In Milan, the contaminations of FOG Performing Arts

Since 2018, FOG Performing Arts Festival has been one of Milan's most fertile spaces for investigation, experimentation and research in the contemporary performance scene. Theatre, dance, performance, and music are the alvei of this annual event in which contamination is finally advocated, grasped, and squared. In the rich programme dedicated to the work of new artists and their performative investigations, we followed the themes of identity and discord in the proposals of Alessandro Sciarroni and Marcos Morau.

(© Andrea Macchia)

In the first part of the festival among the proposals we find "Op.22 No.2", a short creation that in twenty minutes embraces and cleaves, saws and wraps, recalls and experiments. Created for dancer Marta Ciappina, this solo by choreographer Alessandro Sciarroni, Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Dance Biennial and former Associate Artist of Triennale Milano Teatro, recalls some autobiographical sequences of the performer, dialoguing between the silence of the first part and the symphonic poem by Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, "The Swan of Tuonela", in the work's close. Adapted to the versatile space of the PAC Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea in Milan, the work hosts that glassy gaze of Marta Ciappina that reveals, inflames and ennobles the stratification of gestures and movements conceived by Sciarroni. One has the impression of scrutinising a soliloquy in dance imbued with that shared and empathic thought that leads to Ciappina's and, perhaps, every spectator's question: "Is it not me?"

Themes that we also found in the performance "La mort i la primavera" by Marcos Morau created last year and already presented at the Venice Biennale. With his company La Veronal, the artist associated with Triennale Milano Teatro here evokes the novel of the same name by Mercé Rodoreda, squaring in the dramaturgy the archaic rites of oppression and oppression.

(©Silvia Poch)

Thus, the mournful and trembling longings lead the spectator not towards a slavish narration of the fierce fairy tale that is the direct source of the play but, conversely, give the impression of calling to mind one of the two cosmic forces of Love and Discord investigated, in the fifth century B.C., by Empedocles of Agrigento. C., by Empedocles of Agrigento. In fact, Morau's theatrical development seems to translate the mutual dominance of the two forces and the consequent progressive birth and destruction sought by the Sicilian philosopher towards a clear prevalence of a gloomy, cruel and disturbing state of tension. An apologia for conculcation in which the nine talented performers commemorate atavistic - and often ambiguous - lugubrious atmospheres.

The proposals and questions suggested by the Milanese festival continue until the end of April, and for the first time FOG will also return in the autumn with a programme designed for the months of October and November.