Six Questions for Roberto Zappalà
e your company Compagnia Zappalà Danza? What sort of contemporary dance do you create (pure dance or physical theatre), what are the themes in your choreographies, what music do you usualy use?
My choreographic work has been focused on body since the very beginning of my artistic activities, a characteristics that has wilfully recurred over the past few years as a protagonist of all my latest choreographies. Working with technologies depends rather on the structure of each of my productions, most of my principal works are pure choreography, based either on actions of individual dancers or the structure of dance. As for music, I do not resort to any particular direction or scope. Personally, I listen to classical music, but in my productions I have used everything that came along. Especially in recent years I have employed the project of original music, composed particularly for my productions and often performed live. My choice of background music for a choreographer is based on the notion that sound should express what dance itself could not.
In your company there are dancers from different countries, and certainly with different dance education. What sort of education prevails and have you created any specific system, how to "adjust" the dancers for your own choreographies? What is your method of working with the body based on?
Dancers that I choose must possess a great command of classical or contemporary dance. We have achieved the best results (the ones I am satisfied with) with the dancers, who have been dancing with us for many years. We have also employed young dancers, who attended the Modem, our course for advanced (Corso di perfezionamento), which is an area where I try to pass my dance language on them via the method "Devoted body" that we have been developing over the past few years. It is an orientation, a way of approaching my style, which I also wanted to describe in a book called Devoted body and which, in accordance with my ideas, makes accessing and attaining a harmony between dancers and my company easier. It is naturally a sophisticated method, however, that does not detract anything from spontaneity and experimentation.
What are the biggest influences on your work? How did your cooperation with foremost choreographers such as Mats Ek, Brigit Cullberg and Jiří Kylián, whose choreographies you have performed on stage affect you?
I come from the classical dance environment, I know the repertoire and I danced in it, these are my fundamental roots. Although I have been working with great choreographers of contemporary dance, I would say that none of them has influenced me directly. My approach to choreography is very personal. It includes my choices (including those in my life), Sicily with its chaos and degradation, the volcano and work in television in the eighties, a sudden and powerful source of inspiration by pop. When I get back to the great artists you just mentioned in your question, I have the greatest admiration for the purity and poetics of Jiří Kylián.
Your company has existed for more than 20 years. What were the beginnings like and have you also come across any obstacles during the long, successful period?
To me, inspiration and obstacles are contained in one single word: Sicily. My country, harsh country, where it was difficult to begin our journey that we have been trying to pursue for over twenty years, the country where it is still difficult to find space for appropriate number of performances and where it is not easy to maintain artistic connections with both the Europian and world avant-garde. But I do not deny this choice and the results we have achieved make me go on.
What is the situation of contemporary dance in Italy like? Are there any structures (either public or private) that support dance and if so, how?
In Italy, there is a ministerial legislature that funds about sixty companies and we are one of them. In some countries the situation is better, in others worse, in Italy it is rather worse. But I do not like to criticize the system. Of course it is a system that can be criticized and, indeed, must be criticized, so that it can be improved. If I was to name one serious drawback, it would be the problem of distribution and appearing as a guest company at national festivals.
Could you please describe the choreography Instrument1, the inspiration behind it and put it in the context of your other works? Why have you chosen solely male dancers for it?
Instrument 1 is the first stage of the project Re-mapping Sicily, with which I initiated the process of "re-reading" Sicily with the focus on its everyday language. Instrument 1 deals with the aspects, customs and attitudes of the Sicilian people, but most of all it is focused on marranzano, a typical Sicilian instrument that is often associated with the mafia. However, for this show it was rediscovered during a fascinating research by Puccio Castrogiovanni, who brought the instrument to innovative and striking rhythms and sounds with the flavour of London underground. Stylistic choice of dancers is given by the first image, the first idea I had when I started thinking about this piece. On one hand, the male body in Instrument1 is a proclamation of the Sicilian way, on the other hand it takes a strong stand against the Mafia as well. The body language of men from the south, and Sicily in particular, expresses the nobility of souls and pride, vanity and plastic poses of Greek statues. To blend this language without words with the sound of marranzano sounded like a good idea to me.
Josef Bartos
Thank you for your thoughts. One got stuck in my mind – that passion makes us different from AI. Just yesterday I read…I am a dance critic. I am a member of an endangered species