Is it possible to realize the oxymoron of a dance that takes place in complete immobility? If any element of biological matrix is vivified from within by constant movement, imperceptible on the surface, how can one distill its centrifugal patterns in order to transform them into bodily attitudes that are readable from the outside? How can we create a connection with our fellow beings (and others) in the absence of visual, auditory, and bodily contact? And further: if the plurality of osmosis is the realm within which these questions seek a solution, what repercussions does this orientation have on the perception of the distinction between self and other?
CollettivO CineticO, “Manifesto cannibale”, concept, direction, texts Francesca Pennini, ph. courtesy ERT – Emilia Romagna Teatro
A ragion veduta, nel balletto, si definisce “corpo di ballo” il gruppo formato da danzatori e danzatrici non solisti che si comportano come un unico organismo interconnesso. È possibile estendere questo concetto allo spettacolo tout court integrandovi anche il pubblico, di solito collocato in funzione complementare e opposta ai performer in scena? Queste sono solo alcune delle domande suscitate da Manifesto Cannibale di CollettivO CineticO, spettacolo debuttato al Romeuropa Festival nel 2021, di recente riproposto in versione ampliata al Teatro Arena del Sole di Bologna. La pièce, sfuggendo alle maglie dei generi drammaturgici tradizionali, come danza, teatro e arti visive, esplora inconsuete possibilità di compenetrazione tra neuroscienza, creazione artistica, linguaggio (verbale e non) e movimento a partire da una specifica condizione dei corpi assurta a regola generativa della scena, ovvero l’immedesimazione nello stato vegetale, inteso come emblema di alterità che invita a rileggere la nozione di umano. L’idea di rete e di relazione è centrale in questi argomenti, come nel metodo di lavoro di CollettivO CineticO, una costellazione mobile di oltre cinquanta artisti provenienti da discipline diverse. Focus principale della ricerca del gruppo è la ridiscussione della natura dell’evento performativo e del rapporto con lo spettatore attraverso la creazione eterodiretta e poli-autoriale di dispositivi performativi interdisciplinari di estremo rigore rigorosi ma al contempo poetici e ludici.
CollettivO CineticO, “Manifesto cannibale”, concept, direction, texts Francesca Pennini, ph. courtesy ERT – Emilia Romagna Teatro
The spectators are thus welcomed on stage by choreographer Francesca Pennini (founder of CollettivO CineticO and author of the concept, direction, texts of Manifesto Cannibale) who, in informal language, recounts the genesis of the show and its eccentric “rules” of fruition: it begins when the audience chooses, it can be enjoyed with eyes closed and even while sleeping, during the break between the first and second part it is advisable to leave the hall, one is free to leave whenever desired, the last part will have a variable duration and will be an endurance test for both the audience and the performers. There will be scenes of nudity, flashing lights and loud sounds, but also darkness and silence. This introduction, as it will become clearer going forward, anticipates that the common thread of the show, beyond the contextual themes, is its construction mode, whose scenic explication is necessary to be invested by the final anagnorisis. The stage thus becomes a sort of open rehearsal room, where what is staged is the mental laboratory of the author, of which she herself and the other performers will become the synapses. Behind Pennini, seated during this monologue on the iron staircase connecting the stage to the orchestra, a composition formed by the naked and immobile bodies of the other members of the group (Simone Arganini, Davide Finotti, Teodora Grano, Carmine Parise, Angelo Pedroni) lying next to each other as if at the mercy of a deep induced dream. All wear red soundproof headphones that isolate them from the surrounding situation, and even the essential scenography, immersed in an atmospherically abstract light, appears punctuated by solitary “sleeping” presences, concealed by white sheets. Even Pennini, who declares she has never seen her show except in photos, at the end of the introduction becomes one of these phantoms, going on stage and hiding under one of these sheets.
