"Can a man, when his life is nothing but suffering,
Look to the sky and say: thus
I too want to be. Yes. As long as friendship
True friendship still endures in the heart,
It does not hurt man to measure himself
With the divine. Is God unknown?
Is he manifest and open like the sky? This
I rather believe. This is the measure of man.
Full of merit, but poetically, dwells
Man on this earth. But the shadow
Of the night with the stars is not,
If I may dare to speak, more pure
Than man, who is called the image of the divine.
Is there a measure on earth? No.
There is none."
From Martin Heidegger, Essays and Discourses
Poetically Man Dwells - Friedrich Hölderlin
Protagonist of the Italian contemporary scene since the 1980s, the Florentine Virgilio Sieni, now director of the dance sector of the Venice Biennale, is "one of the very few authors capable, through movement - as Goffredo Fofi wrote - of creating compositions that still speak of the human."
A choreographer guest of all the major ballet companies of the former Italian opera foundations - La Scala in Milan, Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, Massimo in Palermo, San Carlo in Naples, Opera di Roma - it is with his company and the large 'family' of the Academy of the Art of Gesture, both based in the Cantieri Goldonetta in the Oltrarno area of Florence, that Sieni develops his tireless choreographic research. Over the last ten years, he has opened up to ordinary people, the anthropology of gesture, the workshop as continuous work, and the utopia of ‘making everyone dance’. In the two projects featuring him at the Festival, the complexity of the author Sieni can be experienced through his latest work produced for his company, Esercizi di Primavera, and a brand new project in stages on the Gospel according to Matthew with non-professionals.
Esercizi di Primavera, whose title is inspired by a lecture by Martin Heidegger on Hölderlin's poetry Poetically Man Dwells, is a journey through sixty exercises that lead the spectator into the mystery of the invention of movement. Six dancers explore its potential starting from the exercise (twists, bends, muscle tremors) and from dynamics, while a voice offstage narrates distant populations threatened or even made to disappear. The performers prepare for the change of the ‘new season’ by expressing their variations in which they challenge themselves and others: physical power and intellectual concentration, but also the fragility of a precarious balance. It is the sound of live cello by Naomi Berrill that guides them, a caress and a slap, a voice, a lament, a song, and percussion. Thus, man dwells poetically.
