A work by Fabrizio Favale

Choreographed and performed by Fabrizio Favale
Set, costume and art work First Rose
Co-produzione Fondazione Teatro Comunale di Vicenza, Festival Danza in Rete, Festival MILANoLTRE, KLm – Kinkaleri / Le Supplici / mk
Supported by MIC / Regione Emilia-Romagna / Comune di Bologna and h(abita)t – Rete di Spazi per la Danza
The project was implemented with the contribution of ResiDanceXL – places and residency projects for choreographic creations, action of the Network Anticorpi XL
Many thanks to Sandra Fuciarelli (Limón technique), Roberta Escamilla Garrison (Cunningham technique) for the collaboration about the techniques and methodologies used

Work selected by NID – Platform 2023

Photo Sara Deidda, Agostino Mela, First Rose

Other versions of the work for unconventional spaces:
 
Version for landscape
This version takes place entirely in outdoor landscapes
 
The industrial version
This version takes place inside and in dialogue with industrial spaces
 
The botanical version
This version takes place inside botanical gardens

Moving away from purely spectacular settings, this work presents a series of dance sequences as if they were exercises or training in which the dancer, starting from some techniques and modalities of American Modern and Postmodern Dance with which he was trained from a very young age, articulates them and projects them towards the future in free and experimental possibilities of development.

Fabrizio Favale (currently 54 years old) returns to dance a choreographic work in the form of a solo, a work that chooses to focus attention on the techniques (not on the choreographies) conceived and developed in particular by Merce Cunningham, José Limón and on some modalities of Trisha Brown’s dance (who never codified a specific technique).

Danze Americane wants to collect and question the legacies of those practices, in an investigation and rediscovery of the dynamic, qualitative, compositional, postural contents. By building and deconstructing sequences, architectures and complexities of articulation of the body’s movement, the dancer through “live” experimentation searches from time to time for the junctions that allow possible evolutions, suggestions, drifts.

The work presents a total of 7 sequences, of which 2 are created starting from the Trisha Brown method, 4 from the Cunningham technique and 1 from the Limón technique. Each sequence is repeated twice, the first time without music and the second time with a music. The dancer then freely deconstructs and recomposes the sequences, in a sense of experimentation and research of new and original movements, combinations, quality of movement. The number, methods or techniques to which the sequences refer are announced to the audience by the dancer himself as he performs them.

The ideal spaces for the presentation of Danze Americane are Theaters with dismantled stages, in which all the mechanisms and lights are visible; industrial spaces, exhibition spaces, etc.

Concept Fabrizio Favale
A collaboration Fabrizio Favale & C.G.J. Collettivo Giulio e Jari
Choreographed and performed by Jari Boldrini e Giulio Petrucci
Original music Simone Grande
Co-produced by Fondazione Teatro Comunale di Vicenza, Festival Danza in Rete, Festival MILANoLTRE, KLm – Kinkaleri / Le Supplici / mk
Supported by MIC / Regione Emilia-Romagna / Comune di Bologna and h(abita)t – Rete di Spazi per la Danza
The project was implemented with the contribution of ResiDanceXL – places and residency projects for choreographic creations, action of the Network Anticorpi XL

For this new creation Fabrizio Favale circumscribes and shares with the dancers and choreographers Giulio Petrucci and Jari Boldrini the intuitions derived from the most experimental phases of Danze Americane.

The attempt is to transmit those materials to other bodies, to other verifications and intelligences, towards unexpected developments, new articulations, free drifts.
Once they have received the materials, the two young artists proceed autonomously in the creation of the contents of NUBLA: from the choreographic arrangements, to the costumes, to the sound environment.

NUBLA is a choreographic object that proceeds by trial, sometimes even only sketched. The dancers, through the repetition of a practice, attempt different approaches to danced materials, repeating, varying or abandoning movement sequences that mix a chaotic and experimental sense with known and codified techniques.

The dancers mostly work in agreement with each other on the material to be used at the moment, or they allow themselves secret, personal variations accompanied by the gaze of the other. They experiment not only with new movements, but also with new relational possibilities, new intelligences of the body. The legacy of the techniques handed down by American Dance is used here as a springboard towards what is only hypothesized. Unknown qualities of movement will be experimented, as if they were in dialogue with other states of matter, a mobile and incoherent corporeal matter.

