Returning to Oriente Occidente after three editions is Balletto Civile, the company led by choreographer and performer Michela Lucenti. Following the success of In-erme, created for the centenary of the Great War, comes a new work co-produced by the Festival, intriguingly titled Bad Lambs. This is a physical score—in the unmistakable style of Balletto Civile—featuring an expanded group of performers: Bad Lambs combines the core ensemble with several differently-abled dancers, initiating new processes and encounters.
The relationship has always been at the heart of Lucenti's research: “I am convinced,” explains the choreographer, “that the creative work activated by relationships brings great surprises. It allows us to achieve unexpected goals in overcoming the limits of each performer. A conscious process on everyone’s part, yet bold and strong in striving for something universal that the audience can immediately understand. As performers and artists, we do not create any therapeutic methods: our goal is the stage, the performance. This drives us to place great importance on the process. We enjoy telling stories through the body, that’s all. But we also want those watching to feel included in these stories.”
Bad Lambs adheres to this methodology, and the immense workshop effort—ongoing as we write—consists of attempting to blend different bodies to find harmony, a common denominator for a journey in the present. Everything starts from a story, as is customary for the choreographer. What is a ghost? “Something that influences our actions in its persistence. The bad lambs lost their better part in a car accident. Not everyone realizes it, but each one is unable to say goodbye to their ghost. Yet they try, stumbling, losing balance, pulling and pushing each other, breaking china, running, in a desperate search for a place to call home.”
Without intending to soften reality, Bad Lambs explores the grace with which each individual accepts transformation or loss: the search for willpower and the efforts made to reconstitute oneself, according to an innate spirit of self-preservation. Bad Lambs examines what we can do when we have lost everything: it tells the story of the war humanity faces so that death becomes tragedy, noise becomes music, movement becomes dance, and word becomes poetry.
