Two dancers (only nominally a He and a She) immersed in an indistinct scenic space, with no physical barriers and unexplored, neutral like the sex of the occupants who, searching for the individual confines coherent with the laws of cognitive proxemics, permits them to appropriate or to refuse the other’s presence. From the very beginning of the pièce we witness the acquisition of the scenic space, with Him an imaginary puppet rising vertically, a novel man of Vitruvius, and Her writing horizontally, subtly underlining the physical differences between man and woman.
The Atacama Company, founded in 1997 by Patrizia Cavola, an Italian choreographer and dancer, and Ivan Truol, a Chilean choreographer, dancer and actor, aims to be a space for study, research, experimentation and a laboratory for the creation of a physical theatre emphasising the basic relation between movement, dance and vocal expression in the form of poetry or song. “L’Ambito” is a project that demonstrates their research of a new theatrical dimension, in an era in which definitions are overstepped in favour of new hybrid forms of art turning the audience toward personal participation and a state of emotional overwhelming. With the background of a music alternating noir crescendos and electronic standstills, the distance from the other is bridged, at first shyly, for her the sense of smell, for him the sense of touch, sight for both (original and expressive is the “taking possession” of the other’s movements from a distance), then more and more urgent, in the moment in which the individual confines, now shared with another other than oneself, need to be protected from the curiosity and attacks of the outside world. The text of the Chilean playwright Oscar Stuardo is presented as a pre-text or a prop to the performance, a meditation from which to start to dis-articulate the performance entrusted to the quality of the actors’ interpretation. The audience is swept into the state of anxiety and distress overwhelming the two characters Jam and Jem, two abstract beings, without history or sex, only the emotions and fears pervading them, generating a constant equilibrium between power and elasticity, that the two actors on the scene communicate perfectly, still manifestly showing the character differences between man and woman (“You always dare”; “Yes, but you advance more”), but distributing equally the dynamic surge, so that the twining of bodies, the acrobatic catches, the plastic stances, are fundamentally filled with a sense of harmony. In the dialogues, the gestures, the audience looks for a sense that delves in the deep of their unconscious, and the confine becomes a place each one is called upon to preserve and defend in a solitude that is sought for in the same measure as it is rejected. We find a psychological suspension and fall, in the discovery of a relation between the two characters, between father and son, between man and woman, between two friends. The relation of a body that voluntarily (and desperately) interacts with another.
Annamaria Pompili and Davide Buonasorte
www.teatroteatro.it
