Tonight The festival organised in the name of Enrico Cecchetti oficially opens its gates to yet a new summer season. There was a preview in June with The Zagreb Dance Company who perfromed "Maybe, something personal". What follows is the forthcoming schedule:

Tuesday 12th July, 2005, Teatro Rossini
HENRI OGUIKE DANCE COMPANY (England)
F.P.S. Parts 1 & 2 / Finale / Front Line / White Space
[Italian premiere]

Sunday 17th July, 2005, Teatro Rossini
PIETRAGALLA COMPAGNIE (France)
Souviens toi
[Italian premiere]

Wednesday 20th July, 2005, Teatro Rossini
ROBERTO BOLLE & FRINEDS (Italy)
Le Corsaire / Romeo and Juliet / The Black Swan Pas de deux / Le Bourgeois / In the middle somewhat elevated / Sleeping Beauty / Don Quixote / Petit Mort / La vie en Rose / La Fille mal gardée / Nisi Dominus / Excelsior

Wednesday 27th July, 2005, Teatro Rossini
CARLOS ACOSTA & DANZA CONTEMPORANEA DE CUBA (Cuba)
Tocororo, a Cuban tale
(italian premiere)

Sunday 31st July, 2005, Teatro Annibal Caro
AGAR - NUCLEO DEL TRATTO SOLITARIO (Italy)
La vera vita comincierà domani (real life will begin tomorrow)
[dedicated to Salvdor Dalì}
(Premiere, festival production)

Tuesday 2nd August, 2005, Teatro Rossini
RENNIE HARRIS / PURE MOVEMENT (United States)
Repertory

Friday 5th August, 2005, Teatro Rossini
ST PETERSBURGH BALLET ON ICE (Russia)
Swan Lake

Monday 8th August, 2005, Arena Sferisterio Macerata
JOAQUIN CORSTES (Spain)
Mi soledad

Thanks for this, Rosella - an amazing mix. Henri Oguike is on a roll and is highly regarded over here. I'm sure Rennie Harris will be well received and I'd like to see PIETRAGALLA COMPAGNIE. But Joachim Cortez?

I see what you mean Stuart, but I believe Cortes is a charismatic performer. There is a controversy over his status as a dancer and choreographer and I believe that his mass success has had a negative impact on his image as an artist. He is not well regarded by the purist flamenco community as he attempts to inflate a new life into the art of flamenco by mingling it with other dance forms.

I have a video of one of his most known work "Gipsy Passion", and i think some of his choreographic inventions are quite good. There is for example a duet between him and a classical dancer where flamenco and ballet meet and interact via the dramatic sceanrio of a duel.

Another important aspect of his coming to the festival is the location where he is going to perfrom. All the other perfromances of the Civitanova Danza festival are going to be based in Civitanova, but this one will be held in Macerata and precisely at the arena sferisterio, which is an open theatre and the sacred house of one of Italy's most renowned summer opera sesons, its other sister and most famous counterpart being the Verona arena. So bringing dance to this place will hopefully give more visibility to dance, a strongly recommended necessity on my part.

Technically speaking it will be interesting to see how Cortes will employ the unusually long stage...let's wait and see...

THE ENERGY BETWEEN MOVEMENT AND SOUND
Henri Oguike Dance Company

12th July, 2005, Teatro Cecchetti, Civitanova, h. 9.30 pm

Rain has the vertical power of dispersing a crowd just before a formal ceremony. And rain delayed the inauguration of the refurbished Cecchetti Theatre Foyer, causing people to stay indoors and wait. Once the rain ended its watery course, they stepped outside and gathered around the mayor Erminio Santinelli. A ribbon was cut and a brief discourse was given. Then the artistic consultant of Civtanova Danza, Gilberto Santini, introduced the programme for the Civitanova Danza Festival 2005 season with a particular emphasis on the performance by the Henri Oguike Dance Company who was to open the festival later on during the evening.

Henri Oguike met the audience in a brief conversation at 7.30 pm, he was very kind to do so even though he was having some technical problems with the final reharsal of his pieces. The audience had the precious chance to know a bit more of the choreographer's approach to movement where music, and especially live music, seems to have a special place. This became instantly clear watching "Front Line", Oguike's signature piece, chosen to open the evening. A string quartet at the back of the stage playing the 9th quartet by Shostakovich and a sextet of dancers repeatedly forming a line destined to contantly be dissolved. There is an energy in this piece which stems from the silk-like sonority of the music to meet that of movement half in a fruitful dialogue which is very rare in today's contemporary dance. In particular, I appreciated the contrast created by the repeated feet beating hard onto the stage and the fluid sounds produced by the string instruments.

