During the summer of 2018, Danza Urbana Festival commissioned me a site-specific performance with adolescents to investigate the relationship between human and nature, past and present. The location was Mountain Bibele, an important archeological site where Etrurians set up a village three centuries before Christ.  

Memory Trigger

I gathered information by visiting the museum and the old village: 

what is the history of Etrurians?

how did they live?

what rituals did they have? 

what was their relationship with the Roman Empire? 

Fire Cavern Ritual di World Music Scene - album Nature Player Primitive Ethnic Soundspheres 
Ais Alpan di Francesco Landucci - album Etrurian Imaginary Sounds
Ancient Night Lyra di Francesco Landucci - album Etrurian Imaginary Sounds
Ade Sound’s di World Music Scene - album Ancient Etruscan Sounds

Music was a great challenge. How could I be authentic and 'contemporary' without overturning the way music was more than 2.000 years ago?

We finally landed on site only to find out from the museum guardian that there was a massive migration of

!!!HORNETS!!!

am I teacher or am I an artist?

44° NORD 11° EST

 

('Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer' by Caspar David Friedrich - 1818)

...slowly getting used to the heat, touching/sensing the nature around us, connecting with the stones by creating spatial configurations, flying like birds, and so on... 

Waiting for the audience

I started the rehearsals in the studio.

10 days (7 studio based + 3 in Mountain Bibele)

6 to 7 hours sessions of work everyday.

How do I facilitate their connection to the archeological site without being phisically there? How do I help the young dancers getting used to dance under the boiling sun of September? → I decided very soon to move our rehearsals outside 

We were not allowed to dance within the archeological site: we had to do our dance in the park along the periphery. How could I make the connection to the idea of the village? How we, as humans, connect to our ancestral past? And how do landscapes support this process?

:STONES:

solid, hard

imperishable

build

destroy

symbolic

timeless