« In the Cappellone degli Spagnoli, which the audience enters after a brief opening in the cloister, La Prima Danza, conceived by Damiano Ottavio Bigi and Alessandra Paoletti, engages with a space frescoed by Andrea di Bonaiuto in the fourteenth century—an environment with powerful symbolic and theological connotations, designed for worship and for the glorification of the Dominican Order. Rooted in the Tanztheater tradition and in a practice that intersects dance, theatre and the visual arts, Bigi and Paoletti’s choreography could not ignore this weighty iconographic legacy. Its choreographic language appears as a deconstruction of everyday and ritual gesture, brought to such a level of abstraction that it no longer represents, but rather evokes states of suspension and unease. The movements of the dancers—six Korean performers—develop through fractured and abruptly decelerated lines, in a play of weight and counterweight that seems almost to oppose the figurative and chromatic density of the frescoes, as though the body were attempting to inhabit the empty spaces between the painted figures.
The influence of Pina Bausch, with whom Bigi worked, is filtered here through a more Mediterranean and theatrical sensibility that does not relinquish fragmented narrative. The bodies move like archaeologists of themselves, unearthing from the floor gestures that seem to search for a salvation that never arrives—a kind of contemporary shipwreck, punctuated by nervous jolts and sudden falls that convey the fracture between the sacred nature of the site and the contingencies of contemporary existence. The relationship with the space appears in no way contemplative, but one of friction: the dancers brush against the walls, measure the height of the vault with restrained leaps, and create a horizontal tension that counters the Gothic verticality of the frescoes. The chapel is thus transformed into a field of forces in which historical memory is quite literally set in motion—not to be celebrated, but to be questioned in its ability to speak to the present. Jung-hoon Pi’s sound design, with its low frequencies and metallic reverberations, contributes to this sense of estrangement, creating a soundscape that is neither ambient nor musical, but a third dimension enveloping the spectators. Compelled to experience the work at close range, they become acutely aware of the performers’ physicality, as though being drawn into a secular ritual whose rules remain unknown to them. 

…Bigi and Paoletti’s choreography plays with falls and lifts, with connections that break apart and are formed anew, evoking a fragility and precariousness that may be the true subject of the performance: the difficulty of constructing a stable narrative in an age saturated with tragic stories, and the awareness that every gesture is a palimpsest, concealing and revealing other gestures. The influence of Dimitris Papaioannou, with whom Bigi has collaborated, can be felt in the almost sculptural precision of the images and in the ability to arrest movement in vivid tableaux.»

[Renzo Francabandera / Paneacquaculture.net – Read more]

« … The resonances of places. And within places. Their memory, the territory, the history they hold. The landscape; the architectural and artistic space: no mere container, but a protagonist, alive with forms and lines, gazes and echoes of presences. This is what dance can activate and evoke: shaping gesture within the immaterial echo that returns; moulding it through the reverberations of the material space that receives it; transforming and layering it within the moving body, within the impulse that passes through it.»

[Giuseppe Distefano / Exibart – Read more]