was indeed one of those who achieved their ends by fighting against their environment. "I had to rely on myself. Ever since I was a kid, I knew I'd be on my own. So it is in saltimbanque that he populates this solitude. In France for less than ten years, he created his company in 1987 and invented before really getting a taste of choreography first swift and light. To be a stranger is to pay attention to others and to oneself."
Is this how "Ciro Esposito fu Vincenzo" came, his last play, premiered last year and presented for two days at the Théâtre de la Ville? In any case, the tone has changed. At the same time close and exotic, this new work speaks of light, warmth, almost Sicilian earth, decadence and beauty. Destitution, face-to-face with death: do we have to be exiled to know, better than others, to approach him?
Paco Decina was born in Naples, a city coveted by Mount Vesuvius and crumbling under the decadent splendour of its history. His first choreographies are not yet marked by the seal of melancholy: it is humour that prevails, and irony.
On the other hand, with Ciro Esposito Fu Vincenzo, Paco Dècina looks at the past and the pare of tragic colors: on a blue wall patinated in gold and mauve, a hole in openings where the eyes of women (they are always the custodians of memory), a man dances. It's very beautiful. Heavy with a wrongful past, as if living today had become impossible.
On the dance side, we find the tics and tricks of the young choreography: falls, rolls and sketches of Arabic, slowness penetrated by seriousness. All in lyrical and popular music for emotion or in the squeak of megaphonic teeth for the intellect. In short, a full scramble of defects carried away by a true force of evocation, a palpitation that is just waiting to free itself from mannerism.
Presented a year ago at the Théâtre de la Bastille, this show will have to find its mark on the big stage of the Théâtre de la Ville.
Paco Dècina is a choreographer, Italian, even Neapolitan. A toned and nervous little man, he is full of imagination. Since he's been on stage and making others dance, he's been wonderfully associated with a whimsical inspiration with the rigors of contemporary dance.
"Ten years ago," he explains, "all modern dancers had followed classical teaching. Today, I work with people who have a contemporary background... dance no longer follows the music. The sounds accompany the dancer and serve as a marker, but we can do without."
In his shows, he emphasizes movement, sets (always sober) and costumes (very elaborate or very sober. "I always talk about memory he says. Each of his choreographies, and in particular the last two, "Shadow in Rosso Antico" and "Ciro Esposito"" speak of the past, even of antiquity. In "Shadow in Rosso Antico", the decorations are reminiscent of Greek or Roman temples and statues. "Ciro Esposito", more inspired by painting, Italian painters as in the scene of the young woman washing in a kind of conque, large shell, tilting her long hair, the Venus of Boticelli is not far away. And Flemish paint for the play of lights, purple and gold colors.
The title of "Ciro Esposito" is composed of Ciro, a name common in southern Italy and "Esposito", on display, the surname given to children found at the door of churches (so "exposed" to people willing to collect them. In this title we find the dual will of exhibition and modesty. "Ciro" also evokes wax mannequins.
Paco Dècina created this show during a residency at the Orleans Choreographic Production Centre as part of an operation called Dances at the Centre (organized by the Central Region). For a choreographer, to be in residence is to be able to have a stage for a certain period of time (a few weeks, sometimes more).
Thus, installed with his dancers, the choreographer can work his show and direct the construction of the sets and the development of the lighting.
Created on January 22 for the first time in Orleans, "Ciro Esposito" tour in the provinces: it will be given on March 23 in Niort, April 3 and 4 in Chartres, june in Mulhouse and in July in Vierzon. He will also be in Paris at the start of the school year.
It is very difficult to talk about these shows that touch deeply. Perhaps because it evokes the unspeakable. The most moving scene of the work, in which the man offers to the eyes of the crowd a woman, his wife; both are naked. The fragility of these bodies, the simplicity of this offering, the impotence of this totally devoid couple Move to tears.
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If you're hooked, but really addicted to today's dance, you'll surely love Paco Dècina's latest creation. There are ingredients "latest" of the choreography in the shot: atmosphere worked with a little hair, binding city costumes, lyrical music of all kinds or megaphonic stridulations, young men with shaved heads and young girls too round or too dry. Serious spirit in concrete. Etc.
