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Davide Valrosso

Davide Valrosso, Who is Joseph | ph Andrea Veroni
Davide Valrosso, Lab 15-19 gennaio 2018
Davide Valrosso, Sogno una notte di mezz'estate
Davide Valrosso, Who is Joseph | ph Andrea Veroni
Davide Valrosso, Sogno una notte di mezz'estate

Davide Valrosso graduated from the English National Ballet, then studied at numerous contemporary training centres such as: London Contemporary, Ramber School, Rafineri.

For five years he works permanently with the Virgilio Sieni company, both as a dancer and as a performer and trainer within the Accademia del Gesto.

In 2017 he is involved as a dancer in the project Cosmopolitan Beauty, production CANGO_Centro di produzione sul linguaggio del corpo e della danza and supported by Teatro Pubblico Pugliese (selection Anticorpi 2017) and in his project We_Pop, production Festival Oriente Occidente and selected at NID Platform 2017.

He is involved in the Prove D'autore XL project, 2017 edition, as part of which he created We are not alone for the Triennium of the Balletto di Roma, under the direction of Roberto Casarotto. In 2018 he created Biografia di un corpo, produced by Kilowatt/Capotrave, as part of the European project BeSpectACTive, and Sogno, una notte di mezz'estate commissioned by Balletto di Roma.

He is also selected in the Resid'And project at the National Academy of Rome for which he creates Bloom. In 2018 he becomes coordinator of the C.I.M.D incubator project for young choreography supported by Mibac (Milan).

In 2019 he presents Bloom II, a side-specific performance created in collaboration with the Centro Culturale S. Chiara within the Mart - Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto. In the same year he is selected for the project Crossing the Sea, through which he works with the company Attakkalari Bangalore - India, where he will create A peaceful, Place.

A Midsummer Night's Dream is one of William Shakespeare's most fascinating works, a comedy immersed in a fantastic atmosphere, capable of arousing emotions and wonder. The Compagnia del Balletto di Roma gives rise to the fantastic and dark story of couples in love who get lost and chase each other in a labyrinthine forest, made of snares and seductions.

Davide Valrosso's new creation reflects on two fundamental themes: magic and dreams. Magic is nothing other than love, symbolized in the play by the juice of a magic flower that acts on the eyes: it is, in fact, through the gaze that one falls in love for the first time, scrutinizing the object of desire. Another theme is the dream, preponderant to the point that reality and fantasy come to be confused, amplifying the look on a timeless event.

In choreographic terms, the key feature is to be found in a fluid passage from academic elements to a more material dance: ambivalent paths that feed off each other, in a continuous migration from the ethereal to the corporeal. The choreography of the duets and of the group parts amplifies a density of presence voluminous enough to give to the body and to the scenography a tangible and at the same time immaterial consistency: it will be the unreal spirits of the characters to materialize in a totally surreal world, but that speaks to us from close up.

Through the dance of his Midsummer Night's Dream Valrosso suggests us to cultivate the transformative sense of this chaos made of deceptions, jealousies and tenderness, welcoming the power that thoughts, words and gestures have to make us abandon ourselves inexorably to beauty.

My dance is developed in a strong dialogical relationship between what we can call thought of the gesture (the action that develops due to an instruction given or a training received) and what can perhaps be called action of the gesture (linked more to an instinct of the body), these two elements merged and balanced are put at the service of the choreographic concept that I intend to develop.

- Davide Valrosso

A faceless body, attentive and fragile, weak and aware, strong and uncertain, changes its essence in a series of gestural figures able to evoke visual images inspired by historical events. Joseph was born from the urgent desire to question, asking questions that become gestures, sometimes symbolic, sometimes freely carved in the harmony of a dance, trying to give voice to that vivid silence that is the background to our contemporary world. In a journey from conflict to resilience, the gesture, like the echo that spreads after a loud scream, spreads in space to ask a thousand and one questions.

Joseph sculpts on his body the iconicity of a time adrift, scratched by a past to be questioned, dissected, to try to wear again to feel on his skin the vigor of the conflict that becomes welcome, of the border that becomes resistance, of the shipwreck that becomes resilience.

I read the newspaper and in my perennial attempt to escape the reality of that period, I am assailed by a thought. What is happening? All this fear, all this anger, what is it? What is going on outside of the plastic world I was trying to build around me?

At that moment I still didn't know I was going to build a new solo, I rejected the idea of making a new creation, but the first image of "Who is Joseph?" appeared violently without me looking for it.

- Davide Valrosso

davidevalrosso.com