A work by Fabrizio Favale & First Rose

Choreography Fabrizio Favale

Dancers Daniele Bianco, Daniel Cantero, Giuseppe Catalfamo, Matteo Di Ciommo, Martina Di Giacomo, Alessandro Girardi, Alicia Ianeselli, Valentina Verini

Knitting by Atelier Della Lana Bologna

Parrots supplied by Animal Spot Milano

Rare Plants supplied by Poti Pota, Bologna

Sleeping boys Filippo Pagotto, Filippo Scotti

Visual Arts Valentina Palmisano

Music Alex Somers, Pascal Pinon, Rökkurró

Costumes, atmosphere and space First Rose

Choreography assistant and ballet trainer Po-Nien Wang

Technician Roberto Passuti

Project manager Andrea A. La Bozzetta

Produced by KLm – Kinkaleri / Le Supplici / mk

Supported by MIC / Regione Emilia-Romagna / Comune di Bologna

Site-specific creation for the Ex Chiesa di San Mattia, supported by MIC – Musei Nazionali di Bologna – Direzione Regionale Musei Nazionali Emilia-Romagna

Created in artistic residency at Teatro Consorziale di Budrio

Art work First Rose

With this experiment the company previews the prototype that tests the foundations of a future work and its compositional method.

In the center of the city of Bologna, for two consecutive days, the experiment brings together in the same place and for a specific time presences and activities of a very different nature: choreography, handmade works, creation of artworks, impromptu everyday events, rare plants and animals.

PRESS REVIEWS

Evidence of an Anti-Speciesist World: Fabrizio Favale & First Rose in Bologna for Danza Urbana Festival
 
Three rare, cat-sized parrots, yellow-blue or white, perched on perches in front of a chapel on the left side of the church of San Mattia in Bologna; behind them are their carriers and their tutors/companions. In the adjacent chapel, in a niche, is the statue of a saint decapitated below the shoulders; in front of the altar are two knitters, each wearing a Peruvian alpaca chullo with earflaps. At the entrance to the church, a maker and designer of dodecahedrons and other paper geometric shapes; in the first chapel on the left are two backpackers (or is this an echo of the reality of the many homeless people living under Bologna’s porticoes, a result of increasingly stark inequalities?). On the counter-façade, a naively expressive Annunciation interrupts the grates of the choir behind which, we imagine, the patrician families and the Dominican nuns who founded this conventual church could attend the celebrations, as was the custom, without being seen.
The way the former Church of San Mattia in Bologna reacts and interacts with The Nothing Island (prototype for a new work) by Fabrizio Favale & First Rose, presented exclusively for the Bologna Urban Dance Festival, is anything but neutral. To the many surviving features of this church, despite its heavy plundering over the centuries—the stuccoes, paintings, and sculptures—Favale and First Rose add compositional and installation “finds” that seem, in a certain sense, almost ironic reinterpretations of the factographism of twentieth-century Russian theater. Except that, instead of modern farms and the engineering works of the new Soviet world, here are inserted minimal, unrelated “facts” of everyday life, semblances of the animal, plant, and human worlds, which complement the performative moment by placing it in artistic-visual and conceptual contact with entities located within a boundary perimeter, in a limbo that is an integral part of the universal atlas of creation.
The fact remains that the spectators, arranged along the four sides, receive visual and auditory stimulation from all sides as the stage is synchronously crossed by the performers, in several waves, with multiple entrances and exits from the wings, almost in successive and multiple processions or parades: in pairs, in small and large groups, solo, from a door leading to the church altar.
Meanwhile, a parrot whistles, vocalizes, unfurls its long tail, one of the sleeping men wakes up, gets up, and passes in front of the audience. It is not a closed work, but an ecosystem, with an anti-speciesist approach, which includes fragments and examples of living life, in which the human landscape, which is only a part, not the whole, is made up of the audience and the bodies of eight persuasive performers, happy with their youth and their light, precise and erect gait: three dancers, Martina Di Giacomo, Alicia Ianeselli, Valentina Verini and five male dancers: Daniele Bianco, Daniel Cantero, Giuseppe Catalfamo, Matteo Di Ciommo, Alessandro Girardi.
The language of their bodies seems mostly that of a notebook of notes, the test of a choreography yet to be constructed: the first brushstrokes of a neo-abstract canvas, which, in their apparent indefiniteness, nevertheless mark the first, decisive step in identifying the underlying stylistic tone, a kinetic atmosphere that will form the foundation of the work to come. They are drawings and trajectories of constructed randomness, of deliberate non-consequentiality, which contain memories of noble traditions of modern and contemporary dance, but as if barely hinted at and then varied in sudden neo-morphologies, difficult without seeming so. An ambiguity of signs found in the performers’ appearances, in their tracksuits, tank tops, and gym socks, with ambivalence of effect in the dancers: their hair tightly gathered in a classical ballerina bun, their heavy makeup, and their solemn expressions, detached from everything around them—visual cues tempered, however, by the everyday nature of their costumes, the baggy Adidas tracksuit bottoms, further contradicted by their slim-fit tank tops.
Performers, parrots, rare plants, sleeping men, and knitters, visited as they are by a natural and pre-musical sound discourse, by a syntax of puffs, whispers, hisses, and whistles of wind, seem to refer to an external world, perhaps cold, as the Andean headdresses and sleeping bags also seem to suggest. They almost subtly evoke the hope of a Utopia, of an island of nothingness that could be a new world, even more than a new work, as the title of the work suggests. Certainly a universe, or rather a multiverse, no longer, hopefully, anthropocentric.
By Olindo Rampin, Bon-Vivre.net

Bologna embraces Danza Urbana, the historic festival immersed in the city

The festival closes with The Nothing Island by Fabrizio Favale & First Rose, who creates an imaginary island filled with people, artifacts, rare plants, parrots, and suspended sounds. A scenic landscape where events are also left to chance, and the spectator learns to scrutinize the invisible lines between the elements.
The gaze indeed wanders freely within the large ecclesiastical structure, where, under a niche, two men lie in sleeping bags, facing the spectators at close range; a young artisan creates three-dimensional, geometric paper sculptures; in the background, two women knit, while three ladies, owners of the three areas, occasionally and unpredictably emit their high-pitched cries. Within this enormous viewing space, punctuated by the presence of succulent plants, some of which are monumental, the dancers move with the elegance of classical steps, between battements tendu, allongé, port de bras, and bras bas; Either with outstretched palms, or with arms reaching for the sky, almost as if to welcome something divine, emerging from the space and then re-entering in new formations with four or five elements, before some final solos.
The music is minimal: at first, it’s almost a dull sound, similar to that of a large fan, which plunges the church into silence when it’s muted. Then other tracks: on a sustained low note, every now and then a small melody of three or four notes repeats. A still situation, in which the dance bursts into a space where the spectator’s gaze wanders unpredictably, as do their thoughts. A slow mental pinball machine, in which thoughts wander in imponderable shapes and directions, while the eyes embrace the dancers’ movements. A work with evident installational, as well as choreographic, significance. An inspired and subtle composition.
By Renzo Francabandera, paneacquaculture.net