Press Review

“I Float, I Drown, I Float” sets Italian contemporary dance free out of the darkness.

Atacama Company deals with a life’s events: its representations match with the diverse expressions of dance theatre.

Floating on the whirl of suspended energies which return and hurt. Moving unsteadily along trajectories, directions, goals whose culmination is their interruption: a contact upsets the situation, reverses reality and takes us in a more intimate and psychological consideration.

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The scene, bordered by an evocative circle of kaleidoscopic lights, was animated for almost an hour by living pictures that show moments of human weakness, moments of exhibitionism, relationships, physical contacts, confrontations. In the absence of a logical narrative development, the dancers expressed diverse nuances of human beings in an authentic way, without trying to hide the spiritual flaws and the body’s desires. In most cases laughter was the predominant emotion, the hinge that link the performers’ body and soul.
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You can drown in existence. Or you can try to stay afloat amidst currents moving surfaces ruffled with possibilities that, once followed, are worth the risk, amidst whirlpools of precariousness to be avoided by resolute veering, amidst tides which punctually recur in order to regulate the ups and downs of feverish mankind. A mankind that did not forgo vitality, surprised in casual harmonies, on the edge of intentions hidden in the dark, implicit in the smile which is knowledge mixed with the creativity of words pronounced by the body. In the variation of arms closing on emptiness, in the evolution of legs jumping beyond the depths, in the palpitation of breaths shaping visions.

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Revealing the contradictions of human nature, making visible what the soul can only imagine, giving rise through dance to a physical poetry able to penetrate the Collective Unconscious: apparently these are the main targets of “I Float, I Drown, I Float”, the latest work by Atacama Company, in Rome at Teatro Vascello until the 29^th of March.

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A sequence of three moments, three movements in which stillness represents meditative thought, and frantic motion the joy of existence. All takes place within a virtual swimming-pool edged by kaleidoscopic lights: a perfect circle that recalls life, the perpetual flow of feelings and gestures. In this space five weird characters (Valeria Baresi, Anna Basti, Ilaria Bracaglia, Cristina Meloro, Marco Ubaldi) meet and clash, each of them occupied by his/her own flaws and weaknesses; they are human archetypes who can be scared as well as amazed.
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The frantic and unending race of an individual indifferent to life’s hindrances and to the strangers who cross his path. He runs, runs, runs, falls down and gets up again, runs and never stops. A ring, a circle, a round. The vanity of existence and the self-centredness that avoids others. The infinite and innumerable facets of human nature, which can shift from joy to pain, from fear to astonishment, from pleasure to shame in a split second. Points of view. Conceptual divergences. A wedding dress.
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… we also happen to laugh while watching three female dancers that talk to each other in an unknown language, vaguely onomatopoeic, rich in expressiveness and gestures, which reminds us how similar to each other we are: we quarrel and rejoice for the same things, little and simple… In a succession of solos, duets and trios, the three performers dance together and alone without affecting the sphere of the other dancers’ personality, even though the physicality of the contact moments makes them appear as one entity, as one body that moves in the space.

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Obstinate and irregular rhythms, desire and a tendency to fragmentation. In the era of technology Esposta appears as an invitation to reconciliation with one’s body. Thoughts are exposed, the face is exposed, memory is exposed. This creation by Atacama Company, founded in 1997 by Patrizia Cavola and Ivan Truol, guides the audience into listening to the imaginary presented by the expressive force of the choreographic language which inspires awe and a capitulation to love.

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We are always saying it: “I exposed myself” “Don’t expose yourself” “That person has undergone excessive exposure …” sometimes adding the adjective mediatic. The verb “to expose” has recently undergone a kind of genetic mutation and from the relatively simple meaning of “putting out, putting on show/in the window”, generally referred to objects, it now expresses a variety of meanings, psychological situations and feelings, invariably referring to us, human beings.
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A performance on the courage and the determination of a woman … an exploration into the possibilities of expression of a “female heroic body”, naked in its exposure, skinless and defenceless, in a mixture of poetry of movement and visionary pictorial elements.

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