Verklärte Nacht by Arnold Schönberg

The creation researches the closest relationship between dance and music, emancipating the expressive potentialities of the body, the elegance of the gesture, the reversibility that exists in the space between an impulse and a decision, between a determination and a glitch, a state in which the human perceives itself as a pure intensity.
Verklarte Nacht in the 1943 version for a string Orchestra, performed by Von Karajan with the Berlin Philaharmonic, is the incipit to articulate a visceral dance in which the body’s instinct in listening to the music, overcomes the concept and designs the dynamic image of the artistic gesture. It is the musical score of Schönberg, which the same author in 1950 described as pure music, composed like a symphonic poem in 7 main parts (grave, animato, poco allegro, grave, adagio, più mosso, moderato, adagio) that contains the dramaturgic sense, carrying out the interiority and making the impersonal of dance, appearing as a vibration trough a body given to music.
It is a slow, inexorable proceeding, the gait of an indicative present where the moment is only the semblance of a vaster time, the ancient character of an eternal return in order to be able to break the boundaries of imaginary and imagination. The dance is a pas de deux with a robot, an automata who makes its own route crossing the dancer’s paths. Its presence opens up a scenario on the imponderables, on all the materialities standing between the body and the space, changing and redrawing the same coordinates. And again it’s Schönberg who gives us the key to the best interpretation of this bet: When the form is in place everything can be pure feeling.

choreography and dance: Cristina Kristal Rizzo
musical assistant: Federico Costanza
production: CAB 008
with the support of MiBAC, Regione Toscana and Comune di Firenze