It may be that we have been swayed by the teaching of the gesture which, slowly pervading the body, forges it without ever usurping it: we might say that the study of movement draws postures from everyday life that then return in the form of another language. This being on the threshold, which might seem a sort of rebound, the return of something that was until just a short time ago unknown, might, I think, be defined as, or compared to, the sense of the poetic gesture: non-appropriable, penetrable, not form in motion, but body that morphs and, like an auratic nebula, seems indeterminately near and far, and works with attention focused on immersion in the space, and on the spatial tactility that comprises us.
The Satyr, as Nietzsche wrote in The birth of Tragedy (1872) and as Giorgio Colli recalled in The birth of philosophy (1975), could be he who looks into the abyss saying yes to life: not night, but its springtime.
The two dancers in the show are infected from within, struck by contemplation of a similar, adjacent, symmetrical gesture. A dance of dermatoglyphs that trace the air, and a syntax that seems to refer to the embryo of the gesture encountering its fellow gesture and recognizing it as both different and friend.
Reaching deep down into the gesture to inscribe forms of understanding and empathy that open up to a musical disposition, the dances mark the space of intoxicating matter that speaks with the body. Here, the everyday world sets sail and breaks away from the enigmatic gesture that explodes into something Dionysiac and Apollonian. Once again, dance becomes a laboratory of life, deals with desperate, titanic actions, stands on the threshold with a vigilant, mantic, divinatory approach. But it is a science of being, a mirror of resonances and cognitive clues.
Founded in 1992, the Compagnia Virgilio Sieni constructs, through a progression of thematic cycles, a choreographic language characterized by comprehensive exploration of the body and its movements. It is a language in continuous evolution, both in terms of composition and relations with audiences and the public, alternating stage performances and other, new formats for itinerant spectators in unconventional places, from woods to museums. The exploration of Greek tragedy, peregrinations in the landscapes of fairy tales and the probing of Lucretian philosophical notions with the dramaturgical participation of Giorgio Agamben are just a few of the stops along an itinerary that traverses anthropological and mythological realms, in continuous discourse with the present, in pursuit of a lost humanism.
