Now, what does this community consist in? Where does one find the alikeness, the familiarity of two energies so different and diverse? In an interview for the programme of Sciame's first performance at Rovereto Festival in 1987, Enzo Cosimi put it somewhat like that: Cosimi, as far as his choreography is concerned, talks of an "abstract tale". He explains in detail his search for a strongly dramatic dimension, always "based upon an exclusively abstract notion of dance". There is no "story" in the classical sense of the term, there is no really narrative contents. But the young choreographer takes the abstract codices of dance, manipulates and rediscovers them to free them from any cold formalism in order to communicate strong states of mind, violent emotions: brusque "internal landscapes" handed back to their radical brutality and thus free of any aestheticism, fallen from grace, free of serendipity, far from any artefacts. Enzo Cosimi, in short, uses dancing techniques in a "hot" sense: wild, passionate, savage.
With his video installations, Fabrizio Plessi builds up a visual world concentrating on a cardinal point, the heart of a thought, a constant: The conception of "Hot Technology". And it is from this point of view that Plessi - although with other means and objectives - seems to move along the same expressive line as Cosimi. Plessi "uses" technology in the same way as Cosimi "uses" technique. Plessi manipulates that technology, explores it, violates it to redefine it and then makes it explode. Through a very rigid and rigorous artistic discussion (of means, of instruments) in a basically minimalistic way, Plessi powerfully communicates states-of-mind with his video installations, passionately involving: With all their violence he describes extreme emotional dimensions. And he sublimates them, makes them become poetry.
For SCIAME, Plessi has designed scenes of parallelepipeds from metal, aligned or out of the way of the dancers. In the center, a larger structure contains a quadratic construction, a framework of TV-monitors that reveal themselves when - shortly before the end of the piece - the great metal screen covering them is solemnly lowered like a drawbridge. And only then these TV-screens are found to be populated either by live images (a hidden camera spots the movements of a naked dancer: Enzo Cosimi himself or by prerecorded material (technological images that are in fact "hot" and vital; milk and water, lots of water: an ever reappearing topic in Plessi's installations). Objects and things underline the actions of SCIAME: ladders, shovels, buckets, iron collars, grids. The coarse elements of a medieval environmental alchemy, primitivistic, a cosmos intersected by a ruvid element, an acid tone, by a perennial and dark obsession. Like a swarm of bees in an imprisoning hive, sexless and monk-like beings in "rural" clothing, the dancers dance their internal tension, a possessedness imprisoning them in the bonds of wry stories, dancing the intolerable hardships of being, a network of unsolvable contrasts. Any joy of corporeality is taken from them, any enjoyment of motion: A diffuse sense of punishment, of guilt furiously pulses in SCIAME, a stridant cry of suppressed physicality like the pulsations of tremendous fear without love.
What we perceive is an ambigouous universe, difficult, sometimes even
irritating in its ingenious absence of "beauty", in its cancelling every
morbid, reassuring spectacularity. But this kind of torturing ambivalence is
annoying as much as seducing by its cruel set of pointed dances, its invasion
of emotional discharges in dynamics and gestures, its always noble and
impressive scenography. Of a barbaric splendour, of royal essentiality.
Leolietta Bentivoglio
