Io Arethusa !

Choreographic writing

In Alpheus & Arethusa, the creation of movement and its expressive meaning lie at the heart of the research. The dance, on the border of theatrical gestural writing and performance, moves away from any codification or shared vocabulary of danced movement, towards a gesture that builds its meaning through action and through the sensations it embodies. The texts by Daniele Marranca, from which the performance originated, themselves proceed through actions: breaking free from the mud, twisting, turning to stone, gathering in, tearing away, overflowing. The performer, free from any predetermined form of movement and grounded in a gesture whose concrete meaning is lived, can thus commit generously to both action and representation while preserving their own singularity.

The figures to which the choreography gives body do not come solely from an iconographic repertoire. They are also figures of the story, multiplied by the myth through its many versions and still resonating in collective memory: the nymph in flight, the pursuing river, the cloud, the journey beneath the sea, the spring on Ortigia, or the man-headed bull, the archaic form in which river gods manifested themselves, which the performer of Alpheus evokes in one part of the piece. Alongside them, Marranca's texts invent new ones: the mud mask as a negative of beauty, the perfect image reflected in the water, the river quenching its thirst by speaking a name, the embrace that finds only itself. The dramaturgical path weaves these new and ancient figures together, taking them apart and reassembling them.

The composition does not stem from a single principle. Depending on the scene, movement arises from the figure and its dynamic transformation, from a driving element, from music, breath and voice, or from a task given to the performer.

In one part of the work, Kinetography Laban, a notation system that allows movement to be written like a score, guided the reading, synthesis and reworking of figures, visual or narrative, drawn from statues, paintings, photographs, objects, episodes of the story and poetic images, and their translation into poses. From notating the pose to notating its dynamic surroundings, natural or imaginary — the mud, the water, the wind, the cloud — and then the transitions between the poses thus defined, we arrived at a dynamic-postural quality: the figure remains recognisable, yet it is traversed by the movement that precedes and follows it. This quality guided the creation of the movements. The performer then takes hold of the writing and makes it their own.

In other parts, we chose to constrain or guide the movement by highlighting a driving element, that is, a part of the body from which the gesture originates, linked to an image: the mud the nymph pushes away even as it takes shape within her, the stirring of the water that shakes the river. Only this element is written into the score using Kinetography Laban, leaving the performer to find bodily solutions suited to their own physical organisation.

Some sections, tied to the music and to the use of breath or voice, take the musical and rhythmic dimension as their main support, allowing each performer's own bodily expression to emerge alongside the proposed constraint. The breath that comes all at once, Alpheus's calls, the name spoken like water that quenches thirst find their echo in the dialogue with the cello and the saxophone.

Other scenes, finally, work on action and figure through a performative approach, in which the gesture does not derive from a danced form or a theatrical interpretation. The performer is given a task, and it is the material conditions of carrying it out that produce tensions, reactions, attitudes and transformations of the body that are not set in advance. Rolling up the cloak until it becomes a hard rope, for instance, imposes a tension and a way of moving that arise from the action itself.

These approaches are distributed across scenes that also treat the relationship between the performers in different ways. In some, the performers interact directly; in others, their bond is purely dramaturgical: the two bodies act each in their own space, connected by the story rather than by an encounter. This is, in essence, the very condition of Alpheus and Arethusa, who seek, brush against and elude each other, only to find themselves together at last while remaining distinct.

The work on figure and symbolism, blending concrete imagery and abstraction, alternates between moments when the performer's body fully embraces its humanity and others when it seeks to move away from it towards more abstract dimensions. The passing of time on stage thus becomes a metamorphosis of gesture and figure: from mud to body, from river to flesh, from body to water, until two figures are together not in form but in element, so close as to seem twins, so distinct as to appear symmetrical.

Where it is used, Kinetography Laban is a tool for making choices and leaving a record: the translation of a way of thinking. Across the performance as a whole, the different compositional approaches make it possible to articulate the precision of choreographic and theatrical choices with the relationship to the music, the relationship, direct or dramaturgical, between the performers, and their interpretive freedom.

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