Ballo improprio

Shows

The repertoire of Znamenny songs that underpins this dance represents a matrix that is completely alien to the dance itself, because its use was, and is, exclusively linked to the Orthodox divine liturgy. Indeed, we should ask ourselves - and we have done so - whether it is not completely unjust and arrogant to take advantage of a centuries-old tradition that arose from the real life of the people, which in itself degrades any other use as improper. But the crux of the matter lies precisely in this need to draw from a foreign and alien source, which betrays a sense of lack that is both formal and moral, and which therefore pushes us to leave every form within reach and to look far away, where we can only glimpse something right, even if it is located in a remote time and space.

The 14th century Znamenny chant, which connects the Black Sea to the Baltic Sea through a long line, prompted us to go to those places where a human communion was simply achieved by giving life to a story. It is true: we are cut off from its religious matrix, but it is as if we wanted to learn a new language through the signs that it projects – and Znamenny means precisely ‘signs’, those graphic lines that served to orient oneself in the performance of the chant. The procession and the circular movement are ritual forms that we invent here from scratch, trying to follow tradition as a path to take, without being experts, in the trust that that matrix will allow the transfer of those who seek to realign dance and universal motion.

The clothes are ceremonial, rather than being folkloristic reconstructions of ancient vestments, they are designed and sewn with a view to the dance
as explanatory addenda of the movement: that is, they perform a technical function for the dance; and also in this aspect there is, in our making an alien tradition our own, the attempt to understand that special congruity between decoration and function. The word ‘dance’ in the title underlines the tendency to reconvert the dance to the ancient formal way of popular dances, adespot and circular rather than choreographic. Compared to the sonorous splendor of the most well-known Orthodox chorality, the Znamenny song, here performed live by the In Sacris Choir of Sofia, wears an austere garment as if to solicit a thought that alternates the weight of the concept with the space of silence. Its rhythmic dimension will have to enter into a relationship with the alternation of distances and architectural convergences that Palladio’s Teatro Olimpico puts into action, finding here, in Vicenza, an opportunity for exceptional experience of what measure and understanding mean.