By Luisa Terzulli
Promoting a show abroad is not always easy: the cultural barriers, and in particular those linguistic, are big hindrances for the export of an immaterial good like art. The Italian Cultural Institute in London, with its programme, aims at doing exactly this: knocking down these barriers and spreading the knowledge of Italian art in the United Kingdom.
On 27th March and 2nd April the performances Re-Wind and The Snow Queen were shown at the Institute in London.
Re-Wind is a particular show of contemporary dance, video, photography and music realised by the group Altrovelab. Three dancers – Elena Antonioli, Fabiola Gallio and Alida Bernardi, the latter also choreographer of the performance – followed the flow of the screened video images, in a contrast between electronic and contemporary music, with mixed pieces that gave the show a sensation of suspension, in a mutable atmosphere of coloured and suffused lights.
The symbology embedded in the dance and in the video too, is a continuous “going back, for the whole work, and also for the musical aspects”. “The target of our work – Roberto Contini, photographer and videomaker of the show said – is in fact going back, for this Re-Wind, to catch what we have missed before, to redo something in a renewed way”.
“The fusion and integration of some forms of art have resulted in an extended show, which starts even before the audience is seated”.
The concept of Re-Wind, that characterises the show, is exaggerated by the presence of multimediality, through the use of different means of communication, like dance, photography, music and video, to convey an emotion in a mix of languages that give birth to an innovative form of artistic expression.
“Re-Wind has therefore become – according to the authors – a way to dig, demolish, rebuild, recreate, to remodel, starting from a rewind”.
“Rewinding, going backwards in time and space, with images and words, allows us – according to Roberto Contini and Alida Bernardi – to enter new languages, to rewrite reality, giving it a new shape, subverting the order of things, so that ahead turns behind, up turns down”.
The show, conceived for five dancers, was adapted for the space given by the Institute, becoming a show for three elements.
Anyway the audience does not lose any capacity of fruition, through the simultaneous vision of different forms of art, as the visual images integrate with the choreography, and the different languages melt together to start a more complex form of expressiveness.
Also in The Snow Queen there is a varied expressiveness of different forms of art. The Snow Queen, staged by theKismet Theatre of Bari, is a show that fuses acting, music, dance and acrobatic in one performance. During the night of 2nd April, the writer and director of the show Teresa Ludovico played an adaptation of the work, taken by the famous fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen narrating about the journey of a girl, Gerda, who searches for her friend Kay, kidnapped by the Snow Queen.
The show, adapted by the Kismet Theatre for the English audience, in association with the Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse, was on tour from 15th February to 7th April.
“This play can melt different genres: circus art, theatre and music, and in time we can attune these languages. For this reason, the performances – Ludovico says – are a great opportunity to continue the work”.
“The first version of The Snow Queen – the director says – was played in Japan, and something has remained of this amazing country in the following productions, played with a new cast in Italy, and now addressed to the English audience”.
“When I write a story it is important, to me, to find immediately the actors; and those selected, sometimes, determinate the writing itself. When looking at an actor, what I try and pick is his rhythm”.
What strikes in the director’s acting is her dynamic expressiveness: “For me – Ludovico says – theatre is prevalently physicalness, corporeity. I write a script that later translate into actions. And sometimes actions are more efficacy than words”.
After Ludovico’s performance a debate followed, where the director and the chairman of Kismet, Augusto Masiello, answered the questions of the audience.
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