CollettivO CineticO, “Manifesto cannibale”, concept, direction, texts Francesca Pennini, ph. courtesy ERT – Emilia Romagna Teatro
A spectator (it is not important to be sure whether by prior agreement or not) executes the choreographer’s instructions and gently pulls the rope tied to the foot of one of the sleepers to awaken him and begin the long prologue that precedes the actual show. At this point, twenty-four possible scenic frames follow, which the author calls Exercises in Vegetable Pornography, in which the performers, alone or in groups, come to life to the sound of Winterreise (Winter Journey), Schubert’s most famous Lieder cycle and among the most renowned in the history of music. Sometimes the music heard is a recording with the voice of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, other times it is performed live by a musician (Davide Finotti and, occasionally, a volunteer recruited from the audience) who plays a piano at some point revealed on stage. The initial work on sleep as an exercise and key to accessing the vegetable being is propaedeutic (for both performers and spectators) to exploring what happens in a condition of presumed immobility, of which the plant is an emblem, where everything happens in the millimeters around the living body.
CollettivO CineticO, “Manifesto cannibale”, concept, direction, texts Francesca Pennini, ph. courtesy ERT – Emilia Romagna Teatro
What does it mean, then, for a dancer to be immobile, and how much dance is there in the space of this immobility? And the dance (light, graceful, surreal, mimetic, at times virtuosic) reproduces itself in a luxuriant budding in which the performers seem truly focused on elaborating the character of their movements starting from the vegetable awakening of a single infinitesimal part of their bodies. Each scene is suddenly interrupted by a noisy flashing activated by the blind choreographer under the sheet, which freezes each performer in the position in which it finds them. In each of these interruptions, she has access to the frozen scene to point out to the audience the difficulties of each one’s posture, to reflect on the next trajectories of their movements, or to ask spectators for suggestions on how to modify the continuation of the frozen action. These spoken inserts, at first glance disturbing with respect to the pleasure of abandoning oneself to the suggestions of what we might define as a sort of delicate “conceptual hallucination”, gradually reveal themselves to be increasingly engaging in guiding the audience towards a detailed analysis of the process in action, namely the capillary identification of the performers with the vegetable being in the form of alien dance. It is a crescendo of involvement and multiplication of perceptual inputs, rhythmed by amusing incursions into play and scenographic fairy tale. At the end of the first part, as anticipated, the sequence is interrupted with a 12-minute break, intended as a scene in its own right and called Vomitorium, from the name of the lateral entrance of Roman theaters reserved for the outflow of spectators, but functioning as an interval.
CollettivO CineticO, “Manifesto cannibale”, concept, direction, texts Francesca Pennini, ph. courtesy ERT – Emilia Romagna Teatro
Upon returning, one finally discovers what Manifesto Cannibale is: the culmination of a perfect but unrealizable project, a static choreography in which the performers, once again with eyes closed, must remain immobile in the posture in which they were blocked by an agreed signal for an interminable time, inwardly dancing to the music that each of them hears in their headphones, a collaborative playlist generated by the audience (Spotify). It is the end of dance, an endurance contest in which those who yield leave the stage and share their music with the audience. All this lasts for about an hour, during which the spectators, trained by the previous exercises to recognize this absence of movement as dance, support the performers in their physical and mental effort with thunderous applause that intensifies when one of them, exhausted, interrupts the execution just a moment before releasing the tension of some muscle, deforming the pose. And then, the cathartic final subversion: the audience that has persisted dances in the orchestra pit in front of the surviving dancers still fixed in their pose, as if both sides truly formed part of an interconnected macro-organism. Other aspects would be worth highlighting in this acrobatic dramaturgical architecture, such as the political connotation of valuing a non-productive space, the renegotiation of the concept of otherness in the proposal of a paradigm of interspecies fluidity, the unprecedented relationship between movement and a founding writing conceived as a florilegium of suggestions, but the heart of it all is right here, in this powerful evocation of the mystery of dance in the (successful) challenge of choreographing its impossibility.
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Graduated in art history at DAMS in Bologna, city where she continued to live and work, she specialized in Siena with Enrico Crispolti. Curious and attentive to the becoming of the contemporary, she believes in the power of art to make life more interesting and she loves to explore its latest trends through dialogue with artists, curators and gallery owners. She considers writing a form of reasoning and analysis that reconstructs the connection between the artist’s creative path and the surrounding context.
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