Virgilio Sieni’s “Sulla leggerezza”: A Beautiful Work, But Where Is Calvino?

 

Photo by V. Sieni.

Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium was published in 1988, after he died. In 1984 he was invited to give the Norton Lectures at Harvard University and this book is the result of those lectures. It is divided into six chapters, each devoted to one literary “value” as Ether Calvino calls them in the preface to the Italian version of the book. The first is called “leggerezza”, lightness and in 2025 choreographer Virgilio Sieni has created a piece dedicated to this chapter.

The dance premiered in Civitanova Marche on 18 July as part of the Civitanova Danza festival. Sieni curated the choreography as well as the space and lights. The dancers in this work, Jari Boldrini, Maurizio Giunti, Chiara Montalbani, Andrea Palumbo, Valentina Squarzoni, Luca Tomaselli and Andrea Zinnato also contributed to the creation of the choreography. The costumes were designed by Marysol Maria Gabriel, the music used was by John Coltrane, Bill Evans and Claude Debussy. This dance was prduced by Centro di produzione della danza Cango Firenze, in collaboration with AMAT and Civitanova Danza, Visavi Festival and Artisti Associati Gorizia with the support of MIC Ministero della Cultura, Regione Toscana, Comune di Firenze and Fondazione CR Firenze.

I went together with friend and critic Stefania Zepponi, whithout whom I would have not been able to go and see Sieni’s work. Therefore, I thank her with all my heart.

Rereading Calvino’s reflections on lightness, I was struck by the imagines he recurs to: Perseo’s myth, Ovidio’s Metamorphoses, Lucrezio’s De Rerum Natura, Boccaccio’s Decameron, Guido Cavalcanti’s poetry, Emily Dickinson’s poetry, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Leopardi’s poetry and many more. Calvino talks about lightness as “gravity subtraction”, which for him is a value and not a defect. When focusing on Perseo’s myth, he states: “Perseo’s strength is always in the refusal of a direct vision” of reality but not in the refusal of reality itself. It is as if Perseo and Calvino with him, were developing what writers Wu Ming have called “an oblique gaze” on the world. Equally Emily Dickinson said, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant -”. This is an interesting point as it paves the way for untold perspectives on the arts, not just literature.

In this sense, Virgilio Sieni’s “Sulla leggerezza” is a beautiful at times repetitive work. A thin male dancer in blue three quarter length trousers and a white vest enters the stage back centre and walks frontway through a glitter string curtain. His movement quality is fluid, he lifts his arms, he gracefully drops to the floor, he adjusts his vest and trousers, mixing these everyday gestures with his dancing and creating a subtle irony. The sound of a sax enriches these moments. But where is Calvino?

Another male dancer comes in and moves through the glitter curtain more than once, letting its strings caress his body. He wears silver three quarter length trousers and a pink vest, he is taller than the previous one. He moves across space and performs two turns, again his movement quality is fluid and beautiful, but where is Calvino?

Other male and femal dancers enter the stage, go through the curtain and dance in couples or even all together. But Calvino is nowhere in sight.

At one point one male dancer performs a stunning, elegant pose (see photograph above): his left knee placed onto the floor, the other knee bent and turned outward, his chest facing the ceiling and his arms straight to the front, palms turned downward. It is a refined pose and with the glitter curtain at the back, it recalls the image of rain or even snow falling and this man fully embracing its power and lightness. Calvino quotes both Cavalcanti and Dante on the snow falling without wind. There is silence and balance and beauty in this pose and here we can find a bit of Calvino, but what about the rest of the choreography?

Sieni talks of Calvino in the programme note, but not much in the dance itself. I am tempted to call his operation a sort of thin narrative, where there are tiny hints at the text that inspired it. It is a strange dance adaptation of Calvino’s lecture, an adaptation that could have benefitted of more variety, as those dancers moving across the curtain after a while became too repetitive, even though towards the end two dancers move across it and shake their arms and hands as if the curtain had activated an electrifying set of movements. However, this is not enough.

I wish there were more jumps to exemplify Cavalcanti’s flight or more images like the stunning one described above. Instead we had Sieni’s fluid approach to movement, some choreographic inventions that recalled Renaissance paintings so dear to him, but little Calvino. This is a beautiful work but not a good dance adaptation.

 

 

Roberto Zappalà’s Ecstasy Trilogy: a Dialogue with the Past in the Present Tense

A moment from the last part of Zappalà's Ecstasy Trilogy. Photo by Franziska Strauss. 

Imagine a party scene characterised by different aspects, like solitude and desire, seduction and the pleasure of showing off and sacrifice and ritual. This is in short the way Roberto Zappalà has reworked three iconic twentieth-century choreographies: Vaslav Nijinsky’s 1912 L’Apres-midi d’un faune [Afternoon of a Faun], Bronislava Nijinska’s 1928 Bolero and again Nijinsky’s 1913 Le sacre du printemps [the Rite of Spring]. These works, especially the first and the last, signalled a watershed in dance history and approaching them is daring, but Zappalà has succeeded in dialoguing with them giving the audience a new flavour.

To begin with, he has conceived them as a single choreographic project called La trilogia dell’estasi, Ecstasy Trilogy, developing a unique way to look at them. Then, he has inserted techno music at the beginning of each piece, thus adding a fresh touch, that works very well by the way, to the music scores by Debussy, Ravel and Stravinsky respectively. Last but not least, his style is remarkable, with the dancers’ bodies moving on stage with fluidity and at a beautiful, at times solemn, at other times furious, pace. This is the result of Zappalà’s approach to dance, an appraoch he developed over the years and that he has called MoDem, “movimento democratico”, democratic movement, which explores the way the body can move according to three notions, those of Devoted Body, Ethical Body and Instinctual Body.

