The artistic directors of Oriente Occidente, Paolo Manfrini and Lanfranco Cis, aim to strengthen the ‘dance system in Italy’ by encouraging the production and distribution capacity of selected national artists. Talented choreographers are offered a two-year path for sharing objectives. In association with Irene Russolillo, Salvo Lombardo, and Davide Valrosso (whose debut is scheduled for the 2018 edition), Oriente Occidente embarks on a production and support journey for these young artists, ensuring both the presentation of their works during the festival and the international launch of their productions.
Salvo Lombardo, born in 1986 and active in Rome, returns to the festival with two different projects: the performance Present Continuous and the installation for Mart, Reappearances. Those who attended his performance Casual Bystanders during the previous edition of Oriente Occidente will remember that the Sicilian artist loves to explore the relationship between perception and movement. That work—characterized by movement and suggestive video projections—was the result of two years of research on everyday gestures, studying urban situations first recorded as work notes and then developed into choreographic sequences.
The new project, Present Continuous, also stems from the close relationship between the everyday, memory, perception, and movement, as well as the observation of the present through the factor that determines its essence: time. This is not understood in an abstract sense, as a Kantian category, but rather as usage. Can the events that occur be ‘distanced’ from the subject who perceived them? “In our society,” explains Salvo Lombardo, “we tend to fix everything. We immortalize surrogates of reality, pinning events to an eternal present, unaware of the past and the future.
For this new choreographic narrative, I started from the negotiation of memory to intertwine, with the lived experiences of the three performers, the real data, the present, in order to identify a shared memory that opens to the time to come.” From a compositional standpoint, the author sought, together with his interpreters, to rework predetermined and relatively simple choreographic sequences with their own lived experience and biographical perspective. The resulting gesturality is minimal, not at all emphatic, constructed through accumulation and repetition of small gestures—true ‘documents’ of our everyday lives. Is repeating not a way to negotiate memory by projecting it into the future?