"F.P.S. (Frames per Sound)" followed "Front Line" and a completely different atmosphere was introduced. Unfortunately, Oguike was unable to perform his solo piece due to a knee problem. However, Adrian Lopez and Nuno Silva were very intense and precise in conveying what Oguike himself had, during the above mentioned conversation with the public, described as the tension between design and rhythm. The warm effect of the brown essential costumes by Elizabeth Baker and the use of light often made of a single floodlight turned towards the dancers, highlighted the intimacy of this piece, made of gestures and movemts often perfomed at ground level.

The night was closed by a choral piece, "Seen of Angels" featuring the whole company. In this case the relationship between movement and sound is more explicit. Again we have an unusual musical choice for a contemporary dance piece, the "Messiah" by Händel. Interesting of this piece was what I would call the 'hug theme', that is the repeated hugs the members of the company exchanged with each other throughout the piece. It was a sweet and at the same time strong manifestation of body contact, the creation of small cells in the dynamism of the dance pharases, where usually each dancer followed his/her path.

The Henri Oguike Dance Company's performance was an Italian premiere and exclusive, it was
well received by the audience of Civitanova Danza as well as by those who came to Civitanova from different parts of Italy to watch them, a sign that this town on the coast of Italy is becoming more and more an important 'house' to host high quality dance.

FRAMES OF A PAST REMEMBERD
Pietragalla Compagnie
"Souviens toi…"
Teatro Rossini, Civitanova Marche, Italy, 17th july 2005, h 9.30 pm

The second appointment of the Civitanova Danza Festival 2005 was the latest work by the Pietragalla Compagnie, "Souviens toi…" (remember), a piece mainly made of duets between Marie-Claude Pietragalla herself and Julien Derouault. The theme is the melancholic and surreal aspects characterising the act of remembering. This is clear since the opening where Derouault literally appears on stage back centre enclosed in a transparent plastic ball. He slowly moves his torso and unrols his arms while shifting towards the centre of the stage.

This intro sets the oneiric atmosphere which continues in the first main frame of the performance. A frame made of a Van Goghian blue sky, a curtain moving on stage back left, a white boat flowing on stage front and a crimson red dressed woman interpreted by Pietragalla. She walks, she opens her white flowered umbrella, she takes off her high heeled red shoes and her dancing/remembering officially begins. Her movement approach is made of a perfect command of classical and contemporary techniques, with pirouettes and wide batmans distorted by a recurrent anxious movement of her arms.

The journey into memory takes a more game-like turn when Derouault enters the stage as a sailor character. He wears a striped t-shirt and three quarters lenght dark trousers. He jumps and moves around untill he meets her. They get to know each other via the two big plastic balls they exchange with each other. One yellow, one blue. Bouncing with them, throughing them away. A game that makes full sense once a series of black and white photographs are shown on a white curtain-like screen that appears in the middle part of the stage. Remembering often acts in a tricky manner, you distort images untill proportions dissolve and a ball you used to play with when you were a child, becomes a huge round coloured object you can almost rest on.

A second main frame is introduced after this. Derouault lies on a green carpet on stage back right. The lights are focused on his figure and on that green square, all the rest of the stage is in complete darkness. This seems to be a more melancholic and introspective side of memory, the one that digs down into the deepest realms of the human mind. The movement phrases are more hysteric and performed standing on place. Pietragalla enters wearing a white gown and perfomes a solo piece as well as a duet with Derouault.

To this second section others follow, the melancholic twist becomes at times tragic and at times comic. Mimed sections with a clownesque touch alternate with slow and fast paced dance phrases, while the showing of photographs is replaced by the projection of filmed sections. Even though the choreographic device sometimes lacks power and inventiveness, the technique ability of the two dancers is excellent and it is a pleasure to watch. "Souviens toi…" is a piece full of pathos, it is dedicated to Pietragalla's father whose recent death deeply affected her. And the Civitanova Danza audience was quite affected by her display of delicacy and lyricism. They applauded a long and intense applause and, among some of them, one could see a tear dropping from their eyes.