new creation 2013

 

 

il piacere di sentirsi terroni (the pleasure of feeling ‘terroni’*)

 

creation for per 7 dancers, 1 actor and 2 musicians

 worldpremière 3 August 2013 Teatro Rossini of Civitanova Marche (Italy) for Civitanova Danza Festival

  

* derogative term for Southerners

 

                                                                                                                                       photo by Alfredo Anceschi

 

an idea by Nello Calabrò and Roberto Zappalà

 

 

 

Vincenzo Pirrotta (voice)

 

Alfio Antico (drums) and Puccio Castrogiovanni (jew’s harps)

 

 

a co-production compagnia zappalà danza - Scenario Pubblico international choreographic centre Sicily

 

with the support of  Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali and Regione Siciliana Ass.to al Turismo, Sport e Spettacolo

 

 

sud-virus [south-virus] is Roberto Zappalà’s choreography commissioned by the Goteborg Ballet (Sweden). It was premièred at the Goteborg Opera on 14 October 2011. It was created by the choreographer with 12 dancers from the Swedish company, with original music by Puccio Castrogiovanni. The new Sudvirus, the 2013 one, is an extension and conceptual reorganisation of the original show, conceived for compagnia zappalà danza.

The word “virus”, from the Latin vīrus, means “toxin” or “poison”. In biology (and in information technology), viruses are entirely negative, characterised by “parasitic behavior which often continues until the death of the host cell”.

Parasitic behaviour and lack of proper structures are also two considerations which are often used, tritely, to define certain aspects of the south of Italy, and often the south of other countries too.

The company’s show aims to present the opposite: a biologically positive version of a new virus created using choreographic language which produces shapes, skills, and moral and aesthetic values. The “south-virus” of dance generates toxins which are healthy rather than poisonous.

In the version for the Goteborg Opera, the underlying concept of the show was to sneakily introduce the south-virus into a world far removed, at least in Europe, from the southern and Mediterranean world of Sicily. In the current, extended version, the focus shifts and becomes, if anything, even more universal. The south-virus no longer seeks to penetrate an apparently healthy body in order to devastate it from within, but simply wants to show what it is. With a conceptual flip, it seeks to present itself as positive, ready to show and represent a world, or a south, very different from the usual definition.

This is how the “south-virus” seeks to present itself, with the meaning of language as a virus, as Burroughs says and Laurie Anderson sings (“Language is a virus”).

This is a language made of dance, and the voice of Vincenzo Pirrotta together with the music of Alfio Antico and Puccio Castrogiovanni will insinuate like a virus, in the melodies of Bach, Vivaldi and Paganini. Dance, music, sounds, words, cries.

Language made up of the south, its heat, its sweat. Language made of a world which runs on incandescence, which at the same time gives out an inextinguishable and necessary human warmth which nevertheless risks exploding and burning, like the myriad light bulbs that constitute the incandescent set of the show.

 

For this production Roberto Zappalà will collaborate with 7 dancers of the company and with 3 extraordinary Sicilian artists: the actor Vincenzo Pirrotta and the musicians Alfio Antico and Puccio Castrogiovanni .