Dancers, cyborgs and acrobats

Nehad Selaiha faces a dizzying theatrical medley in Polverigi
Polverigi is a tiny Italian village perched on the top of a hill in Le Marche region, overlooking the Adriatic Sea. Arriving there, late at night from Ancona, the capital of the region, after a nasty ride up and down steep hills and twisting narrow roads, you are likely to think it is the last place on earth anyone would expect to find a festival. It was very quiet as the car trundled up the diminutive high street and scrunched up the gravel drive leading to the porch of a quaint old building called Villa Nappi, the headquarters of the inteatro festival. Formerly a monastery which dates back to the 11th century, it occupies a very prominent spot, dominating the village and the surrounding landscape and has a charming old garden, dotted and bordered with pines, oaks and chestnuts; and in the middle of the lawn, towering above the rest, and proudly marked with a tag, is an ancient cedar of Lebanon the monks are reported to have planted there hundreds of years ago. Eventually, the monastery became a private residence for a succession of big families until it was bought by the municipality in 1976, renovated and turned into a community centre to pump some energy into the life of the sleepy village and cater for the artistic needs of its population.
The project was masterminded and set in motion by Dr Domenico Mancia, a neurologist by profession, with a practice in Parma, who was then (and continued for more than 20 years later) mayor of Polverigi. He is a kind, burly man, very friendly and genial, with a genuine passion for theatre; he was always there in the evening, greeting the guests and sharing the performances with the audience, and every morning you were sure to find him sitting outside the village café, near the church, chatting with visitors and locals alike over steaming cups of espresso. Dr Mancia needed a creative mind to make his dream come true and hit on the right man for the job. It was the late Italian director Roberto Cimetta, another son of Polverigi. Cimetta came to Villa Nappi with his assistant and devoted disciple, Velia Papa, the current artistic director of the inteatro festival, then a very young woman, and together they worked to transform that old building into a hive of theatrical activity and a magnet for young talented people and budding artists. Behind them, there was always Dr Mancia's staunch, unfailing support. From this modest beginning, the inteatro international festival was born and has become over the years one of the most exciting theatrical events in Europe.
When Cimetta died five years ago (leaving young theatre artists a generous gift in the form of a fund to help them travel round, north and south of the Mediterranean -- The Roberto Cimetta Mobility Fund), Velia Papa took over the steering wheel as director, with Dr Mancia continuing as titular president. Since then, she has expanded the project, hosting workshops and training programmes in dance, movement and other theatrical arts at the Villa all the year round. The festival has become an important event in the life of the Polverigi community and generates a lot of activity around it, she realizes. But it is not enough; Villa Nappi has to be a creative centre all the year round. It takes a lot of work and an enormous amount of careful planning and budgeting to do both, not to mention the constant battling with bureaucrats over funds; but so far, and with only seven people to help her, she seems to be winning.
Compared to other bigger, older and better- known European festivals, like the Edinburgh, Zurich or Avignon, the inteatro seems pathetically small and stands, as Papa admits, on the fringe of the fringe of such events. It can only survive if it guards its own distinctive character and special flavour. The intimate, cozy atmosphere, with all the events centering in or around the Villa, within a short walking distance, and most of the guests and artists living on the premises, at the back of the offices, and bumping into each other day and night on the village high street, in the few venues, at the Villa restaurant, or its open-air garden bar which comes to life after the shows, providing a wonderful setting for chatting and making friends over drinks -- this atmosphere goes a long way towards making the festival a warm, exciting experience, with a distinct, memorable feel. There is also the quality of the shows Papa invites, not always the ones she personally likes best -- as she confesses -- but daring, controversial ones that linger in the memory and provoke interesting question whether one likes them or not.
This year's festival (the 24th edition) seemed designed to provide a wide (and, indeed wild) variety of contrasting theatrical experience, ranging from street, circus and children's shows, concerts of ethnic rock and archaic ritual music and songs, to sophisticated modern dance, multimedia performance art, Happening and hi-tech pieces relying heavily on digital art and cybernetics. At one end were the clown and acrobat; at the other, the cyborg and a dialogue for actor and mouse. And in between, a bewildering conglomeration of images and sounds, merging or juxtaposing the virtual and real, software and dancers, old myths and surrealistic future fantasies, Alice in Wonderland and the horrors of military dictatorship in Chile, the story of creation and apocalyptic visions of the end of civilization, gentle celebration of nature and iconoclastic travesties of sacred religious figures, tender, poignant lyricism and grotesque, savage humour.
