The New Habit
Dance by Mòra Company on Znamenny chants of the Russian tradition,
performed live by In Sacris choir, Sofia
Choreography: Claudia Castellucci
Dancers: Sissj Bassani, Guillermo de Cabanyes, Silvia Ciancimino,
René Ramos, Francesca Siracusa, Pier Paolo Zimmermann
Music: historical repertoire of Znamenny chants, St. Petersburg
In Sacris choir, Sofia: Simeon Angelov, Nikolay Damyanliev, Samuil Dechev, Osman Hayrulov, Miroslav Kartalski, Angel Naydenov, Ivan Stanchev, Yavor Stoyanov
Choir Master: Boryana Naydenova
Final apex: Stefano Bartolini
Assistant choreographer: Sissj Bassani
Dresses: Iveta Vecmane, Riga
Sets and lights: Eugenio Resta
Technician: Francesca Di Serio
Director of Production: Benedetta Briglia
Organisation: Valeria Farima
Administration: Michela Medri, Simona Barducci, Elisa Bruno
Production: Societas, Cesena
Co-production: musicAeterna, St. Petersburg; Teatro Piemonte Europa / Festival delle colline Torinesi
foto Lyuda Burchenkova
Andrea Macchia
The dance was born out of a gradual approaching and filling of a matrix completely alien to the dance itself: alien and distant. It is an ancient Russian liturgical chant, the Znamenny chant (signs), that prompted Mòra Company to move, in October of 2021, to St. Petersburg, to construct there the dance, together with musicAeterna Choir of Teodor Currentzis. Compared to the choral music of the better-known Orthodox tradition, znamenny singing wears a modest garb, far removed from the pomp of the Byzantine-Slavic liturgy. Its matrix is thus religious, but we have deprived it of its creedal meanings. The procession and the circle are ritual forms of movement, but we inhabit them stripped of meanings attached to a tradition. The clothes are ceremonial, but they are sewn in view of the dance, as addends to the movement. All this is the turning away and the separation from one’s horizon. Taking the side of a saprophytic dance, nourished by a foreign matrix, it indicates a concrete way of exile, initially cultural and then physical, yet, in the meantime, there is the reality of time, invented by the dance to be physical, of new consistency and actuality
