Paco Decina in Rovereto
ROVERETO - Paco Decina's debut at the Rovereto Festival with the show 'Vestigia di un Corpo' surprised us. We were expecting a show with a French flavour since, as we may know, the 36-year-old Neapolitan choreographer, who has been running his company for six years, has found work and grants in Paris. And yet, Decina has created a personal, courageous piece that refuses the artificial patina of many "new dance" exercises and keeps easy labels.
For a little over an hour, we witness a flood of "pictorial" images, which are not dictated by the urgency of conveying messages, but by the urgency of finding in the hidden recesses of the memory fragments of life that the author lived and then recreate it and make it imprescriptible. Decina proposes her intimate journey where autobiography is totally absorbed in order to paint fresco spaces. Atmospheres where the bodies of the five protagonists and their movements are all elements of the stage sets: from the shimmering costumes through the rigid, spongy, clay-coloured curtains, to the lights and strings that hang from the hangers or remove heavy loads out of the place of representation.
The journey takes place aimlessly, as if we were weaving a braid of macabre and solar memories, grotesque and peaceful. It's like we're going from North to South, all the time. For example, in an afterlife criss-crossed by sharp flashes, women stand up wearing cothurne; on a sun-drenched floor a man writes "I don't know how to tell you I want you" (in Spanish), while three companions work immediately afterwards to erase the message with a dance in unison, almost folkloric. Decina offers feminine silhouettes that often resemble Mediterranean Madonnas and men in sad Neapolitan masks: there is even the reference to Eduardo De Filippo, with the classic striped pajama pants that gesticulate quietly in front of a flame-red backdrop. Even if we did not know that Paco Decina is Neapolitan we would find anyway in his Vestigia di un Corpo trace of a Parthenopean (Neapolitan) culture. However, more than in the singular details, it is in the overall vision that the hypothetical "napolitanity" reaches a philosophical level: a kind of silent resignation to death that mitigates even the most dramatic moments. As when, towards the end of the adventure, a woman desperately tries to get out of the bite of two oscillating ropes that hang from the hangers, invoking, mutely, the help of two men with their backs turned to the audience who instead stand still.
If a glimmer of German-branded neo-expressionism can be detected in such a shortcut of anxiety and existential impotence, it is nevertheless once again the whole piece and its functional dance that escapes any definition. What is certain is that Vestigia di un Corpo is even musically a backward journey to death. Proof of this is the deliberate approximation of the music of Hitchcock's psycho film (reworked by Tiziano Popoli, author of the soundtrack) and Schubert's Lied du Winterreise.
As proof of the attitude of the dancers (Manuela Agnesini, Didier Bastide, Alessandro Bernardeschi, Regina Martino and Paco Decina himself), suspended from the action and not tended towards it, as if the stimulations came from listening to music and listening to a word that was born in the unconscious and becomes a poetic language for bodies of automatons without skeletons.
Finally, in Vestigia di un Corpo, it is not so much the dance that strikes, but the whole choreographic construction and the effort to move without using pre-established models. It is not about theatre-dance, or even pure dance, but perhaps the beginning of a scenic writing (where there is no shortage of excesses, repetitions and interpretive shifts) that has something to do with a surrealism deprived of rethorics: still to be explored in the open field of research on the body in motion.
The Italian choreographer is at the Théâtre de la Bastille with his latest piece "Vestigia di un corpo", Cemetery, beyond... A juxtaposition of charade images more theatrical than danced.
Paco Decina has always had a soft spot for the large scales to which he attaches the girls as holy martyrs of procession. He has a very Latin taste for the theatrical, circus, commedia dell'arte, disillusioned irony and retro nostalgia that made the charm and originality of his first play, "Circum Vesuviana" . With 'Vestigia di un corpo' , he leaves his sunny universe to dive into a dark, if not hostile, world in search of memories, memory, perhaps eternity. This means that this journey at the end of the night takes place in an almost total darkness with light inflorescences that suggest without illuminating. Night upset by the shrill bursts, the swells of a very present music by Tiziano Popoli.
From the first scene - a skinny girl who plays nervously in the manner of Michelle-Anne de Mey in "Balatum" - it's a matter for the audience to decipher often sumptuous images that sometimes hold rebus or charade. Here's an inventory; beings who take off their shoes, their clothes, who even try to remove their skin. Atmosphere of travel without hope of arrival on a Schubert lied, walks in a cemetery, plunges into the afterlife... The load in symbols is strong but too airtight. Of course, one can console one with Claudel's phrase on the Japanese Noh: "It is what you do not understand who is the most beautiful", one can simply caress with the eyes the superb paintings that build and cancel themselves in a Saint-Sulpician resent but poetry does not always come to take over the intellect; even the imagination is taken aback. Unlike these previous shows, where he conceived the paintings as a series of actions, Paco Dècina proposes a succession of moments, a juxtaposition of images that can be conveniently described as surreal because we do not perceive the purpose.
A few highlights here and there condense the emotion by their exaggerated theatricality such as the sequence of strings, murderous pendulums that the dancers touch to the millimeter. at these moments, Dècina makes a personal contribution to the solicitation of the memory of bodies dear to the whole young generation of European dance. He arrives at the same observation of impotence and non-communication of a Pina Bausch or a François Verret. The choreographed passages - too rare - are all electroshocks in a relaxed fabric. The boys in particular, a very effective macho trio, sing the space in impressive cataleptic trances with implacable little gestes where Italian expressionism plays. Too bad Paco Dècina did not make more use of this very physical dance in his theatrical composition. What a paradoxical challenge it would have been in a room about forgetting the body...