Creation by Roberto Zappalà for ArtEZ Dansacademie.

 

Music (live) Eckhart Kopetzki – Moondance

dancers: ArtEZ Dansacademie

 

 

“Odisseo” is the next project by compagnia zappalà danza, but before working on it the choreographer Roberto Zappalà will stage 2 creations “pre-texts”, which will be moments of study and preparation for “Odisseo”:

“pre-testo 1. naufragio” [pre-text 1. shipwreck] , has been already proposed in the frame of the uva grapes Catania contemporary dance festival in august 2010, while “pre-testo 2. accoglienza” [pre-text 2. welcoming] will be elaborated and conceived for the dancers of ArtEZ Dansacademie, through a laboratorial work held by the choreographer at ArtEZ together with some of his dancers.

In “pre-testo 1” the choreographer dealt with the idea of the shipwreck in and with concepts like journey, hunger/thirst, death/salvation, lack of space, and with references to Ulysses as a shipwrecked and only survivor in the Alcinoo’s island. Treating last but not least the today chronicles , with the continuous migrants’ crossings in the Mediterranean Sea and the consequent and tragic shipwrecks.

 

In the creation for ArtEZ Dansacademie, “pre-testo 2: accoglienza” [pre-text 2: welcoming] Roberto Zappalà focuses on hospitality and welcome.

 

"The welcome, as the wreck, reminds us of some “useful” concepts like: racism, indifference, exploitation, meeting, threat, separation, hospitality, other, foreigner, etc. as well as of Ulysses who personally experiences many welcome situations during his travel. A very interesting meditation on hospitality in Ancient Greece and in our modern society is reported by Ryszard Kapuscinski in “The other” where he states that in that civilization Gods could take a human shape and behave like men. At the time they could not tell with certainty if a wayfarer was a man or a god disguised as a man. This uncertainty, this charming ambiguity is one of the sources of the culture of hospitality which imposes to always welcome a newcomer clemently.

 

The hug is the action which better expresses the welcome. Almost always the hug welcomes and makes people take part in a common feeling. However there are many and opposite reasons for it: joy, passion, happiness, pain. In any case embrace and welcome mean sharing. Welcome is false if we do not share something with the ones we receive: in the same way an embrace is false if it does not share any feeling.

The hug is a sign with different inflections: joy, pain, passion, happiness, tiredness. We also embrace to support each other, to provide physical help. If in Japan there is a grammar of the bow, in our civilization we could set up a grammar of the embrace. The embrace is linked to the people we love, to the members of our family; we hug them because we have welcomed them in our heart. We do not embrace in an indiscriminate way.

If we consider the peculiar case of the Mafia family, embracing is not really an innocent and pure action. Hugging is also a sign of respect, of fear and submission, a gesture establishing hierarchies. An action which in an upside-down world can be the prelude to the opposite feeling: the refusal, and even the murder of the embraced person."

[Nello Calabrò]