with Philippe Barbut, Biagio Caravano, Francesco Saverio Cavaliere, Marta Ciappina, Laura Scarpini
choreography Michele Di Stefano
soundtrack BIGG, Riff Raff, Geir Jenssen
management Carlotta Garlanda
productio mk 2013, Regione Lazio Assessorato alla Cultura Arte e Sport
in collaboration with Routes Agency, National Prehistoric Ethnographic Museum "Luigi Pigorini" Rome and MELA/European Museums in an age of migrations
supported by MiBACT
Africa, as prefigured by Raymond Roussel in his novel Impressions d'Afrique (1910), is a surreal landscape, which has no other purpose than to serve as a background to a combinatorial method, based on continuous chain reactions of words and friction of arbitrary different worlds. Unreadable and wild - because prone to absorb all the information suggested by the Western regimes in order to create unpredictable hybrids - our Africa has more to do with the discovery of new destinations than with a search for origins .
The performances stages the characters of a turbid adventure novel and investigates them at the exact moment they don't know what to do with their roles anymore. They just want to present themselves to the real world and react to their exotic boundaries and cliché. We'll see a woman doomed to sacrifice, a patrol of Marines in reconnaissance, some experts in telepathy.
Their aim seems to be the search for a new body posture as the result of a cautious ballistic calculation which is also nevertheless full of swagger. The new proximity to reality asks for strategies: cohabitation is now their new deal.
In terms of dance we consider movement as an act of learning and choreography as the making of a landscape. Full of people.
Impressions d'Afrique premiered May 2013 as a site-specific project at the National Ethnographic Museum "Luigi Pigorini" in Rome; it was accompanied by a talk about postcolonial issues, as if to confirm its allure of an anthropological report.
An expanded version of the performance was presented June 2013 at the BiennaleDanza in Venice and September 2013 at Short Theatre Festival in Rome.
This version includes guest performers and instructed people.