Ballet de l’Opéra de Lyon in Mycelium by Christos Papadopoulos. © Agathe Poupeney

review

Highlights from Roma Europa Festival 2024

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Ballet de l’Opéra de Lyon in Mycelium by Christos Papadopoulos. © Agathe Poupeney
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Deserts, flesh, flowers and budding new artists at Rome’s expansive festival

In Rome, it is possible to attend cultural events all year round but some periods undoubtedly offer more options than others. From the beginning of September to the middle of November, the Roma Europa Festival (REF) dominates the cultural agenda of the city with a multidisciplinary programme that spans music, dance, theatre and new technologies. Although the festival may lack the community feeling among spectators and artists that usually emerges during short summer festivals, its richness in artistic proposals and length across several weeks reward both visitors and residents.

At REF, dance occupies its own space as a distinct genre with subprogrammes such as Dancing Days (dedicated to emerging European choreographers) and Anni Luce (dedicated to emerging artists from Italy) as well as sections on international and Italian dance and theatre, offering multiple points of entrance into the main programme. In its 39th edition, REF was marked by several special events such as Mycelium by Christos Papadopoulos for the Ballet de l’Opéra de Lyon, which also presented Merce Cunningham’s Biped, during the opening week at Rome Opera House. In Mycelium, Papadopoulos orchestrates a mesmerising and floating corps de ballet that moves with modest sensuality. He moulds a magnetic chorus, a sort of a Lernaean Hydra that captivates even the most resistant spectator. In Biped, flesh bodies are superimposed with immaterial bipeds projected on the screen; verticality is combined with sharpness and crispness, making Cunningham’s 1999 work still look undoubtedly fresh.

Echoing postmodernity, REF’s section on Italian dance and theatre was inaugurated by Francesca Pennini, founder of CollettivO CineticO, with two works: O+< Scritture viziose sull’inarrestabilità del tempo (O+< Vicious writings on the unstoppability of time), a dialogue between Pennini and visual artist Andrea Amaducci that captures the trace of movement, and <age>, a work with nine teenagers, exhibited as ‘samples’ of today’s youth.


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O+< Scritture viziose sull’inarrestabilità del tempo with Francesca Pennini. © Delpapa
O+< Scritture viziose sull’inarrestabilità del tempo with Francesca Pennini. © Delpapa

Expressions of rigour in the Italian scene

<age> was first created in 2012 and for this latest edition, it was remade with a new cast of teenagers. A sequence of labels about self-identity, self-perception, personal beliefs, preferences and sexual orientations, together with corresponding behaviours, are projected on the screen, controlled randomly by an adult ‘gamekeeper’ (Angelo Pedroni). The randomness is the distant echo of the context in which the piece was created, in homage to John Cage on the centenary of his birth. The nine teenagers-as-samples are tasked with responding to these prompts by positioning their bodies for a series of spatially expressed confessions. They stand up from their benches, stagger and stare at us courageously and honestly, or form human constructions such as letters and shapes. The melancholic and melodic tone of Bach’s looped Aria Sulla Quarta Corda contrasts with the laboratory-like mood of the piece, where the distances between the human samples are clear and the timings of their actions well measured – despite a few instances of playful disobedience. The sampled expressions seem to have been taken from an elaborate scientific questionnaire, yet the creative use of language by Pennini and her team opens to irony, imagination, empathy and laughter. <age> is a fresh remake and resurrection that aims to understand the present through the most sensitive thermometers of our times. The precision and rigour of the choreographic structure, intertwined with randomness, is fused with the poetics of movement and language. But unsettledness emerges when considering how obedient today’s teenagers can be, given that adolescence is the age of resistance, revolution and dispute.

The section on Italian dance and theatre featured Claudia Castellucci with her Mòra company in Sahara, an anti-narrative work that reflects a mental and emotional desert not dissimilar from the process of art-making: a continuous exploration, a procreation from nothingness, giving meaning to the incomprehensible or the unspeakable. Focusing on the body as the primary material to construct meaning, Castellucci creates a sealed and enigmatic world. The light design (by Andrea Sanson) transforms the stage into a grainy and delicately blurry environment where portions of actions are fluidly intertwined in an atemporal and unidentified place inhabited by mysterious and silent characters dressed in earthy tones. Within the alienating soundscape by Stefano Bartolini, vertical relations between the six performers create simple situations of hierarchies: a pair with arms on each other’s shoulders hops and crosses legs; a frontal rope stretching from the one side of the stage to the other becomes a boundary containing this ‘theatre of disbelief’; a woman chases drops of water in the air while another moves her head with long wet hair. Images in motion construct a choreographic mosaic – precise yet puzzling, dreamy but uncanny, earthy and atmospheric – to decipher or to plunge into. But the most impressive aspect of Sahara is perhaps the evocative and poetic discipline of a dance troupe that is expressively cohesive thanks to a distilled and rigorous choreographic practice.


