La Commedia – Emio Greco | PC

Choreography and directing:  Emio Greco | Pieter C. Scholten

with: Victor Callens, Dereck Cayla, Vincent Colomes, Neda Hadji-Mirzaei, Sawami Fukuoka, Suzan Tunca and others
Light design: Henk Danner
Costume: Clifford Portier

The show will be at Torino Danza in September 2011
“The fact that has given life to this adventure has been a love at first sight by the two artists, respectively Italian and Dutch, for a place where full and empties give back extreme sensations” – Susanne Franco and Roberto Casarotto declare, curators of the dance projects for HangarBicocca. Emio Greco and Pieter Scholten, inspired by the presence of The Seven Heavenly Palaces by Anselm Kiefer and by the artworks of the Terre Vulnerabili project, have thus rethought to their journey on the traces of Dante’s Divine Comedy, bringing it into the theatrical dimension of the comedy and have started new reflections on the great existential questions. Starting from the experience done in the deconstruction of the many meanings of Hell, Purgatory and Paradise and in giving them a different sense, the choreographer and the playwright give life to a show that also feeds on the suggestions evoked by the monumental Kiefer’s Towers, among which the dancers move.
The four steps that have measured the artistic research of Greco and Scholten starting from the  Dantesque poem, that is Hell (2006), the diptych on Purgatory In vision and Popopera (2008) and finally Para | Diso (2010), find in La Commedia a sort of summa, but also a new start. With a good amount of humor, used as a weapon to contrast the pervasive pathos, the two artists face themes such as the mass media influence, populism, megalomania, originality and individual responsibility. “Everything that has a value is vulnerable” is the affirmation of the Dutch poet Lucebert that has been a light in this enquire on the existential fight for dignity and respect. Can this battle been fought through laughs and comical acts? – Greco and Scholten ask themselves. Bringing again the body close-up La Commedia wants to give back muscle force and new rhetorical vis to vulnerability. Contemporary dance comes back thus to deal with the great themes of life and nowadays and to put us in front of the infinite potentialities of the bodies moving through the space.

The dance company of Emio Greco | PC, active since 1995 and winner of important international awards, has founded in 2009 the International Choreographic Arts Centre Amsterdam (ICKamsterdam) which, besides producing shows, hosts workshops, seminars and researches that feed the reflection on dance and sustain new talents with an international and interdisciplinary approach.