Among the new names in the landscape of contemporary Italian dance are Angelo Egarese and Elena Salvestrini. Artistic directors, as well as choreographers and dancers of the very young company KinesiS Danza, founded in Florence in 2011, Egarese and Salvestrini gained recognition as authors at the 2013 edition of the Danz’è - Città di Rovereto Choreographic Competition, where they won the First Prize. On that occasion, they presented to the jury of critics and industry programmers Equilibrio Instabile, a work where fluid movement met the dynamics of light and objects.
By right, as the first place winners of last year’s Danz’è, they are guests of the 2014 edition with a new work co-produced by the Festival titled CorpoREAmente, where the REA, written in uppercase in the heart of the title, assigns a tone of guilt to both the word ‘body’ and the following ‘mind’. This emphasizes a deep split between the two entities and the associated sense of guilt.
Invited by the artistic direction of Oriente Occidente to reflect on the theme of conflict and the Great War, Egarese and Salvestrini began creating from the devastation that war brings to the individual, forced to create a parallel world, altered and alienated, which distorts their essence. “CorpoREAmente - the authors explain - exposes the dancers to the burden of emotions, to a close confrontation, to the exchange of opinions. It is a dive into history, putting two temporal horizons in relation: today and a hundred years ago. Everything revolves around some key words: Love, Solitude, Anger, and Hope.” Love, which besides being a feeling for oneself and towards others is ‘Patriotism’; Solitude, which besides being the despair of a soldier at the front deprived of home affections, is also an unrestrained tension for independence; Anger, which is nothing but the fertile humus on which all wars germinate; Hope, which is dream and necessity.
