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by Elisa Guzzo Vaccarino - Teatro Comunale Bologna

Primo Toccare White - Matteo Stella Dance Arts - Balletto Teatro di Torino

Project for New Visions

 

Primo Toccare is a unique work conceived by Matteo Levaggi and contemporary artists Corpicrudi, 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, now 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).

 

What kind of dance is Matteo Levaggi's dance? It is the dance of a choreographer convinced of the intrinsic value of the art of the signifying body in motion. The art of dance, for him, is therefore accompanied on equal terms with the arts of music and the plastic-visual arts. Arts that coexist on stage, without overpowering each other. Does he have, in this, a filiation? From where did he derive, to make them his own with his personal, and certainly not trivially imitative, touch, these conceptions? The contemporary ballet, of which Levaggi is a leading figure, is indebted to George Balanchine, the Petersburg-New York master of neoclassical ballet, and to Merce Cunningham, the father of postmodern, a friend of the Dadaist Duchamp, without forgetting the “deconstructor” of ballet, the Frankfurt-based American William Forsythe, head of the school of postclassical. Levaggi, like his co-generational Benjamin Millepied, Christopher Wheeldon, Wayne McGregor, carries the legacy of these masters in his DNA. His direct and attuned work with Karole Armitage, who assimilates in her own path precisely the double militancy, Balankian and Cunninghamian, and who adds to this theoretical-aesthetic solidity an astute up-to-date fashion touch, has undoubtedly marked Levaggi's “auteur hand,” which believes in pure dance, which tells only itself in its organic unfolding, in a context of beauty, sometimes austere and sometimes glittery, in total postmodern ease. Among Matteo Levaggi's most successful achievements with BTT must be mentioned Canto bianco (in a Moment of Vertical Horizon), produced by the Venice Biennale Danza in 2006 with Torino Danza, to music by Steve Reich, Ryoji Ikeda, David Lang: a creation made of duets, quartets, groups, solos, in constant dissolution and transformation, now haloed with Apollonian candor now immersed in restless chiaroscuro.

 

Primo Toccare is precisely a very successful example of this 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 Corpicrudi's iconographic layout, are fixed, fascinatingly interweaving mobile and immobile. There are no realistic, “recognizable” gestures, no theatricality and no psychologisms in this “sound and light choreographic endurance match,” Levaggi further clarifies. It is the muscles in their disciplined dancing hypertrophy, in their obsessive self-control, that generate a thrilling visual impact.

 

Corpicrudi created three installations for the project, each dominated by a different color, playing with the visual perception of bodies, objects, sound and movement. White Lux is immersed in a white limbo, Black Lux breathes an intimate and ritual atmosphere, while Red Lux is a surreal dream in ancient visions.
Their set-museums are based on the conception of the body and certain symbols (the skull and the cut flowers from the seventeenth-century Vanitas, representing respectively the end of life and the end of beauty in the White episode, an altar with two immobile models as in a communion in the Black episode, a gallery of statues drawn from the Greco-Roman tradition in Red) as elements that refer to our historical past.

 

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. Levaggi knows when to direct his gaze to a single performer devouring the entire space or focus it on a small portion of the scene or when to draw lateral lines placing the entire group on the edges of the stage; he knows when to insist on a set of movements, bordering on exasperation, and when to change course by introducing new centers of attention, articulating the dance in unison or in separate actions, starting with fluid bari- centers, capable of twisting and stretching throwing out legs and arms extended to the extreme, with open, large, dramatic hands. A postclassical poetics in the full sense of the term, that is, combining the strength of neoclassical legs with the flexibility of postmodern torsos and masterfully using the multidirectionality of individuals and the group.

 

Can perfection, in so much vigor, and powerful energy, between stop and go, between aerial portés and ground work, move? Can the impeccable clarity of a rabid technique in the pursuit of perfect form seduce? Does the ambiguity and/or anti-psychological duplicity of the still and transient images require complex, cerebral decoding, or is it to be enjoyed in and of itself, letting go of the urges of instinct? Can the viewer manage to look for personal equivalents, in his memory, in his psyche, in his body, of what Primo Toccare secretly conveys?

Beauty - it must be remembered - lies in the excited eyes of the beholder no less than, here and now, in the bewitching Primo Toccare of the choreographer and his dancers.