A dance work by Fabrizio Favale

Choreographed and performed by Fabrizio Favale
Set, costume and art work First Rose
We thank Sandra Fuciarelli (Limón technique), Roberta Escamilla Garrison (Cunningham technique) for the supervision on the techniques and methodologies used
Co-produced by Fondazione Teatro Comunale di Vicenza, Festival Danza in Rete, Festival MILANoLTRE, KLm – Kinkaleri / Le Supplici / mk
Supported by MIC / Regione Emilia-Romagna / Comune di Bologna
With the support of h(abita)t – Network of Spaces for Dance
The project was carried out with the contribution of ResiDanceXL – places and residency projects for choreographic creations, action of the Anticorpi XL Network

Work selected by NID – Platform 2023

Photo Sara Deidda, Agostino Mela, First Rose

Other versions of the work for unconventional spaces:
 
Version for landscape
This version takes place entirely in outdoor landscapes
 
The industrial version
This version takes place inside and in dialogue with industrial spaces
 
The botanical version
This version takes place inside botanical gardens

Moving away from purely spectacular settings, this work presents a series of dance sequences as if they were exercises or training in which the dancer, starting from some techniques and objectives of the Modern and Postmodern American dance from which he was trained, articulates them and projects them towards the future in free and experimental development possibilities.

Fabrizio Favale (currently 53 years old) returns to dance a choreographic work in the form of a solo, a work that chooses to focus attention on the techniques (not on the choreographies) conceived and developed in particular by Merce Cunningham and José Limón and on some objectives of Trisha Brown’s dance (who never codified a specific technique).

Danze Americane wants to collect and question the legacies of those practices, in an investigation and rediscovery of the dynamic, qualitative, compositional and postural contents. By constructing and deconstructing sequences, architectures and complexities of articulation of the body’s movement, the dancer, through “live” experimentation, seeks from time to time the junctions that allow possible evolutions, suggestions and drifts.

The work presents a total of 7 sequences, of which 2 created starting from some objectives of Trisha Brown’s dance, 4 from the Cunningham technique and 1 from the Limón technique. Each sequence is repeated twice, the first time without music and the second with a different piece of music each time. Subsequently, the dancer freely disassembles and recomposes the sequences, in a sense of experimentation and search for new and original movements, combinations, quality of movement. The number, modalities or techniques to which the sequences refer are announced to the audience by the dancer himself as he performs them.

The ideal spaces for the presentation of American Dances are Theaters with dismantled stages, in which all the gears and lights are visible; industrial, exhibition spaces etc.

Concept Fabrizio Favale
A collaboration Fabrizio Favale & C.G.J. Giulio and Jari Collective
Dancers Jari Boldrini and Giulio Petrucci
Original music Simone Grande
Co-production Fondazione Teatro Comunale di Vicenza, Festival Danza in Rete, Festival MILANoLTRE, KLm – Kinkaleri / Le Supplici / mk
With the contribution of MIC / Emilia-Romagna Region / Municipality of Bologna
With the support of h(abita)t – Rete di Spazi per la Danza
The project was created with the contribution of ResiDanceXL – places and residency projects for choreographic creations, action of the Anticorpi XL Network

For this new creation Fabrizio Favale circumscribes and shares with the dancers and choreographers Jari Boldrini and Giulio Petrucci the intuitions derived from the more experimental phases of the work Dance Americane.

The attempt is to transmit those materials to other bodies, to other tests and intelligences, towards unexpected developments, new articulations, free drifts.
Once they have received the materials, the two young artists proceed independently in the creation of the contents of Nubla: from the choreographic structures, to the costumes, to the scenic and sound environment.

Nubla is a choreographic object that proceeds through attempts, sometimes even only sketchy ones. The dancers, through the repetition of a practice, attempt different approaches to danced materials, repeating, varying or abandoning movement sequences that mix a chaotic and experimental sense with known and codified techniques.

The dancers mostly work in agreement with each other on the material to be used immediately, or they indulge in secret, personal variations accompanied by the gaze of the other. Sometimes intertwined as if they were a single living organism, they experiment not only with new movements, but also with unprecedented relational possibilities, new intelligences of the individual body and the social body. The legacy of techniques passed down from Dance Americane is used here as a springboard towards what is only hypothesized. Unknown qualities of movement will be experienced, as if they were in dialogue with other states of matter, a mobile and incoherent corporeal matter.

