After collecting movements and gestures of bystanders with the project Casual Bystanders and developing game and social dynamic standards with the project Twister, Salvo Lombardo continues with Present Continuous his research into the relationship between memory, perception and movement by observing real life.
In this case, the choreography is once again “derivative” and often calls upon “ready-made” gestures. The performance is based on the shared memory of the same experience – an evening in a night club – during which performers observed and appropriated a system of postures, motor-actions and relational means of those present.
In every daily act we produce tracks that attest to our being in the world. We immortalize surrogates of reality, bodiless mists, which nail events to an eternal present, spreading themselves on our behalf and reproducing a fixed condition that excludes any real relationship with their original subject.
Present Continuous simply seeks to mark the points of a choreographic narrative that has been developed on the basis of the negotiation of memory through the sharing of reproducible motor sequences. The memory of real movement intertwines with a subjective micro-narrative that reveals the emotional life of the performers in their attempt to reconfigure a shared memory of movement and the experience it created, which, exploding from its actual re-enactment, leaves the “now” and becomes bounded to a future in the making.

Salvo Lombardo is an Italian perfomer, choreographer and director who works between theatre, dance and visual art. He lives and works in Rome. His works have been presented in the main festivals and theatres in Italy. In 2015-2016 he was resident choreographer at Anghiari Dance Hub where he worked at the project Casual Bystanders based on a choreographic pattern representing an archive of “not-extraordinary” gestures proceeding from kinetic fragments of common people observed in public places. From 2017 he is associated artist to the Festival Oriente Occidente within which he created the performance Present Continuous inspired by a memory system of gestures which stem from a night’s work at a music club and also the interactive installation in augmented reality titled Reappearances conceived for the MART Museum of Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto and involving the participation of the local community. Still in 2017 he was guest choreographer at Aura Dance Theatre of Kaunas (LIT) for which he created the performance Twister, a Fabbrica Europa co-production, studying the relationship between gesture memory, play and sociality.

conceived, choreographed and directed by Salvo Lombardo
performers: Cesare Benedetti, Lucia Cammalleri, Daria Greco, Salvo Lombardo
collaborating choreographer: Daria Greco
lighting design: Loris Giancola
sound design: Fabrizio Alviti
production: Festival Oriente Occidente
co-production: Chiasma, Versiliadanza
with the support of DiD Studio – Ariella Vidach AiEP, Versilia Danza, Anghiari Dance Hub, Teatri di Vita
special thanks to Studio Azzurro – Area Ricerca Progressiva

[photo: Michela Di Savino]