Director’s Notes

In occasion of the Romaeuropa Festival 2015, Balletto di Roma presents TURNING | Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, the first creation in collaboration with the artist Alessandro Sciarroni. On December 8th, 2015, in the spaces of MAXXI, Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI secolo, the dancers of the Roman ballet company will display the signs and the results of the rotating bodies. By balancing on the verge of vertigo, Sciarroni reflects upon the loss of orientation and temporary instability, upon the perceptive changes and the finding of one’s self. Hosted by the most important national and international institutions such as the Festival d’Automne à Paris, Centre Pompidou and Le 104 in Paris, Alessandro Sciarroni takes the audience into a universe made of strict and simple signs, which are able, by being repeated and stripped of their flesh, to become a mirror for the human feelings and relationships. With the Symphony of sorrowful songs version, a title that pays homage to the Polish composer Henryk Górecki, Sciarroni focuses on the action that allows the body to rotate on its axis. It is a site specific in which the artist displays the first materials of the TURNING project, which were produced with Balletto di Roma. The performance took place in the Gianferrari room of MAXXI and, on December 8th, the dancers of the Balletto di Roma company shared their practice with the visitors in different rooms of the museum. It is a new experience for the historical Roman company, who, thanks to the cooperation with the famous Roman festival, has experienced a different type of show, in between choreography and artistic performance. As Alessandro Sciarroni declared in an interview: “TURNING is a constantly changing and transforming project; actually, it seems to me that already the title hints to the possibility of change. I chose the practice of rotation as a way to verify an intuition. And I have verified such intuition: I think about these big birds that go back and forth following the same route, like in a circular motion. Or think about salmons: they hop from freshwater to saltwater, their bodies change, but when they feel that they are about to die they return to where they were born”.


Credits

Creation
Alessandro Sciarroni
for Balletto di Roma

Project curated by
Lisa Gilardino

Music Paolo Persia