This experience in its declared uncertainty and in its physical and creative effort is shared in an empathetic sense between spectators and performers, where together they witness each time the success or failure of the experiment.

This short work / satellite is designed to be linked to Dance Americane performances or as a separate and independent object.

PRESS REVIEWS

Dances out of this world and dances out of place at NID
Review by Stefano Tomassini, TEATROECRITICA.NET 10/09/2023
“Fabrizio Favale with the brilliant Danze Americane literally brought down the theater between a demonstration of Limón technique, then Brown and then Cunningham”.

Something about Danze Americane
by Agnese Doria, Altre Velocità, 29/10/2022
“It’s that whole visual experience” Cunningham seems to have said when talking about dance. A few nights ago I went to see Fabrizio Favale’s “Danze Americane”. I’m not very lucid and biased because Favale’s dance touches me buried strings and makes a mysterious part of me vibrate. Favale returns to dance after perhaps a decade in which he had dedicated himself to choreography, after having therefore chosen to cross that thin threshold which tries to transmit an energetic and gestural flow to others on his own. He returns to inhabit and exhibit his body by fighting with memory: learning and retaining certain dance languages is a non-secondary game that requires a journey. In the suitcase that he packs for this journey, he chooses to return to his masters. He leans, in an original authorial path, on some crucial points of the research undertaken by Cunningham, Trisha Brown and Limón to return to them, with the maturity of a consolidated artist. An embodied, mature and thoughtful reflection on the legacy of the season of “American dance” experiments. As a spectator, I abandoned myself to visions and dilations, reverberations and drawings in the air, having the opportunity to listen to my body and to feel how well I felt in being freed from the background buzz of thoughts and worries, feeling how right it was to abandon the sense in favor of the senses. How great was the possibility offered by an abstraction free from interpretations, within which one can enter and exit, free from the taxonomic classification urgencies of which our today is greedy.

Dance in Rete off: the new generation of international dance in Vicenza
Review by Renzo Francabandera, PAC paneacquaculture.net 14/03/2024

Danze Americane.
Fabrizio Favale, now a firm presence in Italian independent choreography and who is at DIR Off with this interesting project also selected at NID – Platform 2023 and by ResiDanceXL, presents 3 of the total 7 choreographic sequences, proposed as if they were the evolution of exercises within a training.
The dancer, starting from some specific techniques and modalities of American modern and postmodern dance (from which the author himself comes by training, as he clarifies in a message read in Italian and English at the beginning of the show) proposes exercises by masters such as José Limón, Trisha Brown and Merce Cunningham, first offered to the public, so to speak, in purity; then the same exercise is proposed again on a musical basis and subsequently developed in a version enriched with ideas and stimuli closer to the contemporary choreographic sign, showing the link between these marvelous sprouts originating from the past century and the gestural and artistic declinations that from those still live in the present of dance.
From the technique of the great Mexican master Limón, which develops through a subdivision into isolations of localized impulses, directed in all directions, to the search for Brown, up to closing with a Cunningham adage, thus crossing the decades with few but very clear signs central of the last century, those between the Thirties and the Fifties. Full Scholarship at the American Dance Festival 1990, Favale, very young, in 1996 was named “best Italian dancer” by the G. Tani Award and after having brought his code to Italy and abroad, in the three-year period 22-24 Fabrizio Favale is Artist Associate of MILANOLTRE.
Here in the exercises, at the beginning of which some wings and the backdrop are lowered to leave the bare box of the stage visible and therefore the art space emptied of artifice, the technique that he has brought to the present is also used. It is a moving journey through the history of language, upon closer inspection, proposed not by chance in chronological progression, and this makes visible the passage from the forms still hybridized with the gestures of ballet, of Limón, to the more psychological and free ones of Brown up to the Cunningham’s relationship which frees the movement from the need to “explain” the music, making the body explode in all its significant power.
The work has its own clarity, particularly appreciable by those who are passionate about history, the evolution of signs, the understanding of their making, mixing, recovering and letting go to go further. In this respect Danze Americane, a bit like Lezioni Americane by Calvino, wants to return to some key concepts to bring them back to today with an eye to the future.