Freely inspired by Tristes Tropiques by Claude Lévi-Strauss

The show is freely inspired by Tristes Tropiques by Claude Lévi-Strauss.
Virgilio Sieni does not produce a literal transcription of the test: on stage two couples of women (dancers Simona Bertozzi, Michela Minguzzi, Ramona Caia, Elsa De Fanti) and a blind girl (Filippa Tolaro). Figures that from a distance appear as undefined shadows, opaque visions, close and dependent figures, couples that “huddle together nostalgic for their lost unity”.
The show is developed in three parts in which the female apparitions are identified as a “penultimate” presence, following a tripartite journey through animal vicinity, conveyed tenderness, lasting nostalgia that foster the sense of what the ethnologist described as “the West’s lost opportunity of remaining female”. Tristes Tropiques opens to the agony and the evocation, dazzling us with eternal nostalgia, disclosing the sedimentation of ritual as it becomes a gesture between animality and humanity.

This is how Virgilio Sieni tells of the genesis of his work: “In the summer of 2008 I was in Avignon, and after discussing dance, couscous and the idleness of the body with Giorgio Agamben, I picked up an essay he wrote on bricolage dedicated to the 75th birthday of Claude Lévi-Strauss. It was then that I decided to work on those “tramps lost at the bottom of their swamp” and how their brutalisation had despite all preserved some aspects of the past: aspects reflected in body and facial decoration of an ancestral nature and relationships between cosmic hierarchies and myths. Bodies and populations that reveal a possible bond with the inaccessible, indicating a flicker of hope for us. And once again, I felt a strong desire relating to dance, not so much as a metric, symbolic, poetic form, but as experience of inertia, as exercise in reanimation during the process of disintegration of man. These cannot be the stories but only the physically fragmented defecations of the stories of the groups of Tupi-kawahib, Nambikwara, Caduvei, Bororo told by Lévi-Strauss in his travels around the 1940s in the Mato Grosso area of Brazil. Populations that were already declining but surviving in which the “noble women” refer to what Lévi-Strauss defined the lost occasion offered to the West of choosing its mission”.
Virgilio Sieni

conception, choreography, set design, light: Virgilio Sieni
original score: Francesco Giomi
performance and collaboration: Simona Bertozzi, Ramona Caia,
Elsa De Fanti, Filippa Tolaro, Michela Minguzzi
lighting: Marco Santambrogio
costumes: Lydia Sonderegger
masks and scenery: Chiara Occhini
setting: Francesco Pangaro
sound: Matteo Ciardi
production: Daniela Giuliano
organisation: Giulia Dabbene
administrative director: Rossella Nati
administration office: Marina Frulio
production 2010: La Biennale di Venezia, Spielzeit’europa / Berliner Festspiele, Bitef Theatre Belgrade
as part of ENPARTS – European Network of Performing Arts
with the support of Culture Programme of the European Commission
in co-production with: Biennale de la Danse de Lyon, Teatro Stabile di Napoli, Compagnia Virgilio Sieni

The Company is supported by Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali- Direzione Generale per lo Spettacolo dal vivo, Regione Toscana, Comune di Firenze