“Lady of the snow, cover our friend, our brother with the soft white cloak. Up in Paradise, let him go through your mountains”: while the performers of U. A Song they are arranged in a semicircle on the stage of the Teatro della Milan Triennial. They are motionless, as from the beginning of the show, and then it almost seems that the author Alessandro Sciarroniwhich among its great strengths is that of not making anyone understand whether it is right to call him a choreographer or an artist, pushes everything into a metaphorical perspective and transforms those bodies into mountains. A mountain range that envelops and protects.
The project, on stage throughout the weekend and then again on November 30th in Trembaly, France, for the Festival d’Automne, sees precisely seven performers and twelve songs of popular inspiration and the technical perfection and power of the voices is put to the test by the fact that Sciarroni’s, this time, is a truly minimal choreography: they almost never move and since in addition to the voice they sing with the muscles , with body movements, everything appears more difficult and challenging when still. Every song talks about natureof the voice of water and gods mystery of rocks, of friendly forests, of glances that speak and of the silence of light. But also of God, of work in the fields, of piety, of love. Everything said always and only frontally, because the performers look us in the eyes without ever running away, looming. The only movements that can be perceived are those of the luce that changes slowly and the few steps they take every now and then to get closer to the audience and it’s incredible how they manage to curate those harmonies while only rarely exchanging glances. Yet they see each other, they hear each other, and then it comes to mind Tolstoy: “he avoided looking at it for long, as one does at the sun; but he saw her, as one sees the sun, even without looking.” In these words there is all the power of Sciarroni’s choreography, which plays on movements that are almost imperceptible at the beginning, such as the bodies that oscillate, but which become more evident as the show progresses.
The musical direction is by Aurora Bauza e Pears You and their work transforms everything into a sort of liturgy that is fragile and dangerous at the same time. Sciarroni won the Golden Lion from the Venice Biennale for his revolutionary approach to choreography, and once again he takes everything to the extreme, also managing to “snatch” tradition and memory (still extraordinarily alive) from a certain type of reactionary thought, which believes it has a monopoly on it. To underline this aspect is the t-shirt worn by one of the performers (the others all have an elegance that manages to be formal and punk at the same time) with the face of Kurt Cobain. Many of these songs were composed between the end of the 80s and the beginning of the 90s, that short period in which the king of grunge operated, and his presence on stage suggests asking ourselves about the concept of contemporaneity, about Why Smells Like Teen Spirit which is from 1991 we feel it close in time and Open the doorwhich tells us that on the hills it is the time of ripe grapes and was composed the same year, appears to us from another century, from another era. To unite the figure of Kurt Cobain and the repertoire of U. A Song it is also and above all the sense of loss: the violent and sudden one of the singer of Nirvana, who committed suicide in ’94, and the more delicate and diluted over time of the instances discussed in this show. And in long silencespunctuated only by breaths, we feel the absence, the void that this world is creating around the most urgent needs of nature, of the planet, of the human being and of all living beings, of our life in danger.
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