There is a subtle difference between the We want it all by Nanni Balestrini and the We want it all of the dance show with which Emio Greco, Pietr Scholten and the company Ick Dans Amsterdam opened, on 8 and 9 September, the last edition of the Roma Europa Festival.
Not by chance We want it all by Balestrini, in the recent English edition of Verso Books, has been translated We want everythingwhile We want it allexplains the same Greco, is inspired by the refrain that Freddie Mercury sings in I want it all, one of Queen’s latest hits released in 1989. If We want it all by Balestrini in 1969 is a collective claim of what we want to take (or take back) from capitalist society, theI want it all from 1989’s Freddie Mercury, today, it sounds like the scream of a lonely, life-hungry man who wants to devour everything around him in an extreme survival drive.
Mercury was in fact already ill when he recorded it and was never able to perform the piece live with Queen. In the title of their new show, Greco and Scholten decline the vitalism of Freddie Mercury in the first person plural and translate it into a 70-minute tour de force in which the bodies of the dancers of the Ick Dans Amsterdam company and the young people of the company junior Ick Next retrace 27 years of the duo’s creations.
We want it all is an anthological show that puts in line the endings of twelve of the sixty shows that the company has created from 1995 to today. Suggesting the fascinating idea that each ending can be the beginning of something new entrusted to the collective intelligence of a company of dancers of different ages.
The real connective tissue of the show was the energy and physical presence of the dancers
The most interesting aspect of the operation, in addition to the virtuosity and exceptional energy that are unleashed on stage, is to put the emphasis on the transmission. That is to say about that moment, within a dance company, of the passing of the baton from the dancers who have created a piece to the younger performers who must learn the choreography, movements, times and intentions of the piece in order to carry it into the future.
The attempt of Greco and Scholten, who have meditated on this time capsule show in the months of the pandemic, is to revive their works of the past by looking for a thread that can unite them. A thread of Ariadne that from the past can lead them into the future.
The mission only partially succeeds: despite the intentions we see that We want it all it’s a patchwork composed of many different parts. Too often the seams can be glimpsed: the passages from one painting to another are announced by thunder or explosions that follow one another in a somewhat mechanical way. To keep things together some scenic elements (a large white flag waving) and above all the magnetic presence of Emio Greco who, when not dancing, seems to supervise the performance of a rite like a high priest.
Even the extreme musical variety, ranging from Taylor Dayne’s late eighties dance to Marilyn Manson’s industrial rock, through Bach, Louis Prima’s swing and the soundtrack of Eraserhead by David Lynch, risks being a double-edged sword.
If, on the one hand, the presence of such recognizable pop pieces creates an immediate involvement of the public, almost like a music festival, on the other hand it risks tying the various moments of the show to an aesthetic that is too limited in time.
Tell it to my heart by Taylor Dayne, for example, opens the show in an absolutely surprising way: it is a classic hi-energy that from the American gay clubs of the eighties has ended up becoming a pop success all over the world. It is a song that, with its hyperkinetic rhythm and the agitated voice of a soul diva, cannot fail to recall the other great pandemic we have experienced: that of HIV. And the use of a lot of nineties rock and a lot of post-grunge, links the various parts of the show to an aesthetic and a feeling that is too clearly linked to that era.
Even some costumes, a little Burning man and a little’ vaudeville post apocalyptic, irremediably take us back to the nineties. If the intention was to carry the company’s work into the future, perhaps the aesthetic references to the past are too evident, at least for those who were there and for those who lived that past.
The real connective tissue of the show, in the end, was the energy and physical presence of the dancers. Bodies very different from each other, unleashed in a rapid succession of paintings which, being all endings, are all the apex of something whose development we do not experience but only the climax. The dialogue between veterans and young people is the true richness of a show that could not have opened the 37th edition of the Roma Europa Festival in a more electrifying way, which will continue until 20 November.