The historic company Abbondanza/Bertoni, based in Rovereto for many years where Michele Abbondanza and Antonella Bertoni also founded the Scuola d’Azione, a theoretical and physical space for training and the transmission of movement, returns to the Oriente Occidente Festival with an entirely new artistic project. Like their most recent successful performance Death and the Maiden, which won the Danza&Danza Award for Best Italian Production in 2017 and was based on Franz Schubert’s string quartet of the same name, the new work also draws from a musical source. The title immediately makes the source of inspiration clear. It refers directly to the famous 1956 album by American jazz musician Charles Mingus, considered a milestone not only in his career but also in the history of jazz. Pithecanthropus Erectus (named after the first recorded track, which tells the story of human evolution in a ten-minute suite—a subdued theme that occasionally bursts with the intrusion of a frenzied, dissonant saxophone, culminating in collective improvisation) was a prelude to Mingus’s later work, increasingly focused on new expressive directions that would lead to the emergence of free jazz in the following decade. Drawn to the harmonic and rhythmic freedom of this iconic LP, and to the political and social undertones produced by Mingus’s often dissonant and jarring sounds, Michele Abbondanza and Antonella Bertoni create an all-male dance quartet. Through Charles Mingus’s genius, his experimentation, and multi-instrumentalism, they give voice to the other half of the sky excluded from their previous production (the female trio Death and the Maiden), exploring a possible polymorphism of the 21st-century male "martian."
abbondanzabertoni.it