This experience in its declared uncertainty and in its physical and creative effort is shared in an empathic sense between spectators and performers, where together they witness each time the success or failure of the experiment.

This short work / satellite is designed to be linked to the performances of American Dances or as a separate and independent object.

PRESS REVIEWS

Out of this world dances and out of place dances at NID
Review of Stefano Tomassini, TEATROECRITICA.NET 10/09/2023
“Fabrizio Favale with the brilliant Danze Americane literally brought down the theatre between a demonstration of Limón technique, then Brown and then Cunningham”.

A comment to Danze Americane
a cura di Agnese Doria, Altre Velocità, 29/10/2022
“It’s that whole visual experience” Cunningham seems to have said when talking about dance. A few nights ago I came across Fabrizio Favale’s “Danze Americane”. I’m not very lucid and biased because Favale’s dance touches buried chords and makes a mysterious part of me vibrate. Favale returns to dance after perhaps a decade in which he had dedicated himself to choreography, after having chosen to cross that thin threshold that tries to transmit an energetic and gestural flow to others. He returns to inhabit and exhibit his body by fighting with memory: learning and retaining certain choreographic languages ​​is a non-secondary game that requires a journey. In the suitcase he prepares for this crossing he chooses to return (or return) to his masters. He relies, in an original authorial path, on some neuralgic points of the research undertaken by Cunningham, Trisha Brown and Limón to return to them, with the maturity of a consolidated artist. An embodied, mature and thoughtful reflection on the legacies of the season of experimentation of “American dances”. As a spectator I abandoned myself to visions and dilations, reverberations and designs in the air, having the opportunity to listen to my body and to feel how good I was in the emptying of the background buzz of thoughts and worries, feeling how right it was to abandon the sense in favor of the senses. How great was the possibility given by an abstraction free from interpretations, within which to enter and exit, free from the taxonomic classificatory urgencies that our today is so fond of.

Danza in Rete off: in Vicenza the new generation of international dance
Review of Renzo Francabandera, PAC paneacquaculture.net 14/03/2024

Danze Americane.
Fabrizio Favale, a well-established presence in Italian independent choreography and who is at DIR Off with this interesting project also selected at NID – Platform 2023 and by ResiDanceXL, presents 3 of the 7 total choreographic sequences, proposed as if they were the evolution of exercises within a training.
The dancer, starting from some specific techniques and methods of American Modern and Postmodern Dance (from which the author himself comes by training, as he clarifies in a message read in Italian and English at the beginning of the show) proposes exercises by masters such as José Limón, Trisha Brown and Merce Cunningham, proposed to the audience at first, so to speak, in purity; then the same exercise is proposed again on a musical basis and subsequently developed in a version enriched by ideas and stimuli closer to the contemporary choreographic sign, showing the link between these wonderful original shoots of the past century and the gestural and artistic declinations that from those still live in the present of dance.
From the technique of the great Mexican master Limón, which develops through a subdivision into isolations of localized impulses, directed in all directions, to Brown’s research, until closing with a Cunningham adagio, thus crossing with few but very clear signs the central decades of the last century, those between the Thirties and the Fifties. Full Scholarship at the American Dance Festival 1990, Favale, very young, in 1996 was named “best Italian dancer” by the G. Tani Award and after having brought his code to Italy and abroad, in the three-year period 22-24 Fabrizio Favale is an Associate Artist of MILANoLTRE.
Here in the exercises, at the beginning of which some wings and the backdrop are lowered to leave the bare box of the stage visible and therefore the space of art emptied of artifices, the technique that led to the present is also used. It is a moving journey into the history of language, if you look closely, proposed not by chance in chronological advancement, and this makes visible the passage from the forms still hybridized with the gestures of ballet, by Limón, to the more psychological and free ones by Brown up to the relationship of Cunningham that frees the movement from the need to “explain” the music, making the body explode in all its significant power. The work has its own clarity, particularly appreciated by those who are passionate about history, the evolution of signs, understanding their making, mixing, recovering and leaving each other to go beyond. From this point of view, Danze Americane, a bit like American Lessons by Calvino, wants to return to some key concepts to bring them back to today with an eye to the future.