Garage Ensemble in How in Salts Desert is it possible to blossom, by Robyn Orlin. © Valerian Galy
Garage Ensemble in How in Salts Desert is it possible to blossom, by Robyn Orlin. © Valerian Galy

Flowers: From optimism to lost romanticism

Instead of the desert as a metaphor for mental drought, the point of departure for South African choreographer Robyn Orlin is a real desert in the province of Northern Cape in South Africa. In How in Salts Desert is it Possible to Blossom, Garage Dance Ensemble and Orlin are inspired by the blossoming of flowers in the desert after the winter rains, a unique natural phenomenon of their region, to speak about surviving poverty, colonisation and slavery, and ultimately about life and rebirth. In Orlin’s work, tradition converses with modernity and the body with technology through a series of live-feed projections using different scale devices that offer multiple points of view: a bird’s-eye view from a top camera matched with looking up towards the sky; subjective perspectives, close-ups through cellphones. The screen offers a complementary and expanded view of the various events on stage with the multi-layered, voluminous and colourful clothes (purple, green, yellow and more) turning into equally colourful forms in the shape of flowers that swirl and are superimposed upon images of the desert and the cracking earth. The cords of slavery and captivity form pre-graphic shapes, and contemporary clothes suggest the appropriation of white modernity. South African melodies, tender and celebratory, fuse with the fleshiness of the body and its iconography, and with visual effects of subtracting and regaining colour, defining and abstracting forms. Among all this, laughing is the consistent strategy to find the strength to face discomfort and disaster in a phenomenon that, as in life, alternates between drought and blossoming, death and regeneration.


Maldonne by Leila Ka. © Nora Houguenade
Maldonne by Leila Ka. © Nora Houguenade

Flowers also appertain to Leïla Ka’s first ensemble work, Maldonne. In long floral patterned dresses, five female dancers, lined up next to each other, enliven an iconographic gestural vocabulary. Their syncopated gestures gradually get linked into a choreography animated by the rhythmic sound of breath; a lip-sync turns into a cacophony. They form the edges of their dresses into long phalluses and whip their bodies with the dresses to punish themselves. Empty floral dresses hooked to flying strings dance to the end of love (to Leonard Cohen’s song). A choreography of steps is followed by a caricature scene recalling Mediterranean women collecting their laundry, gossiping and speaking about corporeal transitions (going through pregnancy with pillows under their dresses). Each section is signalled by a change of dress, in this rather fragmented choreographic composition. In Maldonne (mal-donne: women behaving badly), the imprint of Pina Bausch’s aesthetics prevails, yet subtle irony and the musicality of breathing treat movement that could have been considered cliched with elegance, creativity and artistry. The work proposes a choreography of lost romanticism – and perhaps this is why it receives a standing ovation.


Zona Franca by Alice Ripoll. © Renato Mangolin
Zona Franca by Alice Ripoll. © Renato Mangolin

Shades of carnality

Among the 24 performances categorised as dance in REF 2024 stands out Zona Franca by Alice Ripoll (also invited to present her 2017 work aCORdo). Zona Franca is a journey of celebration under ecstatic Afro-Brazilian rhythms, interlaced with contradictions and fluctuations of friendship, love, lust and desire. In a micro-cosmos of society where the body desperately seeks liberation and elevation, solitude and community are two sides of the same coin. Carnality dominates Ripoll’s vibrant and festive approach, which nevertheless fails to break the ‘fourth wall’ of the theatrical experience.

In a different approach to carnality, Arno Schuitemaker’s 30 appearances out of darkness sculpts light and shadow to form silhouettes and to shape flesh. Syrupy bodies in circular motion convey sensuality, the light that traces the edges of their sweating skins making them look as if made of silver. Schuitemaker forges a pleasing visual effect, gradually building in intensity, yet the work remains enclosed in a rather self-indulgent mood.

As every year, REF hosted the culminating event of DNAppunti Coreografici (DNA), a project supported by a network of Italian institutions, addressed to emerging choreographers under 35 years old. On an annual basis, DNA selects works in progress by an artist or a collective to offer mentoring along with support for production and distribution. During REF 2024, last year’s award-winner Giorgia Lolli presented the evolution of Eat Me, a courageous feminist duet that questions the gaze on the female body, which could do with more dramaturgical support to bridge the choreographic intention with the spectator’s reception. This year’s DNA award went to Matteo Sedda, a dancer for Igor x Moreno, for a very promising and already solid duet with Marco Labellarte that will premiere at REF 2025. With DNA, REF embraces emerging artists and their fragile artistic processes into an already plural programme that spans diverse ideas, aesthetics, and current tendencies in performing arts. ●


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