Dance, environmental and plant choreographies for the CollettivO CineticO on stage in Rome

Light is the first source of energy for bodies ‘planted’ on the stage of ‘Manifesto Cannibale’, a new production by CollettivO CineticO led by Francesca Pennini, co-produced by Romaeuropa and staged in a national premiere on 6 and 7 November at the Teatro Vascello as part of the XXXVI edition of the festival. A show whose construction began before the pandemic and which, in the suspension of theatrical and choreographic activities, has settled and nourished with a new feeling, with new needs to look at the stage production and at the ‘time’ with which we inhabit the world . In the background, in the extended time of contemplation and stasis, the bond with nature, with plant beings from which to learn other forms of existence. Imitating plants, learning new forms of subsistence from them, slowing down, being like leaves under the sunlight or applying photosynthesis processes to one’s breath and movement, transforming the speed that engulfs our days into a new form of stillness. These seem to be the principles that move the company that moves its research on time, on play, on the set of codes and conventions that feed the performative act into a new vegetative and vegetative dimension. dialogue with the viewer. On stage, sleeping, the naked bodies of the performers offer themselves to the eye ready to be awakened while the cycle of Lieder ‘Winterreise’ by Franz Schubert, performed live, orchestrates a perceptive rite of transformation of bodies, a continuous passage of state of the flesh towards stillness. They are ‘ghost tracks’, as the choreographer Francesca Pennini calls them, an exercise book for performers and the public built with the enormous amount of material sedimented during rehearsals and their suspension during the lockdown period, therefore aimed at immobility. . Like that of the same choreographer who, in a form of authorial self-boycott, distant from the scene, chooses to sign but not see her own show, attending as a ghost, an entity capable of immobilizing the scene and modifying it in its showing itself to the public . A sowing that leaves to infest, without pruning. “What does it mean to stop? – the choreographer and dancer Francesca Pennini asks – I will only see what is still. And I will be able to stop the scene when I want, but without knowing what I will find in front of me, without foreseeing how to interact. These pauses are a crack. unexpected, a fracture of the narrative, the deviation into a vertical time. They are a call to the present for those on stage, a boycott of my own show, an invitation to be aware of what is happening “. “Like a virus, I put the scene on pause – he continues – An unprepared and permeable piece of life enters. The Outside breaks through”. And it is precisely the stillness that becomes the central element in the second part of the show. A game, a resistance challenge for the dancers and for the public who participate in the construction of the scene by choosing the music for this end of the world and of the human as we have known it so far. “I wanted to synthesize the research on the plant world in an exercise book for a theater that does not represent or tell – underlined Francesca Pennini – A theater that makes itself, in its entirety, a paradigm of an ecological, political, ontological complexity of bodies” . “That the theater can be the boycott gymnasium of the visual bulimia of the flashing light, of the scrolling, of the zapping, of the very fast and anesthetizing stroboscopic flash of pieces of the world to be swallowed without chewing, subliminal binge out of flavor has wished Francesca Pennini – Slow down, silence, darken to hear better, to see something that is not necessarily happening in front of our eyes.