Sunday 2nd July Michele Merola's MM Company reinterprets Maurice Ravel's masterpiece
The ensemble, winner of the Danza&Danza Award as best emerging company in 2010, is a leading figure in the sector in Italy and abroad.
Salerno, June 30, 2023 Velia, dance on stage. The enchantment of authorial music, the magic of art, centuries of history. The 2023 edition of Salerno Danza Festival continues, an event dedicated to the languages of contemporary dance which, on Saturday 1 July, hosts, at the archaeological excavations of Velia, the MM Company in “Bolero Soirée”, a revisited version, already winner, in 2017, of Europaindanza 2017 – Award of Merit for choreography, of Maurice Ravel's masterpiece.
A clockwork mechanism of rigorous precision, Bolero (1928) is still today among the best-known and most listened to pieces in the history of music: one of the reasons for the piece's success seems to be strongly linked to the evocation of images of sensuality that it arouses, even when such suggestions are marked by a substantial ambiguity.
In the new choreographic version, Merola, winner of the Positano Leonide Massine Prize for the Art of Dance, confronted this obsessive and repetitive music, trying to understand its identity, reason and function, to arrive at its interpretation: at the end of this journey the choreographer's inspiration focused on the inexhaustible range of human relationships, especially those between couples.
Thus, in the different nuances assumed by the dance, the choreography declines the variety of moods that circulate around and within the relationship of two people and that spice up existence. In the steps, fears, repressed desires, existential shocks that reveal entire universes, secret bonds that exist between people are projected from the inside out. And irony gives way to fear, love to disillusionment, detachment to sharing, and so on, between crescendo and diminuendo, like the music of Bolero.
On this same music, with the license and inventiveness that are the true mark of every artist, Stefano Corrias intervened. As a refined and expert composer, Corrias created his own musical score, freely inspired by the original version of the piece by Ravel. The new score was composed by carefully analyzing the pages of Bolero, with which it integrates perfectly.
Dance, in close symbiosis with music, conveys a sort of abstract bitter tale, an allegory of the pain of living and the misunderstanding between human beings. And so Bolero becomes a metaphor for existence, caught in the double tracks that each one experiences in the course of their life, between contrast and dialogue, seduction and disillusionment, surprise and dismay.
Dancers/performers: Emiliana Campo, Lorenzo Fiorito, Mario Genovese, Matilde Gherardi, Fabiana Lonardo, Nicola Stasi, Giuseppe Villarosa; costumes by Alessio Rosati with the collaboration of Nuvia Valestri; lighting design by Cristina Spelti.
MM CONTEMPORARY DANCE COMPANY Founded in 1999, in 2010 the MM Contemporary Dance Company won the prestigious Danza&Danza Award as best emerging company and today, it is, to all intents and purposes, a reality of excellence in Italian dance, with a consolidated activity of shows throughout the national territory. For some years it has conquered an international market with shows in European and non-European countries (Korea, Colombia, Canada, Germany, Russia, Morocco, Belgium, Spain, Slovenia).
Salerno Danza Festival, conceived by CDTM – Circuito Campano della Danza, is realized with the recognition of the MIC (which has included Salerno Danza Festival in its three-year program) and the support of the Campania Region, and is considered among the most qualified and professional in Southern Italy. Artistic director Luigi Aruta, young dancer and choreographer.
USEFUL INFO The show will start at 21.15 pm. From July 7th Salerno Danza Festival will continue at Palazzo Ricci – De Dominicis in Ascea until July 15th. For information and reservations: www.salernodanzafestival.net.
Article published on 30 June 2023 - 11:50
