After previewing at Santarcangelo, Chiara Bersani’s Sottobosco (‘undergrowth’) premiered at Centrale Fies, an old hydroelectric station in Dro, Italy, within the programme Feminist Futures. It’s not just a vision for the future though, it’s a cosmogony of science and poetry, the ending and the beginning of a cosmos, where beauty is redefined, peaceful and takes a journey to find.
Bersani and her brilliant musician Lemmo start to one side of a stage covered by a sea of marshmallows – a carpet of forest flowers, perhaps, or a sensation, a childhood memory. Slowly, Bersani starts crossing this floor, rolling softly, inevitably touching it with her whole body. Our attention is immediately captured, whether by the curiosity towards this soft unstoppable creature, or by the activation of our senses by every random yet careful marshmallow encounter.
We catch a glimpse of someone’s feet approaching from the other side, behind the black backcloth. It’s the second main inhabitant of this space, dancer Elena Sgarbossa, dressed in the same puritan black dress as Bersani. They are orthogonal projections of each other, Sgarbossa moving up and down, sometimes abruptly, in contrast to Bersani’s almost meditative state. Both are hit by the tension and thunder of Lemmo’s live score.
This contrast lasts until Sgarbossa sits to face Bersani, engaging in silent conversation, first with their almost too intense gaze, then by moving the marshmallows, and finally communicating through hand movements (their own sign language) – signs which become signals to other inhabitants in this undergrowth: hiding among the audience are participants of an earlier workshop that Bersani had opened to people with disabilities, who one by one enter the space until they reach their assigned spot, still signalling to others and to each other.
The ending is as soft as the beginning, the music opening up to frame a tableau of dancers. We leave with the warm hope that Olympus might be inhabited by such gentle – unconventionally perfect – gods.
