This new project on Ravel’s most famous work is a choreographic object that sets out from the explicit premise that the Bolero is the world’s most popular orchestral score, a piece of music known and recognized by all.
Written in 1928 when Maurice Ravel was 53 and was suffering the first symptoms of FTD (frontotemporal dementia), the whole piece is built on one single melody – divided into two phrases – repeated nine times.
But what in fact is a Bolero? It is like a desert island, far away from the continents. An extended expressive field, a gesture of enrolment in the world. Given this point of departure, it is possible to achieve a body condition in “maximum aperture”, to force the enchanting sinuosity of the trajectory of an excited mass, to practice bodily turbulence attempting to break up the picture of composure.
The project is structured on research at musical level of border-crossing resonance of dance rhythms, thought of as an archaeological route starting from Ravel’s Bolero.
The sound ambient in which the choreographic score fits is built on the diminishing and dilations flows as in a sort of post-global dance hall. The attempt is to activate a place of co-habitation, a Utopian stage place where figure and background lose their own limits. Shifting the paradigm from dominion to disposition. A body preparing for a transformation must activate an inner light, something similar to a bright fire.
Is it ever possible to give up one’s own mental habits once and for all?

choreography: Cristina Rizzo
performer: Annamaria Ajmone, Cristina Rizzo, Simone Bertuzzi
music and D-jay: Simone Bertuzzi aka PALM WINE
light design and technical direction: Giulia Pastore
management: Chiara Trezzani
production: CAB 008 with the support of Regione Toscana and MiBACT
co-production: Biennale Danza of Venice
in collaboration with Terni Festival

[photo: Ilaria Scarpa]