Giovanna d’Arco

Matteo Stella Dance Arts - Production #2

RED "Solo" from Primo Toccare White Black Red 

Elisa Guzzo Vaccarino | Primo Toccare

Project for New Visions (excerpt)

Primo Toccare is a unique work conceived by Matteo Levaggi and contemporary artists Corpicrudi (Samantha Stella and Sergio Frazzingaro), produced by Balletto Teatro di Torino, directed by Loredana Furno (in co-production with Biennale de la Danse de Lyon, Regione Piemonte, Torino Danza and Bolzano Danza). Divided into three episodes, brought together in a single evening - White, Black, Red - Primo Toccare is a hypnotic creation that reveals above all images, visions marked by decisive colors that describe a mysterious and perhaps new way of staging dance becoming here an event not far from the pure experience of life. Levaggi calls this work a dichotomous reflection on eternity and transience through pivotal points of existence, such as sex, life, vanity, and death. Aesthetic and sensory journey from iconographic reference to our historical past in the installations created by Corpicrudi (the Vanitas of seventeenth-century paintings in White, a Christian altar in Black, the Greco-Roman sculptural tradition in Red).

Primo Toccare is a very successful example of purist and radical approach to art dance. A kind of project for new visions that combines in its choreo-author's intent the idea of beginning (first) and the idea of end (touching) alluding to the contact sought and achieved with an organic surface, that is, connecting the terms of head and tail, first and last, seen as initial and final elements of the work of art.

Dance, light and sound vibrate, while the installations, in the iconographic layout created by Corpicrudi (Samantha Stella and Sergio Frazzingaro), are fixed, fascinatingly interweaving mobile and immobile. Primo Toccare was born in stages, debuting in different venues for each section, but ended up taking shape as a single ballet in three acts, conceived in chapters, born in three moments and for three places: White at the Biennale de la Danse de Lyon in 2008, Black at the Joyce Theater in New York in 2009 and Red at BolzanoDanza in 2010. The breath of life in the hypnotic, limbic, glacial White, with its models crystallized under glass in Alessandro De Benedetti's clothes, over a sound that is breath and sensual moaning, born or rather distorted from silence to an organ resonance (music by Autechre, Lilith, Mika Vainio), finds and manifests its meaning in the vitrine of virginal flowers displayed with with a silvery skull in proscenium, a still life, a figurative vanitas (the still lives of skulls, musical instruments and flowers to which ancient 17th-century Flemish painting accustomed us), a sic transit gloria mundi live, a critique of human folly and pride in what is not exactly a garden of delights; summarizing, an installation that resonates the eternal and the transitory, that is, the themes of art: life, death, eroticism. Black, ritually intimate, in voluptuous tones, to the music of Arvo Pärt, harkens back to pagan images of Christian altars, with the sacred altar inhabited by models in black “boxed” in Plexiglas, rather than by Madonnas and Saints, while the surreal and dreamlike a solo Red, in a place of scarlet light, harks back to Greco-Roman sculpture of our past, exhibiting statues that cite antiquity in their golden and symbolic proportion. The dancer (sometimes Levaggi himself), in search of statuesque perfection, seems to have no purpose other than to show herself, weaving an almost autoerotic praise of the body, an inner dialogue with her profane God, in which to lose herself in a dance where sounds (by David Tudor) appear generated by the movement itself.

MATTEO LEVAGGI - Production

Open Skin concept: Matteo Levaggi NEW WORK

Open Skin draws inspiration from a work by Twyla Tharp that I had originally intended to acquire for BTT, in collaboration with the artistic direction at the time. Initially conceived for three women dressed in black leotards and boots, this work serves here as a point of departure for a personal reinterpretation.
The project is grounded in my deep affinity with Tharp’s choreographic research — particularly her seminal work In the Upper Room — which has had a significant impact on both my academic training and artistic development.
Within this framework, Open Skin unfolds as an open and non-prescriptive semantic structure, resisting any fixed narrative. The video is articulated into three sections—sound, encounter, and romanticism—through which shifting intentions and a distinct dramaturgical intelligence emerge. These elements guide the transformation of movement and the evolving relationships between the bodies.

Performers
Valeria Garcia Ortega
Eki Goñi Martinez de Lagran
Aimar Inchausti Garbuglia

Costume Design (live performance) Lorenzo Seghezzi

Artistic Residency
Escuela Profesional de Danza de Castilla y León – Ana Laguna, Burgos

https://fuescyl.com/epdcyl/actualidad-danza/taller-coreografico-burgos