BOLERO SOIRÉE

Production MM Contemporary Dance Company
Coproduction Elegia: Teatro Comunale di Modena

ELEGIA

People in search of their own path and identity, united by the same inclusion in one historical period, in an era like the present one that brings dizziness and bewilderment. Individuals who trace new trajectories and look for new ways to recover their own route, in a moment of exile from normality. A tale of lost moments and relationships, coupled with the search, in one’s memory, for images and landscapes that used to be familiar and comforting to us. A dream journey to rediscover one’s self, now lost. When we think we have nothing left to lose, the hope of a new beginning brings us back to the primary instinct of resistance and struggle for life.

A choral dance that plunges us into a whirlwind of lines and trajectories. These meet and intertwine, in an apparent primordial chaos until the return of quiet, which brings with it the choice of abandoning oneself to a rediscovered hope, in view of a new rebirth.

A praise of care, of paying attention to others, amplified by the words taken from the poems of Italian poetess Mariangela Gualtieri.

Mariangela Gualtieri lyrics:

– Excerpt from Sii dolce con me, sii gentile (Be sweet with me, be kind) – in: Bestia di gioia (Einaudi Editore, 2010)
– Excerpt from Alcestis – in: Bestia di gioia (Einaudi Editore, 2010)
– Excerpt from Canto di ferro – in: Paesaggio con fratello rotto (L. Sossella Editore, 2007)
– Excerpt from Gli altri sono troppi per me (The others are too much for me) – in: Senza polvere senza peso (Einaudi Editore, 2006)

BOLERO

Like a precise clockwork, Bolero (1928), is still today one of the reasons why the lucky score seems to be strongly linked to an evocation of sensuality.

Michele Merola created in 2015 a new version of Bolero, after a deep and long study with this obsessive and repetitive music, trying to fully understand its identity, reasons and functions until he gets the main interpretation: at the end of his studies path, the choreographer inspiration focus on the inexhaustible range of human relations, especially the ones related to couple relationship, in which we often note the mutual and irreconcilable distance between men and women, “the invisible wall” dividing their existence. So, as shades of dance are different as choreography declines the variety of moods that make our existence so “spicy”. All human feelings are present in this choreography and Bolero score highlights them from the allusive opening drumbeats to the final orchestra “explosion”. Dance conveys to a sort of abstract “bitter tale”, allegory of the pain for living and misunderstandings between humans.

On the Ravel’s music intervened composer Stefano Corrias, which created its own musical score, loosely based on the Bolero, which integrates perfectly with it, fitting in three different moments of choreography. The three fragments emphasize the most intimate moments, and more real, of each of us, when we are far from the gaze of others, and far from the deafening noise of the world.

That’s how Bolero become a metaphor of our life always half away between conflict and dialogue, seduction and disappointment, surprise and bewilderment.