Physical concert for bodies and souls

with Elena Croce and the Fabula Saltica Company dancers Laura De Nicolao and Claudio Pisa Choreography by Claudio Ronda Original music by Paolo Zambelli Lights and sound by Gianluca Quaglio Directed by Alessio Pizzech Production Association Ballet “city of Rovigo” with the contribution of the Ministry of Culture

A woman in the center of the stage in a rocking chair beginning her slow passage of time; she holds a book, a kind of security to cling to in the loneliness that surrounds her, in the dark emptiness that envelops her person. She flips through the book and begins her Spoon River tale sometimes tearing the sheets, sometimes rewriting them in the making of the text, and creatures populate her mind and the space around her; dancing souls come to visit her and give body and gesture to the features of the human figures she has acted out through her word… and the rocking chair changes pace… varies moment by moment from a night to a dawn to a blinding day that blinds her. This woman thus evokes the world of the dead and in connection with them restores them to us alive and vital in their being more human in this passage and limbo between life and death…

Director’s Notes

Echoes and accents, reverberations and cross-references between bodies and words, between glances and nods…presences as if arrived at the edge of the threshold of a ceremony of evocation of the submerged world of Spoon River’s creatures. Elena Croce as a priestess presides with her voice and presence over this evening between dance and voices in a concert featuring two dancers from Rovigo’s Fabula Saltica company led by choreographer Claudio Ronda. An evening celebrating that extraordinary relationship that binds life and death; those who are no longer here in the physical world will speak to us through the voices of those who inhabited Spoon River. Journey this theatrical but also a tribute to the power of poetry and the dialogue with space shaped by the dancer’s body. Spoon River becomes an opportunity to reflect on the time we live in, on how we have wanted to trade the mystery of death for false aspirations that today prove insubstantial. The souls that populate these compositions are encounters that function as a warning for the present time.