Aringa Rossa

Creation Biennale de la danse de Lyon on September 27, 2014

Blurring the lines, arranging clues, confusing the audience: these are the techniques that the choreographer loves above all else. Aringa Rossa perhaps takes this to the extreme, borrowing its name—Red Herring—from a narrative technique used in cinema that consists of filling the story with false leads. Thus hooked, the viewer becomes attached to a gesture, watches for a character or a situation, when perhaps they should have been looking elsewhere.
This piece for nine dancers takes on the appearance of a detective novel, peppered with false leads and narrative dead ends. Everyday actions tinged with absurdity—a phone call, a song—set the pace for a piece that alternates between ballet scenes, fragments of dialogue, wordplay and situations, and games. And the group effect and the sheer number of performers only accentuate the choreographer’s delight in this game of endless repetitions and reconfigurations. “These tracks are like recurring signs, threads that are woven together, layers of clues that eventually fit into a kind of mini-script. But rather than a narrative, I would call it a situation; by telling everything and nothing at the same time, these scattered forms say something about the human condition,” she explains.

In this piece, Igor Sciavolino’s musical montage, made up of fragments of life, sounds, and music by great composers (Monteverdi, Stravinsky, Amodei), plays a major role in this arrangement between the plastic and sculptural composition of bodies, between dance and theater.