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Sciame
'Enzo Cosimi
Enzo Cosimi
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'Fabrizio Plessi
Fabrizio Plessi
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'Luca Spagnoletti
Luca Spagnoletti
Choreography, director: Enzo Cosimi
Scenography and visual design: Fabrizio Plessi
Original music: Luca Spagnoletti
Light design: Stefano Pirandello
Costumes design: Enzo Cosimi
Audio/video technics: Riccardo Silvi
Organization: Francesco Cantalupo/Teorema
Administration: Maurizio Silvio
With: Paola Autre, Rachele Caputo, Rita Cioffi, Enzo Cosimi, Karin Elmore, Franco Senica
The stage design and stage objects were realized by Carlo Ansaloni, Giovanni Grandi and Bruno Marchesin of the Centro Videoarte Palazzo dei Diamanti Ferrara, directed by Lola Bonora.
SCIAME is produced by OCCHESC, Incontri Internazionali di Rovereto, Associazione Sarda Musica e Danza, Cagliari, Cooperativa Teatro dell'Elfo, Milan, Centro Spettacoli e Servizi, Udine.SCIAME Sciame (swarm) was born out of the encounter of the choreographer Enzo Cosimi (in many ways the founder of Italian New Dance) and the visual artist Fabrizio Plessi (one of the world's outstanding masters of video installations and technological sculptures).
This encounter – in every sense of the word – of two daring and superior spirits is based on an essential synthesis: for it is an encounter moving along a trail, along an itinerary paved with the (aesthetical as well as ideological) presuppositions of both the artists.
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 program of Sciame's first performance at Rovereto Festival in 1987, Enzo Cosimi put it somewhat like this: 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 artifacts. 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 rugid 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 ambiguous 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.
Leonetta BentivoglioLUCA SPAGNOLETTI
SCIAME SCIAME is a composition starting basically from a conception of unnaturality: a tale told in an indirect manner, avoiding to produce any imitation of reality, of everyday matters, but creating a dramatic dimension of exclusively abstract conception instead.
The sound material, in fact, starts from this basic supposition in order to re-invent and transform the scenic "story" into strongly communicative states-of-mind based upon an internal and highly psychological dimension.
By using various techniques of electronic synthesis, I tried to compose a music beyond time, in which dream and reality are overlaid upon each other, without any solution of continuity in order to get to a state of altered sensorial perception similar to obsession or trance.
I used – always in tight collaboration with Enzo Cosimi and Fabrizio Plessi – heterogenous material for the realization of this work, sound material that might render this dimension beyond time: processed instrumental sounds, electronic sounds, ethnical sounds, and all of that mixed into a continuum strictly connected to the choreography and scenography.
Sciame has been realized and mixed by the composer using sampling techniques, FM synthesis, and additive synthesis.
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