SUDVIRUS
il piacere di sentirsi terroni

(from the project : Sudvirus or ‘about belonging’)

creation for 7 dancers, 1 actor e 2 musicians
première: 3 agosto 2013 Teatro Rossini of Civitanova Marche for Civitanova Danza/Amat

and idea by Nello Calabrò and Roberto Zappalà

choreography and direction
Roberto Zappalà

with the participation of

Vincenzo Pirrotta (voice)

and
Alfio Antico (drums) and Puccio Castrogiovanni (jew’s harps)

dancers
Gaetano Badalamenti, Maud de la Purification, Alain El Sakhawi,
Liisa Pietikainen, Roberto Provenzano, Fernando Roldan Ferrer,
Ilenia Romano

a production by compagnia zappalà danza – Scenario Pubblico international choreographic centre Sicily
in collaboration with Civitanova Danza/Amat, Fondazione Nazionale della Danza (Reggio Emilia) and GöteborgsOperans Danskompani (Sweden)

with the support of Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali and Regione Siciliana Ass.to al Turismo, Sport e Spettacolo

The word “virus”, from the Latin v?rus, means “toxin” or “poison”. In biology (and in information technology), viruses are entirely negative, characterised by “parasitic behavior which often continues until the death of the host cell”.

Parasitic behaviour and lack of proper structures are also two considerations which are often used, tritely, to define certain aspects of the south of Italy, and often the south of other countries too.

The company’s show aims to present the opposite: a biologically positive version of a new virus created using choreographic language which produces shapes, skills, and moral and aesthetic values. The “south-virus” of dance generates toxins which are healthy rather than poisonous.

In the version for the Goteborg Opera, the underlying concept of the show was to sneakily introduce the south-virus into a world far removed, at least in Europe, from the southern and Mediterranean world of Sicily. In the current, extended version, the focus shifts and becomes, if anything, even more universal. The south-virus no longer seeks to penetrate an apparently healthy body in order to devastate it from within, but simply wants to show what it is. With a conceptual flip, it seeks to present itself as positive, ready to show and represent a world, or a south, very different from the usual definition.

This is how the “south-virus” seeks to present itself, with the meaning of language as a virus, as Burroughs says and Laurie Anderson sings (“Language is a virus”).

This is a language made of dance, and the voice of Vincenzo Pirrotta together with the music of Alfio Antico and Puccio Castrogiovanni will insinuate like a virus, in the melodies of Bach, Vivaldi and Paganini. Dance, music, sounds, words, cries.

Language made up of the south, its heat, its sweat. Language made of a world which runs on incandescence, which at the same time gives out an inextinguishable and necessary human warmth which nevertheless risks exploding and burning.

photos Gian Maria Musarra