What about the dance? Ah! Yes, dancing. to be taken with tweezers, rolls or falls. Sometimes, too, stealthily, in clandestine arabesques.
It is understood, Paco Dècina manages a flawless in the chic career of the shock choreographer. And yet, behind the clutter of all this, we sometimes glimpse something true, a heart throbbing behind the codes, a force of evocation and convincing emotion.
Paco Decina was born in Naples. From his origins and, surely from a good culture rubbed against Italian neo-realistic cinema, comes this talent to suggest a climate, an oppression, a violence. Death, present throughout the sequences that follow, is enveloped with popular Italian songs from afar, without nostalgia.
At the back of the stage; a large wall patinated in blue, gold and mauve, lets the gaze of three women hidden behind a horizontal murder, while a boy dances in the dark, accompanied by a woman candlestick. One holds his breath to hear that of the author and to reconcile with him. It's hard to be yourself.
For this choreographer, who arrived from Naples and whose company has been performing since 1987, image, memory and social relations are among the major elements of his productions. Five shows have followed each other since " Tempi morti " piece from the beginning to "Vestigia di un corpo" penultimate and superb creation marking an important step in the development of his work and yet unfortunately remained in the shadows. The word is not in vain. In these latency of silence - able to make emerge in layers put in images a whole memory of the body and its history, a work that is particular to it - to remove from the bodies and dance the memory as well as its current resurgence of the threatening shadows of a totalitarian social body. Under the keen eye of this Latin choreographer, history and politics are always at work as close as possible to the aesthetic questions and bodily changes they produce. Always in this lineage, dives and rises the words of "Ciro Esposito fu Vincenzo". Invented character, "echo of a thought" as much as "iconography of the possible" , to compensate for " an era that leaves no room for poets, no more time to think about death " this is the point addressed by Paco Dècina in this room. Difficult bet and firmly held. Through a clear, open writing, the choreographer makes the great work here with rare constructions forcing the sense and the imaginary into infinite dimensions.
No description can evoke the surprising richness of this living iconography, paintings so polished as to dream that they awaken to other realities, reversing the data of the visible and the invisible, playing on the tenuous links of the relationships present, whether musical, plastic, and especially on the work of the performers that should be emphasized. Remarkable solos, all fullness and tormented roundness at Chiara Gallerani, or crossed by disturbing lines with the sheared gestures of Paco Dècina soon joined by the folds and curved progressions of his companions: Alessandro Bernardeschi, Guillaume Cefelman and Carlo Locatelli. Other duets slip from violent encounters to subtle offices particularly active in Regina Martino and Manuela Agnesini.
The choreographer's artistic approach seems quite close in his processes to the Italian Anachronists, proposing a quotationist pictorial universe - a problem stemming from post-modern reflection and which takes shape in the early 1980s - taking shape in "the visit of the museum", practising the quotation, refinement and mixing of different styles of the great Western pictorial tradition. The ensemble taken as a linguistic modality extends the critical analysis of the art history undertaken by certain artists of the 70s. In response to the idea that "forgetting afflicts memory". Paco Dècina establishes a interlocking dialogue between the stratification of plastic ways and themes and an intimate meditation of moments and movements of life that place the discourse in a paradoxical position of overcoming.
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Paco Dècina's latest creation is beautiful, it's a master's painting. Ciro Esposito fu Vincenzo is a new and luxurious confidante of Paco Dècina. A refinement that is stubborn with all its beautiful and fluid lightness.
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Ciro Esposito fu Vincenzo transports us to a universe where the signs of a certain daily life allow an essential and complex human dimension to touch. His choreography weaves tenuous links between musicality, plastic expression, the body of the performers, and inner movement. His dance touches us deeply. It is impossible to forget this upsetting duet where a man and a woman in the crudest of nudity, possible image of a pietà in motion, give us to feel the most extreme pain. In these moments, dance is an incomparable look that pierces us and pierces appearances.
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Ciro Esposito fu Vincenzo is a look at death close to contemplation. Its purpose, from the high imagination that emerges there, responds to the images that flood the daily space, to the acceleration of ordinary time that obstructs fantasy. Ciro Esposito... evokes by carnal and poetic paintings, a time rediscovered thanks to the sensations offered by time lost, singular accents or moments created by these concentrations of being.
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