During the Mladi Levi festival 2024, Valeriia Buradzhyieva met with Francesca Pennini and Angelo Pedroni of the CollettivO Cinetico (Ferrara, Italy) to talk about their experience of collaborating with choreographer Alessandro Sciarroni on the piece "THIRD DIALOGUE: In A Landscape", which the collective performed at Športno društvo Tabor (Ljubljana).
Valeriia: Francesca, as director and choreographer of the collective, what pushed you to invite an artist from the side to run the piece?
Francesca: We invited Alessandro [Sciarroni] to create a piece for us as part of a project of dialogues with other artists. So this is the third dialogue — we have already had two others with Sharon Fridman and Enzo Cosimi. The invitation was to start creating from the nature of the bodies of the CollettivO CineticO, the people of the CollettivO CineticO. That's how Alessandro created the Third Dialogue, but the piece belongs to the company, so we tour with it. Sometimes he comes when the geography allows it, but he doesn’t follow the piece, so he has also delegated some artistic matters, spacing, corrections to me.
CollettivO CineticO is composed mainly of people who don't come from a traditional path in dance. Angelo was a fencer. Carmine was a cyclist. Simone danced a bit, but also did sports. Stefano, who plays the piano in this piece, is actually a dancer in the company, but comes from music and martial arts. Theodora comes from the circus. And there are a lot of us, actually there are more people in the collective. Most of them knew dance through me, because they started dancing with me in the collective, so they mainly have my point of view, and I wanted to give them other points of view, other tools, I wanted to shift the words that are used. I think it's also politically and poetically an important key to look at what we're doing and not think that it's somehow the way.
And at the same time, I wanted to have the opportunity to be a performer for someone else whom I like very much, but whose language is different from mine. This was very important for me, because I was a performer at the beginning of my career in Sasha Waltz & Guests, but after that I worked as a choreographer and in 2007 the company was born. After so many years, it was a gift for me to work as a performer again. I had a completely different approach and saw the struggle of the choreographer. There was this transparency of a creative process that might have the same problems now, but a different focus. It was really a kind of mirror, too.
Valeriia: Angelo, how long have you been with the company?
Angelo: Since 2010. I started as a technician in the company and we began our dialogue with Francesca like this. She invited me to training, to some warm-up exercises and to the company's creative process meetings in the mornings, also outside my working hours. And I enjoyed that and that's how I started working as a dancer.
Francesca: That's something I really like to do, that everyone, even if they're not on stage, is involved in the creative process, including the other roles. And Angelo actually fitted in very well with the creative part. He's had a very long career as a spectator, since he was a little kid — he's seen many, many performances because from his family he was used to going to the theater. So even though he wasn’t a dancer, his body was very skilled in other languages through sport; and his taste, his eye and his mind were very skilled because of being a spectator. That's a very important training for a dancer. And so, in the end, he stood on stage in this piece for the first time in his life — naked.
Valeriia: You don't give easy tasks — just be naked in the first piece you’ve ever been in!
Francesca: He passed the test, yes. (Laughing) Angelo still takes care of many technical aspects. Sometimes we have other technicians, but he takes care of that too. And he’s also the dramaturge of the company. So the artistic process starts between us.
Angelo: But generally, the shows' requirements of the bodies and their performance are very specific in our work. So if we need a very specific physical tool, this kind of body that can do this kind of specific thing, then we search for it in other performers who we invite. Sometimes we also train to obtain it, and sometimes we just say, okay, we're not going to train for it, we'll just find someone who can do it.
Photo: Nada Žgank
Valeriia: Speaking of which, was anyone of you trained in hula hooping before this piece?
Francesca: Margherita, who was the other female dancer before Teodora, and I could hula-hoop a bit, because that's what you do as a child, usually.
Angelo: But the others, not really.
Francesca: Yes, they couldn't keep the hula hoop up at all. In the beginning we called a professional hula hooper and she came for a day and showed all kinds of tricks. Of course, some of them were extremely advanced, like moving twenty hoops up and down the body at once. We filmed everything and then we started experimenting. Of course we didn't have the technical skills at first, we had to build them up. She gave us some very important advice: the costume has to be very tight and not slippery. And for costumes we had these silk shirts, so it was the worst. The hoops just couldn't stay up.
