(TRILOGIA DELL’ESTASI)

a project by Roberto Zappalà

worldpremière 30/31 May 2024 Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino (Florence)

direction and choreography Roberto Zappalà

music Claude Debussy/’L’après-midi d’un faune’ – Maurice Ravel/ ‘Boléro‘ – Igor Stravinskij/ ‘Le Sacre du Printemps’  – other music VV.AA.

dance and collaboration Samuele Arisci, Faile Sol Bakker, Giulia Berretta, Andrea Rachele Bruno, Corinne Cilia, Filippo Domini, Laura Finocchiaro, Anna Forzutti, William Mazzei, Silvia Rossi, Damiano Scavo, Thomas Sutton, Alessandra Verona, Erik Zarcone

dramaturgy Nello Calabrò

set and light design Roberto Zappalà | costumes Veronica Cornacchini and Roberto Zappalà

costume realization Majoca | goatmask Giada Russo Art Atelier

choreographer assistant Fernando Roldan Ferrer | management Vittorio Stasi | tour management Federica Cincotti | technical direction Sammy Torrisi 

a co-production by Scenario Pubblico|Compagnia Zappalà Danza Centro di Rilevante Interesse Nazionale, Fondazione Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino (Florence), Centre Chorégraphique National de Rillieux-la-Pape (Lyon), Fondazione I Teatri (Reggio Emilia), MilanOltre Festival (Milan), Teatro Massimo Bellini (Catania),  in collaboration with Fondazione Teatri di Piacenza and Fondazione Ravenna Manifestazioni 

with the support of  MiC Ministero della Cultura and Regione Siciliana Assessorato del Turismo, dello Sport e dello Spettacolo

The project will see Roberto Zappalà tackle three major classical compositions, which for him are also somewhat “sacred,” as they have marked the choreographic (and also musical) journey throughout the past century. The respect he has always had for these works has made him reflect on them for more than 10 years. Today, the time is ripe to bring them to the stage.

The three creations that will have, as a common denominator, Zappalà’s clear and wild language, are “L’Après-midi d’un faune,” “Boléro,” and “Le Sacre du Printemps,” and only in 2024 will all three creations be presented in the same evening.

The challenge and the bet of this trilogy, in retrospect, is to find a new imagery that, without categorically denying the past, does not seek to modernize it but, with the acquired maturity, aims to personalize a world that already possesses immense evocative power.

In addition to the choreographer’s specific language, the work on space becomes essential, if not fundamental, by creating a “stage device” that, each time, performance by performance, limits, amplifies, and modifies the dance created by the choreographer.

As an example, the first piece of the trilogy, already presented in a studio form, in the wonderful piano version played by Leonardo Zunica, Debussy’s “The Afternoon of a Faun,” will be danced in a confined space, whether real or symbolic, and this will have implications for the limitation of the stage and choreographic space.

As always for Zappalà, the emphasis is on human relationships, on the interactions between men and women: denied, exalted, violated in a choreographic “reflection” on the deviations of contemporary society.

The first conceptual motif of the creation takes inspiration from a tragic news event that occurred during a party in a villa in the Roman countryside in early 2021, onto which an evocation of the iconic party sequence in Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut” is overlaid. Both the real-life incident and the cinematic scenes are freely transfigured by Zappalà’s visual and choreographic imagination.

A single stage set will host the creation, a creation that simultaneously encapsulates exclusion, courtship, and eroticism in “L’après-midi d’un faune”; inclusion, vice, and lust in “Boléro”; and finally, persecution and sacrifice in “Le Sacre su Printemps”

To paraphrase the title of an old Lelouch film that concludes with the filming of Ravel/Béjart’s “Bolero,” it’s always about dancing with and for “one and the other”..