Osso

With his hard body, as though carved out of rock, Virgilio Sieni is an impressive dancer whose work is centred on the exploration of a grammar specific to the controlled gestures, positions and vagaries of the human shell. He is Florentine, trained in modern and classical dance at the same time as he studied art and architecture. In 1983, Virgilio Sieni founded his company and created short original pieces with a small number of dancers. He considers that dance is rooted in the concrete aspect of life, and the search for the simplest and most direct links between bodies encourages him to banish from the stage the spectacular leaps, academic repertory and incarnations that are too sentimental. The bodies he sets in place and gets to move all seem connected to visual research, to a sound ambience and human matter, as strange as they are dense and rigorous. His company's shows are regularly presented in Italy and throughout Europe.
Virgilio Sieni runs the Cango space which he founded in 2003 in Florence, a centre with an innovative concept, dedicated to experimentation on dance and the body's disciplines, as well as a contemporary artistic language. Cango is an international reference project open to encounters in Italy and to welcoming international artists. In 2007, he founded the Academy on the Art of the Gesture, a project focused on transmission, teaching and creation. The heart of the Academy is in Florence but its influence is cast much farther afield through the artists and teachers that Virgilio Sieni has trained.

When we see them side by side, Virgilio and Fosco Sieni, son and father, have the same serious face, the same determined look, a deep expression, and they share a melancholic authenticity of the people. The older, and smaller, is simply “even less of a dancer” than the younger. They constantly look for each other, hold each other, sometimes push each other away. They “dance” together, the body oblique, in an unstable equilibrium, sometimes taking each other's hand, sharing a game, a drink, a table, a physical exercise, that is, poles apart from choreography and prestigious duets. Moreover, where are they lost, these two children from a common family? Here they are as though they were shut up in cold, desolate, sad places that they inhabit with the rare gesture and contained zeal. Suddenly, filial understanding is imposed, through magic tricks, a ball or hoop game, shared, tender as the pale sun that comes in through the windows. But often, each of them is sent back to his solitude to be condemned to melancholy, a strange ballet of jerky and repetitive gestures for the older man, purposeless contortions for the younger, as if these two only had the parallel trauma of the inability to communicate as an existence. This way of not talking, however, is also a plunge into origins, the son finding in the father the beginning of his own gestures. It is man's condition that Virgilio Sieni explores in this show, which sometimes brings to mind the documentary film San Clemente by Raymond Depardon, the existence of this modern man who goes off to conquer himself and his physical identity. The only breaks are no less radical, floating in a halo of white, red and blue light, accompanied by an oppressive background sound, as though the father and son had been forgotten there to better find and understand each other again.

de Virgilio Sieni
avec: Virgilio et Fosco Sieni
projet sonore et live electronics: Francesco Giomi, Francesco Canavese (Tempo Reale)
lumières: Virgilio Sieni
production: Daniela Giuliano

production: Compagnia Virgilio Sieni, Tempo Reale
en collaboration: avec le 35e Festival de Santarcangelo (Italie)
avec le soutien: du ministère italien de la Culture, du Conseil régional de Toscane, de la Ville de Sienne et de la Ville de Florence