As it is stated in the Company’s website, “MoDem is the language Roberto Zappalà has developed in over 30 years of creations with his Company. It is based on criteria linked to flows, controls, joint and muscular explorations that the body exercises daily, through a methodology that tends to favor contamination between members of the working group and an obsessive knowledge of their joints.

I saw the Ecstasy Trilogy at the Rossini Theatre in Pesaro on 15 November 2024.

The work opens with a group of dancers clad in black cloaks and wearing white big mouflon masks. Soon one of them takes both the cloak and the mask off, revealing a white unitard with brown spots on his chest and down on his genitals. It is the faun. A rectangular carpet is illuminated on the proscenium and it is this object the faun will dance with.

In 1912, when Nijinsky’s Faune premiered in Paris, it created a scandal for the final masturbatory act of the faun himself. He laid down and moved his rear end up and down. Zappalà changes this act into a standing position with the faun showing his back to the audience. It is a clever decision that keeps Nijinsky’s intent but with a different look.

However, Nijinsky’s faune was particularly groundbreaking for another reason, that is its two-dimentional approach to space. Aided by Leon Bakst’s set design, Nijinsky created a choreography with the dancers’ feet in parallel which broke with ballet’s great invention, the turn out. Apparently he wanted all the dancers to follow his direction and left no space to improvisation. Zappalà’a Faune does not present this kind of two-dimintionality but the limited space of the stage-carpet, in a way, quotes Nijinsky’s choice. Zappalà’s Faune initially barely touches the carpet as if he were just tasting it, then with a somersault he enters it and smiling dances inside it.

The dancers in white mouflon masks remain on stage and the masks will then be placed at the back of the stage to constitute a sort of fil rouge during all the performance. Zappalà, in the post performance talk with Francesca Pedroni has said they recall a “demoniac world where there is evil”. I believe they also recall the god Pan and the costume of Nijinky’s Faune as he was wearing small horns on his head.

A section characterised by techno music introduces a very differrent atmosphere, that of Zappalà’s Bolero. In the post performance talk, Zappalà has highlighted how Maurice Bejart’s 1960 Bolero is the visual reference point for Ravel’s music and that it was difficult to elaborate something as good. For his Bolero, Zappalà took inspiration from Stanley Kubrick’s 1999 film Eyes Wide Shut, in particular he focused on the party scene. The dancers wear masks on their faces, black hooded cloaks on their bodies and high heels on their feet. Their movements are slower and more measured with respect to the previous piece. They move in groups, following circles and lines, at one point they kiss each other. Then they take their cloaks off revealing almost naked bodies. They dance in couples, but as Ravel’s musical crescendo increases, their movement seems less incisive and structured. Of the three dances, especially in these moments, this one seems less convincing. In a way Bejart’s version remains unsurpassed.

And before Bejart and a few years after Nijinska’s Bolero, there was Alberto Spadolini’s successful 1930s version which captivated the Parisian audience as well as other international stages. We do not know much about his approach to movement, we know he recurred to improvisation and we know this was often a solo dance, rich in Spanish-flavoured details, like his costume, which, in various cases, consisted of dark trousers, a bolero jacket and a wide-brimmed hat.

Zappalà’s interesting take on Nijinska’s Bolero is that he does not focus on a dancer on a table, which, as far as we know, was Nijinska’s vision and which, in a way, it became Bejart’s vision. Zappalà focuses on the group of dancers, an aspect which brings us to the last choreography, the one dedicated to his dance adaptation of Nijinsky’s Sacre.

Before the dance starts there is again a techno moment, with the dancers performing an amazing dance which is going to be repeated as an encore after the performance is finished.

Nijinsky’s Sacre has become a reference point for almost any choreographer as if the music and the idea of sacrifice as ritual had become a symbolic point of passage in dance history. Famous are the dance adaptations by Maurice Bejart, Pina Bausch and Martha Graham, and, more recently, those of Tero Saarinen and Virgilio Sieni. Interestingly, the 1913 work was only performed nine times and at the premiere it caused a scandal, because of the way the dancers moved and because of Stravinsky’s music as well. The narrative rotates around an ancient Russian community where a maiden is chosen to be sacrificed.

Zappalà’s dance adaptation of Nijinsky’s Sacre is based on the notion of a collective sacrifice and that is a very significant reinterpretation of the work. In fact, there is no Chosen Maiden in this work as the whole group is going to be sacrificed. According to Zappalà, the net that hangs over the dancers’ bodies represents a change, the sacrifice itself embodies a change that, in today’s society, is an important critique of what is wrong, what needs to be improved and precisely changed. The dancers often move all together in unison, with their backs curved in as if to exemplify the hardship of sustaining a difficult sistuation. The lights change in different ways, they focus on the dancers when they move in three groups, they become lateral and warmer when they dance in circle. The costumes, by Zappalà himself, in collaboration with Veronica Cornacchini, are very colourful as a contrast to the tragic destiny the group os going to face.

Zappalà, who has collaborated at this project with dramaturg Nello Calabrò, took ten years to make the Ecstasy Trilogy and the result is stunning, a real tribute to the past with an insightful eye on the present.