Shine Pink Floyd Moon, Micha van Hoecke’s ‘testament’ at the Olympic Theater

The ‘moon’ shines again after the closures that stopped the performances of Shine Pink Floyd Moon, a rock opera by Micha van Hoecke, created in 2019 on the songs of the legendary English band – performed live by Pink Floyd Legend and interpreted by Denys Ganio and the dancers from the Daniele Cipriani Company. As part of the season of the Roman Philharmonic Academy, the show of music, lights and psychedelic dances, now dedicated to the memory of its creator, who recently passed away, is staged at the Olympic Theater on 13 and 14 November, both days at 5pm. and 21. Pink Floyd’s timeless songs, bridge between rock and classical music, and early soundtrack inspired the Russian-Belgian choreographer / director Micha van Hoecke Shine. He himself defined it “a music that has a soul and that, in the collective imagination, is linked to the inner youth of all of us”. The starting point in the creation of ShinePink Floyd Moon is the famous song Shine on You Crazy Diamond in which the four Pink Floyd – aka Roger Waters, Nick Mason, Richard Wright and David Gilmour – paid tribute to their lost partner Syd Barrett in the unknown regions of the ‘moon’, understood as mental illness.In Shine Pink Floyd Moon, Syd is played by Denys Ganio, former étoile of the Marseille Ballet and interpreter of the famous Pink Floyd Ballet by Roland Petit, cult ballet that debuted in 1973, in the middle of the pop era, with the English band playing live. A thin thread therefore links the past to the present. Not surprisingly, Syd / Ganio has a young and darting alter ego, the dancer Mattia Tortora, flanked by the soloists and ballet company Compagnia Daniele Cipriani, while the hypnotic psychedelic sound and the bewitching lyrics of Pink Floyd are now interpreted (always by vivo) by today’s acclaimed Italian band Pink Floyd Legend (musical director Fabio Castaldi). Musicians, vocalists, dancers skilfully intertwine their arts to create a true symbiosis, so that the viewer really gets the impression (borrowing a maxim from Micha) that “singing is a dance that is heard and dance is a song that it shows”. More than half a century after the “cool” moon landing, a skilful play of lights, lasers and video projections transforms the stage space of Shine Pink Floyd Moon into a surreal moon inhabited by characters such as Syd’s ‘double’, a kind of Pierrot Lunaire, the twilight being that captured Arnold Schoenberg’s imagination. Oneiric visions that intersect to create sidereal worlds, yet very close … maybe why inside of us? As the Alexandrian philosopher Origen intuited many centuries ago. “Know that you are another world in miniature and you have the sun and moon in you and the stars too,” he asserted. Shine is therefore a journey into the world of the inner moon of the human being. Not just a place of madness and lost wisdom, but a symbol of poetry, of fantasy, of life itself. “It is my autobiography that also tells the life of every man – explained Micha van Hoecke, the recently deceased director and choreographer of Russian origin – The story of our lives that proceed in cycles, with a circular movement like that of music and dance of the stars, of the rotation of the moon. A motion marked by a continuous process of birth-death-rebirth. and the longings that loom today “. It is not difficult to see in Shine Pink Floyd Moon a spiritual testament by Micha van Hoecke who with this latest work urges us to turn on the bright side of our inner moon, to always find ourselves, even in these times of bewilderment.