Some of the pieces, particularly the hi-tech ones (and may be I am a bit prejudiced here) struck me as shallow, self-indulgent or downright silly. Marce li Antunez Roca's Afasia (from Barcelona) was a flagrant example. In front of a screen showing a mixture of cartoon and film sequences featuring scenes of reckless savagery, gratuitous carnage and cannibalism, Roca stood, wired up to a collection of electronic musical instruments, providing, by
remote control, a raucous sound accompaniment to his gory narrative of a modern Ulysses in a modern Odyssey, writhing and ranting all the time, like a demented thug, and madly swiveling his hips in a defiantly obscene way. It was utterly ridiculous, like a childish video game with a particularly nasty sense of humour. Equally disappointing was the Italian Aiep Dance Company's "Opus # 1" in which technology managed to efface the dancers bodies and Ariella Vidach original and complex choreography by an excessive flux of bewildering visual projections and light effects. It effected a complete dissociation between the dancers and the audience and the feeling was exacerbated by the transparent screen which covered the proscenium arch. This could have been a very enjoyable show, particularly as it took place on the open-air stage in the garden of the Villa; but the senseless pursuit of technology spoilt it all.
Compared to it, shows which relied completely on the skills of performers, and the imaginative use of props, or traditional mechanical devices, like levers and pumps, fared much better. In E non e ancora sera, by the Italian Giolisu Dance Company, choreographed and danced by Lisa Da Boit and Giovanni Scarcella, the symbolic voyage of a man and a woman towards each other is strongly evoked and sensitively rendered by the sheer poetry of movement and the metaphoric manipulation of a beach-guard tower and a few metal barrels. In L'Animal a l'esquena too -- a dance work from Barcelona by the Mal Pelo Dance Company, created and directed by Pep Ramis and Maria Munoz, who also danced, the scenography was shaped right before our eyes by two stage assistants in overalls, using simple mechanical and even primitive manual devices; and yet, no illusion was broken and the poetry of the dance remained untouched. The animal in all of us which the dance seeks to discover, the animal round the corner, as the title says, was subtly revealed to us in all its beauty and ferocity, vibrant sensuality and destructive passions. More stunning, however, was Chile's Alice Underground from the prestigious Teatro del Silenzio, conceived and directed by Mauricio Celedon and performed in a circus tent pitched in a field off the village high street. Here, Carroll's Alice is plunged into a primitive, nightmarish world, symbolized by a hug hole in the middle of the circus tent, strongly suggestive of the pit of hell, and her familiar story, with many of its familiar figures, is used to build, through the collective rituals of the acrobats, clowns and circus artists, a harrowing allegory of the political reality in Chile and other Latin American countries under military dictatorship, featuring the reign of terror, the people's longing for freedom, their pathetic, nostalgic clinging to the utopian dream of socialism and its heroes and martyrs, including Marx, Lenin, Che Guevara and Salvador Allende. It was painfully moving, like a poignant elegy to a lost cause.
The art of the acrobat surfaced again, though less effectively, in the French Eclats Sol Air. Collectively created and performed by Armance Brown, Bruno Krief, Gilles Baron and Aude Arago (whose company is based in Paris), with live music and songs by Lamine Kouyate, it attempted to interweave the skills of two dancers and two magnificent trapeze artists to create a three dimensional choreography (on the ground and up in the air) expressing different moods in love relationships involving two couples. But the elements failed to integrate and split apart, with the two trapeze artists monopolizing the attention of the audience to the exclusion of all else. A bit of the art of the acrobat also crept into the wild, morbidly sadistic, even masochistic and unbearably distressing portrayal of human cruelty and violence in the Italian Mayday, Mayday, May We Help You, by the Artemis Danza company, choreographed and directed by Monica Casadei, as well as in the spectacular, prickly street show of the Sol Pico-Danaus company from Barcelona.
And as if all the guest artists were intent on dragging the ugly realities of the world into this peaceful, secluded village, which seems to have miraculously eluded the grip of the media (for 10 whole days I never set eyes on a single radio or television set), the festival opened with a virtual invasion of the old monastery building, including the rehearsal and meeting rooms, the offices of the festival staff and even the bell tower. Enzo Cosimi's homage to his birthplace, called Roma as seen from the tower of Villa Nappi at a distance of 306 km, which had its debut in London, at the Tate Gallery last year, and was adapted for this festival, has for its theme metropolitan anarchy, chaos and excess, and Cosimi managed to ram his theme up our noses and down our throats, as we trudged across the garden, up the stairs, and filed into one room after another, stumbling over corpses, huddled tramps, senseless recumbent figures, and meeting at every corner scenes of rampage, rape and torture, violent murders and savage mock canonization rituals.
Not a very uplifting start, and quite disturbing for someone who was going to spend the night in that same building. Luckily, the final leg of that lurid itinerary took us up a narrow winding staircase to the bell tower where the savagely battered mock- saint stood simpering, like some angelic idiot, woodenly moving from side to side, like a marionette and spraying air-freshener all around. It was like bursting a balloon and the whole thing became funny and a bit ridiculous.
I cannot pretend that any of the shows I saw in Polverigi has made a dent in my heart or etched itself into my mind . But it was certainly a very interesting festival with not a dull moment. And though it has not made me a richer person, theatrically speaking, it has given me food for thought and some irking questions about the future direction of theatre.
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