Photographs Leonardo Regano

“Something is wrong, my little child?”
“I did something bad.”
“Very bad, Francesco? Tell me.”
“Today I took almost all of your flowers. The blue ones, the big, there are no more.”

from Infancy of St. Francis of Assisi, by Hermann Hesse.

This show is suitable for open air performance, in particular squares, cloisters, stairwells, alleys. It is available in both winter and summer and is particularly suitable for audience of children. This work aims to take a look at an hypothetical afternoon, late and sleepy in the streets of Assisi, in the 1193 A.C. There, in alleys, at the base of the stairway-entrance to the house, on the dusty stones, and there in the garden of purple gladioli, and even beyond, following a bunch of little children led by a twelve year old moody, who led a dance in front of the Duomo as no longer accorded in recent years, a playful infatile religious ceremony that for a moment turned into a innocent bacchanal. That twelve years old was “Cesco” for mom. Francesco, for the villagers. He would become St. Francesco of Assisi, for everyone else.

Review

“… St. Francis in dance, therefore, because Favale is an inventive and essential choreographer, capable of thickens, abstract, transform the literary, epic, mystic (he worked on Indian sacred poems), or of another nature: in pure dance. He play with his companions, en plein air, keeping the house behind and venturing into the park, including forest trees and shrubs, including smells of mint. An army blanket of the past covers the three (or four) young and abandoned bodies. Someone launches in an essential dance. Several potatoes are launched in the direction of the public, in the fun of a bunch of kids. Then a dance of birds (abstract birds, dancers with a few feathers on one arm, with ribbons that encircle the hair), on wooden clogs, with the poses of a peasant jig, the rhythmicithy and the gentle abstraction of a Balinese show, with electronic music that opens horizons of the Far East, mixture and transformation. Then all go in the park, with the enthusiastic and mischievous children who accompany the dancers, up to a dance with feathers and leaves under the boughs of a great tree, the shadows fall and the show reveals another city, a forest becomes garden, get lost, find, look for a contact with the ground, with those feet beat, with this subtle scent of resin. ”
Massimo Marino