Dance, Roberto Bolle’s cry of pain in the Chamber: “A massacre”

A very harsh speech was given in the Chamber of Deputies by Roberto Bolle, who takes a break from the rehearsals of his now traditional show aired for 5 years on the first of the year on Rai 1, ‘Danza con me’, to bring his ‘cry of pain’ for the dramatic situation in which the dance system finds itself in our country. L’Étoile dei due Mondi, as the great Italian dancer famous all over the world was named, abandoned for a day his proverbial calm, but always authoritative tones, and addressed a precise ‘j’accuse’ against the malady management at the institutional level of the Terpsichorean art. In the long and articulate speech he gave – the text of which we report in its entirety – Bolle started by recalling that dance is an art born and codified in Italy and then exported to France and Russia in the eighteenth century. “Classical Dance was born and evolved through the creative minds of Italians who felt the need to bring the expressive level of the representative arts of their time higher – said l’etoile – Luminari who had the courage to change the route, to invent a new one, to touch deeper chords “. On the contrary, he stressed, “it seems that our glorious past has been forgotten and left unworthily behind. The situation of dance in Italy is increasingly difficult and arid, made up of increasingly thin theatrical companies, of dance groups that come closed, of absolute lack of protection for the artistic category, of dancers who have to leave their country to live off their passion and try to make their dreams come true. My speech today is both a cry of pain and a request for help for Ballet in Italy “. Bolle then highlighted the great numbers linked to the passion for dance in Italy where the number of students enrolled in schools exceeds by over a third that of football schools. Finally, the attack supported by numbers on the management of the dance system in Italy: “Let’s say things as they are: in recent decades a real havoc has been made towards Italian dance, an impoverishment of which one can only be ashamed. Italian is constantly disheartened, treated as the Cinderella of the arts, with opera and symphonic music in the role of the privileged sisters, to whom the attention and care of the Foundations are reserved “. From what does this seemingly unanimous decision to kill Ballet here in Italy comes from, the dancer asked himself? Certainly not for the unsustainability of the ballet bodies but for lack of knowledge of the sector and lack of vision of those who were responsible for it.