All dressed up with nowhere to go

by Giorgia Nardin
with Marco D’Agostin, Sara Leghissa
research Amy Bell, Marco D’agostin, Sara Leghissa, Giorgia Nardin
music Luca Scapellato
light design Matteo Fantoni
photos Alice Brazzit
costumes by Edda Binotto

“What is really shocking in Bosch’s painting is that, in spite of its profusion of realism, it strives to express the immateriality almost from the beginning”.
Carl Linfert

An empty frame, a male body, a female body and an ensemble of minor everyday actions torn from reality and integrated in an ethereal context deprived from the diachronic flowing of time and its hunger. This is how the bodies in the choreographies of Giorgia Nardin lie: full of material, consumed by a “political” sentiment that goes through them from head to feet and collapses in a core hidden from the gaze, in the slowness of the movement, in the nudity, in an imposition – reassuring and cruel at the same time – of reality. An idea of being on stage – or in the world – that Nardin has been nurturing during her dance training in the most important European research centres, in workshops with national and international artists (Simona Bertozzi, Nigel Charnock, Adam Linder, Yoshifumi Inao, Tabea Martin, Emio Greco, Barokthegreat) and through the collaboration with Marco D’Agostin and Francesca Foscarini, friends and fellow travellers with whom in 2011 she created the funny and disturbing “Spic & Span” (special mention at Premio Scenario the same year). After “Dolly”, her first solo choreography on the theme of gender identity, presented at DNA Romaeuropa Festival 2012, “All dressed up with nowhere to go” is her first choreographic work. A long title to stress the lack of an end or a constant and at the same time subtle transformation. To be dressed up without knowing where to go: to destroy the linearity of time, the beginning and the end, the body’s chance to find memory in the gesture, to crystallize the movement, to enter a preset score in spite of a categorical rejection of improvisation. The bodies of the performers are, on this stage, pins of reality stuck in the weaving of the performance. They touch their noses, heads; they fold cuffs and collars as if they were surprised in the street, in a supermarket, or seat at the office’s desk. Only one limb remains still, as a goad sustaining all the weight of reality, as a trunk that digs and presses the land, vainly trying to draw out its own roots, to subsequently find itself out of balance, subject to all the force of gravity. So the bodies of the dancers react, through the continuous transformation of their degree of presence and movement awareness, to a loss of balance, through a choreography composed by a limited set of patterns that every single performer can freely use to avoid falling. This bold use of “reality” – that beyond the metaphor skilfully touches the borders of performing art- is mirrored in an immaterial dimension that gradually fills the stage through the cyclical nature of movement. Weariness is an escape route, contact is a form of protection to escape from the gaze of an observer that runs over the bare and sacred surface of the bodies without embarrassment or provocation. Everything lies there, in trying to foresee the abstract in the concrete and the reality in the abstraction, in the pale tints of the bodies and in the soft lighting of a form of warmth. After all, as Nardin says, “All dressed up with nowhere to go” traces its source of inspiration in the vision of Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings, and even if the choreographer’s research gradually shifted from that initial inspiration, something the painter’s tints, patterns and soul seems to linger in her work: the circular frame, as already remarked, but also an idea of transcendence that originates from immanence and becomes a device to frame something contemporary that removes certainties, takes away ground, shatters and takes the balance away. And the body reacts to all this.

Matteo Antonaci

Winner of Premio Prospettiva Danza 2013
Developed as part of ChoreoRoam Europe 2012
Developed as part of B Project 2013
Supported by CSC – Bassano del Grappa, Graner – Mercat de les Flors Barcelona, La Piccionaia – I Carrara – Teatro Villa dei Leoni, La Conigliera – Resana, Inteatro – Polverigi, Teatro Fondamenta Nuove – Venezia, Arearea – Udine.