SATIRI

Virgilio Sieni

choreography Virgilio Sieni

with Jari Boldrini, Maurizio Giunti

cellist Naomi Berrill

music Johann Sebastian Bach, Naomi Berrill

lighting design Marco Cassini, Virgilio Sieni

animal masks Chiara Occhini

production Centro Nazionale di Produzione della Danza Virgilio Sieni

in collaboration with AMAT & Civitanova Danza, Galleria Nazionale delle Marche

with the support of MiC – Ministero della Cultura, Regione Toscana, Comune di Firenze

Satiri, created by Virgilio Sieni, features two dancers on stage, Jari Boldrini and Maurizio Giunti, accompanied by the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and Naomi Berrill, played by the author herself live with her cello. The Satyr, as Nietzsche says in The Birth of Tragedy (1872) and wisely echoed by Giorgio Colli in The Birth of Philosophy (1975), may be he who looks into the abyss while saying yes to life: not night but rather its spring. The dancer is a person who throws their body into the abyss of the act while saying yes to life. They are “dances on the edge” that mark space, shapes of harmony and empathy, that explode between Dionysian and Apollonian. Studying movement takes away from everyday life those postures that subsequently return in the form of a different language, not a moving form but rather a body that changes colour and, like an auratic nebula, becomes indistinguishable between distance and proximity and operates based on an attention towards spatial tactility that includes us all. A show centred on a force that still today classical antiquity produces on modern humans, who are cynical and lost, that seeks to touch the deep substrate of the spectator’s conscience not only through the art of the gesture, but also through light, the environment and music.

Biography

Virgilio Sieni is an Italian dancer and choreographer, an artist who works at an international level with the most important theatre and music institutions, art foundations and museums. His research is based on the idea of the body as a place to welcome diversity and a space to develop the complexity of the gesture. He creates his language starting from the concept of transmission and tactility, with an interest in the haptic and multi-sensory dimension of the gesture and the individual; he explores resonance, gravity and the poetic, political, archaeological multitude of the body. He was the Director of the Venice Dance Biennale from 2013 to 2016, where he developed a four-year plan based on the idea of polis and democracy, conceiving the city through its metaphysics.

His path embraces thematic cycles ranging from the exploration of Greek tragedy to fairy tale landscapes, the relationship between gesture and filiality to the shared exploration of the meaning of the democracy of the body.

Teatro Comunale Città di Vicenza