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ASCOLTANDO I PESCI

year 2003 duration 60'
("listening to the fishes")
 
from the project "Corpi incompiuti"
 
 
choreography and direction Roberto Zappalà
original music Nello Toscano
 
dancers Laura Anastasi, Liliana Barros, Daniela Bendini, Sonia Condorelli, Nunzio Impellizzeri, Jordi Martin, Alberto Piuzzi, Alessandra Scalambrino
and with the participation of Piero Sammataro
 
text  Nello Calabrò
video Nello Calabrò e Roberto Zappalà
light set and costumes Roberto Zappalà
sound engineer Gaetano Leonardi
photos Gianmaria Musarra
 
a coproduction by compagnia zappalà danza – Scenario Pubblico – Benchmarkin’fest
 
with the support of  Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali Dipartimento Spettacolo, Regione Siciliana Assessorato Beni Culturali
 
première 13 novembre 2003 Catania, SCENARIO PUB.BLI.CO "Benchmarkin’fest03”
 
Some years ago, with Corpi incompiuti,  Roberto Zappalà started working on a project on the perception of the senses. With OB/sol.um he dealt with the “discomfort” caused or suffered by the contemporary body, with the second step Ascoltando i pesci he investigates silence and dumbness and the hypnotic capacity of the language of the signs.
 
Nothing like the fishes in the Western imagery represents the sign and symbol of something (else): from sacred to profane, from Christ to the male sexual organ. And yet and above all fishes are dumb and someone is “as mute as a fish”.
The new show by compagnia zappalà danza starts from the fishes to investigate silence, silences, different kind of silence, and tries to engrave its forms, whispering, laws. And it isn’t by chance that “law of silence” is, in nearly all worldwide languages, the literary translation of a word that exists only in the Italian language (and society): “omertà”.
“Omertà”, family, silence. Power, fear, silence again.
“Walls of gum”, metaphoric and non, against which, literally, the dancers dance, a diver realizes his enigmatic course in real time, amidst the sounds of the sea, and over all fishes. Fishes, in an aquarium, a “TV-screen”, let us doubt who is on this side of the glass.
A performance that tries to offer questions rather than answers that it would be unable and unwilling to give. Through dance, it shows those moments when “the extreme need of communication (…) coincides with the extreme incapacity of speaking”. (Peter Handke)