Creating out of nothing is the secret ambition of art. The desert, in its extreme monotony in time and space, offers the conditions to follow a different way and demonstrate that it is possible to produce another world, even when one has only oneself as a raw material. Dance has, as its sole –first and last– instrument, only oneself. Inexistent and irreproducible forms are realised only through oneself. But the desert is also a place of intense shadows, since in the end they are always one’s own; and it is a place of the utmost companionship, since one’s own mind continually produces images that cannot be eradicated. Physics and the metaphysical mind are not places exclusively of one’s own, and the desert turns them into accommodations that always remain open… The desert contains no end of fantasies, and as an environment it is falsely empty, populated, as it is, with mental images of all sorts. The ancient anchorites knew this well, since the desert is where they went to engage in a combat with the images of this world… Even more than a spatial configuration, the desert imposes an extremely elastic temporal condition, with moments of exasperating waiting and moments of sudden alert, which the music, composed for the occasion, dictates.

While in Claudia Castellucci’s previous dances the Dancers’ mental tension was implied by the interpretation of a rigorous choreographic structure to be awakened, here, dance is increasingly encouraged to assert itself as an art of flagrancy. A considerable amount of their efforts is expressed by an immediate decision made by each of the Dancers, who are deprived of any model. This dance looks towards an extreme simplicity, which the desert does not offer, but disturbs to the utmost degree. There are no examples available.

Desert, cave and savannah are hyperbolic and symbolic words, for the portions of silent facts that follow one another in dance. Still, they are the ones that best represent the condition of these Interpreters: an underlying nothingness, the figured bass of life and its immensely tender quality, when seen flowing by from afar… Close relatives buying eggs at a supermarket, unaware that they are being watched, like fixed stars, by their children or parents, who are deeply moved, on the verge of tears, by the mystery of simple presence, rather than by light and grandeur… And then something happens, which is also similar to what happens among the stars. Certain gatherings arise, prepared by inertia itself out of darkness. Magnetic currents induce us to feel the same impulse, which neither resembles nor unites, but only explains the deepest love.

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