Angelo: It was very difficult. And then we had a lot of rehearsals in normal sportswear, but when the costumes arrived we thought we couldn’t do the piece anymore, because it was quite late in the production that we first put them on and understood the struggle.
Valeriia: Yes, I was thinking during the dress rehearsal—how do you manage to hula-hoop on your waist in these delicate silky shirts… So how did you, eventually?
Francesca: We just kept going, it was harder — the body had to push more. But now it's okay. It's still very hard when we do it outdoors, especially when it’s windy, so we're lucky here [at ŠD Tabor]. It's worth the effort that the costumes are the way they are for the aesthetic landscape of the piece. They were designed by Ettore Lombardi, who often works with Alessandro. I think the costumes are particularly important here because they shift the piece from the aesthetic environment of the hula hoop circus. It goes somewhere completely different.
Valeriia: Yeah, if you were dressed in a tricot, it would be over.
Francesca: Yes, the piece would just be killed (laughing). Actually, I think this uncertainty about our own skills at the beginning also fueled something in the piece, because we always try to connect with the feeling that maybe, just maybe, we can or cannot do it. And Alessandro often emphasized that. Every time one of the dancers suggested a new movement, you wonder, what if I can do it? Or maybe I can't. Let's see. The path of thoughts in the piece was really like this, maybe we can work. I don't know. I don't know if I can walk. And I discover every time: yes, I can walk. I can do it. It really is a discovery. It's still an act of faith, this piece. When I do it, I just try to trust that this magical gravitational relationship, which is so fragile, that it'll just keep going, that it won't fall. This kind of balance can never be taken for granted. You always feel a bit like rope walking.
Angelo: It's really a dialogue with the object that is alive.
Valeriia: If the hula hoop falls down, you work around it during the performance. You support the person whose hula hoop has fallen off by stopping and starting again at the prompt of Stefano and his piano. What is the philosophy behind this embrace?
Francesca: Well, for Alessandro it's a blessing. We don't look for it, so we try not to drop it. But when it happens, we take it as a blessing. It can happen at any moment. Before yesterday's dress rehearsal that you came to see, it had never happened that a hoop falls when a dancer spins it around their arms. It usually happens on the upper body or during the tricks. Every time it falls down, everything stops without judgment, we just wait for the signal from Stefano to start again. We take our time and it's a wonderful moment for the audience every time. So inside you feel a bit like you've made a mistake, but you have to fight it and accept it for the piece. And I don't think you can work on a piece like this without acknowledging the fact that it can fall. Because of course it can.
Angelo: Alessandro has worked with the circus, with professional pins jugglers. He told us that it can happen to anyone, even the best. So you have to have a plan for how to react. In the circus, the mistake is usually corrected and the trick is repeated to perform it well and show that you can do it, and Alessandro wanted to work the opposite way. He wanted to accept the fragility and exceptionality of the fall, not the exceptionality of the trick. Whitin the landscape of thought in the performance, when the object falls, it's a blessing because it was not expected. I don't have to work for the unexpected. It really is unexpected.
Francesca: This is also really aligned with John Cage's philosophy. Just like the sounds that come in at all the events we hold outside. Once a rabbit passed through, or there were children, birds, and everything really becomes part of the piece. It always seems like it's perfect that this thing happened at that moment. And I think the moment of falling is also this openness to the world and to reality.
Valeriia: Yes, when I heard the sound of the vacuum cleaner coming from another room during the dress rehearsal, I really thought it was an intentional part of the piece, as it was somehow so aligned with the score… But then you told me it was just the cleaning time at ŠD Tabor.
In the text about the performance, it says that you try to erase the subjectivity of the performer so that the hula hoops are more accentuated and given more subjectivity. How did you approach it in the piece, this erasure?
Francesca: Well, not directly. I think it's an effect rather than the goal, actually. We were never asked to subtract ourselves, but because of the structure of the task and the indication we had, it started to happen. Also because of the relationship to the gaze that we established. The fact that we are nothing showing off, and are not there to demonstrate already puts us in the mode of an observer. So I become a spectator during the piece. I even have the same thoughts, the same mind landscapes as when I’m sitting in the audience. And I think, oh my God, Teodora is beautiful at this moment. But you are also a spectator of yourself and of your object. During the piece, I'm always focusing my attention on something else, and even when I'm focusing it on myself, it's as if I'm a spectator of myself as my feet leave the floor. You are passed through by the spectator's gaze and you don't emphasise it, you are transparent in a way. But that's my take, it's not an idea I have from Alessandro, but as a performer that's how I feel.
