From the project “Di stanze 2 Beckett”.
Inspired by “Play” by Samuel Beckett

Choreography Roberto Zappalà
Music Frédéric Chopin (24 préludes for piano, first 13 préludes)
Dancers Fernando Roldan Ferrer, Ariane Roustan, Valeria Zampardi

Lights and costumes Roberto Zappalà

Foulplay, from 2005, shines bright amongst the company’s choreographies. The clarity of its style and musicality of its dancers, that move to Chopin’s astonishing score, speak of adultery in ironic, poetic and precise fashion. Here, irony, that does not usually rank amongst the choreographer’s prime subject matters, reigns supreme. It sets the choreographer’s delicate and deeply emotive work in a dramatical context that strongly resembles Samuel Beckett’s eccentric ‘Commedia’. This strikingly rich play gave light to the 24 preludes (later performed in 2007).

Foulplay, or wicked game, ranks amongst Zappalà’s few short creations that impresses the senses in only twenty-three minutes, by its immediacy and perfect simplicity of style.

“… a muddle of figures, a great energy which contracts and leaps the body as a steel spring : the dancers, unforeseeable in the figure, on the notes of a voluptuous Chopin, propose the fall of the human being which is word, but also flesh. They move on the plot of the action and imagination, exploring the labyrinth of the feelings…thunderous applause.” Sergio Sciacca, La Sicilia

“…On stage a chaotic, lively, brilliant dance blazes up, full of stiff lines contaminated by tics and out of balance. It’s a sharp project : it doesn’t renounce at all to correlate its “diseased” dance, which gets attractive with the shake of the bodies, in their awkward and beastly movements, to the music, moony and furious, sensual and frigid, joyful and tragic…” Marinella Guatterini, Il Sole 24 Ore

“…what Roberto Zappalà made and unmade of the preludes of Chopin is amazing, disarming, incontestable. He takes those lyrics in black and white, those “golden dreams” as Liszt liked to say, and he sows them on the Land of madness and in the bodies of seven overpowering dancers, who make ripped stories from them, without time and end … Rivers of applauses and ovation, at the end.” Carmelita Celi, La Sicilia