With “Cultus” which in its Italian tour made a stop at the Teatro Astra in Turin and opened Paolo Mohovic’s Dance Stage season, Roberto Zappalà from Catania reconfirms himself as a master in articulating dancers on stage, starting from a precise narrative starting point but then succeed in transfiguring into dance the feelings, the passions, the joys that pass through the compact dance troupe of eight dancers, five girls and three boys.
David Lang’s music is taken from his award-winning composition “La piccolo Fiammiferaia”. The text that serves as the background to the dancers’ evolutions is a long monologue on virginity taken from “All’s Well That Ends Well”, which is followed by Shakespearean sonnets read by today’s top Kinglese actors.
It is clear that if you were not born across the Channel, the best of the text will escape you, but it will help create a complex sound background which, in addition to Lang, is also joined by the rhythm of a mazurka with a curious combination of high and low music. But all this is just a carpet of sound
What matters however is the evolution of the eight dancers who first wear jeans and shirts and petal caps (those beach caps for the ladies of the past) and then increasingly expose themselves by wearing simple tank tops and blonde wigs for everyone .
Everything is new here, yet everything brings us back to the style of Zappalà who deploys his usual gestural imagination by articulating the group now to occupy the entire scene, now to compact into a unison from which in turn a single individual stands out, but only for a short while. kicking, soon convinced to regroup. Gestural leitmotifs emerge, emotions physically resolved in forms of rebellion of individuals against the group.
As always, the gesture, the movement, underlies a strong carnality, a use of bodies that are never simple instruments, but beings of flesh and blood who conquer us, who suffer, have explosions of joy, sink into blindness.
In this sense the song is a further piece of that project conceived by Zappalà and entitled “Transiti Humanitatis” which has characterized his artistic journey for a long time.
After “Christ”, a work that saw the strong presence of the word, in this work Zappalà returns to pure dance and as a master he is able to articulate it.
The dramaturgy is by Nello Calabrò, who has always been a collaborator and dramaturg of Zappalà. On stage there are Giulia Berretta, Corinne Cilia, Filippo Domini, Laura Finocchiaro, Anna Forzutti, Silvia Rossi, Damiano Scavo, Erik Zarcone.
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