choreography Enzo Cosimi
performers Alice Raffaelli, Leonardo Rosadini
Duration 60 min.
In Venere vs Adone, Enzo Cosimi reinterprets the poetics of the Bard, creating a textual and visual mosaic through a journey interwoven with different languages and media. Like tesserae in a mosaic, elements of contemporary reality merge with philological aspects. The drama of unrequited, untamed love; the cult of the body, the vital force of man, man’s domination over nature, and the violence of death – these are the threads woven through the composition, echoes and spectres of the Baroque that haunt the present. Although here the bodies are rewritten: they overflow, refuse to conform to norms, transgress, extend, and dissolve their boundaries, allowing themselves to be possessed and transformed. The queer universe, which has been at the core of Cosimi’s work from the very beginning as a critique of normativity, emerges powerfully. It is high-lighted in the metamorphosis of characters that overturn conventions, challenging the anthropocentric relationship with nature, hybridising themselves, and allowing themselves to be permeated by an untamed vitality. The dramaturgical focus, curated by Cosimi and Maria Paola Zedda, centres on two Shakespearean figures: Adonis, symbolically represented by a fit body, obsessed with constructing his sculpted body-machine, and a tormented Venus, desperately trying to ignite his desire. The work revives some of the choreographer’s key references: the seductive, hyper-real imagery of Warhol’s production, characterised by its insistence on the body-as-image, its commodification, and eroticisation. In contrast, the blinding, fiery reference to the paintings of South African artist M. Dumas bathes Adonis’s unshakable apathy in violent hues and depicts a Venus possessed by passion.