GIULIANO

Presented for the first time at the Rocchetta Mattei for the PerAspera Festival 2016.

 

Concept and choreography Fabrizio Favale
In collaboration with Andrea Del Bianco and Vincenzo Cappuccio
Dancers Vincenzo Cappuccio, Andrea Del Bianco, Fabrizio Favale
Music Benjamin Britten
Supported by MIBACT and Regione Emilia-Romagna

 

Photographs Fabrizio Favale

 

 

This choreographic work starts from the Memories and the Opera of the Emperor Giuliano (331 – 363 d.C.), rewritten by Gore Vidal in his historical novel “Giuliano”.
Giuliano reigns at a time when the greek-Roman paganism gave way to a pressing Christianity.
Far from reproducing in dance language the narrated events, the work collects the narrative three- voices structure of the Vidal’s book (Prisco, Libanio and Giuliano), in a succession of dances mostly abstract and built as a dialogue scheme, or a correspondence, or , if we prefer, a kind of Elizabethan theater, where everybody speak or act alternately one at a time (Prisco and Libanio), plus an isolated form of talking, intimate, that does not wait response, typical of the tales in the form of memories (Giuliano). And it collects what remains of an ardent utopia, the imaginative substrate underlying to both dialogues and the memories, fiery lover of worlds and ways of thought unable to survive.
And what remains is a volatile scaffold, on which stands in balance all the work: steam, smoke, some haggard twig.