One of the few Italian festivals totally dedicated to dance, Torinodanza was founded in the 1980s by the Turin Municipality and set in a beautiful open-air space, Rignon Park, able to hold over 1000 people. For dance, those were the glorious years of the greatest popularity and curiosity and the Festival artistic committee – at the time composed by all the five dance writers working in town – cleverly offered the largest range of styles and trends of the art at the higher quality, inviting the greatest international ballet and dance companies as guests (from The Royal Ballet to Mark Morris Dance Company, from Ballet Frankfurt to Angelin Preljocaj) and commissioning new productions from budding Italian choreographers (the most successful was Mauro Bigonzetti’s Mediterranea, later to become a true international hit performed worldwide by Balletto di Toscana).
Over the years Torinodanza has adapted its earlier artistic mission, absorbed and to become an integrated project of the Foundation Teatro Stabile di Torino – since 2015 named National Theatre by the Italian National Culture Department – the festival has guested mostly in a smaller venue, the Fonderie (Foundry) Limone, in Turin’s suburb Moncalieri, rescued as a functional Arts Factory with two small theatres, the Teatro Stabile school for actors and workshops for sets and costumes. As mentioned, the mission is now based above all on the proposals of the latest developments emerging on the dance scene, with rarer attention to the mainstream currencies of the contemporary scene and the tradition of the latest decades of the past century (actually so important for the choreographic art). Nonetheless, the current artistic director of Torinodanza, Anna Cremonini, seems to have found a balance between both trends, programming experimental new physical and theatrical languages whose imaginative strength is able to capture the attention of larger audiences and give them a special experience of how theatrical illusion is both creative and renewing.
After previous editions saw renowned exponents of this theatrical approach, such as Dimitris Papaioannou and the Peeping Tom Company, translate in such an original and personal way, the opening of Torinodanza 2022 was entrusted to the French-Belgium choreographer Damien Jalet (often a close collaborator of Sidi Lardi Cherkaoui, another of Cremonini’s inspirational artists) who presented the Italian premiere of Vessel. One of the three creations conceived with the Japanese visual artist Nawa Kohei, Vessel (2016) fulfils Cremonini’s intentions and the audience’s expectations. Visionary, mysterious and intriguing, what evolves in this 60-minute piece catches the attention until the end thanks to great use of lighting, set, sounds and ‘special effects’ balanced with calibrated mastery.
Centre-stage, a crater reveals an ebullient, lively white magma, fluid and solid at the same time; all around – on a water pool that during the show will help to create illusory effects, reflections, waves, rain – strange knots of flesh, limbs and torsos gradually expand themselves into the space. These acephalous creatures search continuously to disentangle themselves, but any attempt is only the occasion for new physical tangles. The outstanding performers’ muscles are carefully carved by the light and the tension required by the complicated partnering recalls a sort of material that through their dynamic transformations assumes new shapes, concentrating a vital energy ready to explode. The memory of Michelangelo’s unfinished sculptures of the Prisoners, mostly without a defined face and with the shapes of their bodies struggling to emerge from the marble, is very evocative, here.
In a previous interview, Jalet said that Vessel is about the underworld and surely here nothing appears real or tangible. Every creature is submitted to a continuous transformation, but no feeling is revealed. The seven dancers’ faces hidden by the wraps of the arms or virtuosic cambrées do not distract from the mysterious event we are attending with too human expressions of fatigue and tension. Finally, this silent liturgy, whose items are underlined by cosmic sounds, bring the creatures on the edge of the white vulcan, but only one, bloomed at last as a human shape, will reach the centre of the crater and will cover his flesh with the magma. Is it a rebirth? Or rather a disappearance, as the figure slowly goes down into the quicksand sepulchre? An unanswered question which increases the elusive fascination of Jalet's piece.