Valeriia: As a collective, you are interested in the theme of disappearing from the stage, of the endings. What was special about this ending for you?
Angelo: The piece ends with the three hoop circles that we soin towards each other, and we all do this together at the end before we leave the stage. And these three circles… It's not a bad moment, but it's a goodbye moment, a point of closing something that I felt. It's already nostalgic. In this goodbye, I'm starting to feel like a gymnast, like here, this was my performance.
Francesca: But I think this nostalgia is already present at the beginning of the piece. I have this feeling about time in this performance, like we start and time sort of spreads in all directions. Like we are in the past doing something we have been doing for centuries, but at the same time we are in something completely new that's never been done before. Maybe that's also because of the music. When the music starts, it's as if I remember something and yet I don’t know it.
Valeriia: …Like nostalgia for something that has never happened.
Francesca: Yes.
Valeriia: Did the hula hoop change your torsos?
Francesca: Yes, abdominals on one side, because we always hula-hoop in the same direction. At the beginning we planned to change the direction at every rehearsal. But then of course we didn’t do that. It's like writing with your left hand when you're right-handed.
Angelo: It was six hours a day spinning in one direction.
Valeriia: And your spines?
Francesca: For someone a little bit? When we rehearsed, we had pain on this side of the neck, and then on this side of the torso, in this knee and this ankle, diagonally, so to speak…
Valeriia: …like a checkerwork, because of the one-sided movement.
Photo: Nada Žgank
Angelo: Yes, and sometimes I woke during the sleep wiggling a bit, as if I was still spinning the hoop.
Francesca: Yes. This slight wiggling we also see it in the audience when we perform. I guess it’s the mirror neurons.
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CollettivO CineticO was founded in 2007 by the choreographer Francesca Pennini and involves over 50 artists from different disciplines. The collective’s research investigates the nature of the performative event with formats that are both playful and rigorous that move in the interstices between dance, theater and visual arts. One of the salient characteristics is the creation of methods of composition and organization of movement capable of encountering extremely differentiated bodies and devices that discuss the relationship with the spectator and vision, moving from the stage to urban places, from mimetic missions in everyday life to virtual platforms.
Francesca Pennini (Ferrara, 1984) is a choreographer, director and dancer. She trained in a wild path between heterogeneous disciplines: from gymnastics to freediving, from butoh to disco dance. Subsequently she studied at the Balletto di Toscana and at the Laban Center in London. She works as a dancer for Sasha Waltz & Guests. She is the artistic director of CollettivO CineticO since 2007, the year in which she founded the company, signing over sixty creations. She has created shows for Balletto di Roma and the National Company of Malta. She collaborates, among others, with Mustafa Sabbagh, Vasco Brondi, Quentin Jones, Pamela Z, Ramón Oliveras.
Angelo Pedroni (Ferrara, 1984) was a competitive athlete in various disciplines and studied mathematics at the University of Ferrara and logic at the University of Florence. In 2009, he trained as a theatre technician by attending the AIDA Foundation's professional course and specialising at the Institut Superieur des Techniques du Speciale in Avignon. Since 2010, he has been a permanent member of CollettivO CineticO in the role of dramaturge, dancer and lighting designer.Valeriia Buradzhyieva is a curator and researcher from Berdiansk, Ukraine, who has worked with IZOLYATSIA foundation (Ukraine), Wild Theatre (Ukraine) and Milvus Artistic Research Center (Knislinge, Sweden). She is currently finishing a Master’s Degree in Performance Studies at Stockholm University with a thesis on dramaturgies of the endings in contemporary dance. In her projects, Valeriia works around relational aesthetics and psychogerohraphy. She is a co-curator of SONIAKH platform.
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This interview was produced with the financial assistance of the European Union. The views expressed herein can in no way be taken to reflect the official opinion of the European Union'.
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