Crossing the Line, The French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF)’s annual fall arts festival, explores the dialogue between artist and public.
FOLK-S
Six dancers enter the stage and perform in hypnotic unison in Folk-s, will you still love me tomorrow?, the East Coast debut of Italian performance maker Alessandro Sciarroni. Precise, rhythmically pounding feet and a pair of lederhosen are the only recognizable relics of a centuries-old Bavarian folk dance that is reduced here to its most elemental form.
Working between dance, performance art, and anthropological ritual, Sciarroni deploys the body, in all its sweaty physicality, to push the limits of human potential in this visceral, mesmerizing piece.
Folk-s is a performative and choreographic practice focusing on time. The work came to life while thinking about ancient
folk dances as popular phenomena that have survived contemporaneity. Dance as
a rule, a dictatorship, flux of images that follow the rhythm and the form, not the content. The form is rhythm, energy that
is perceived through our ears, not the eyes. Thus, for the performers of Folk-s, there’s no other time than the present, a time that is not-past and not-future. It’s the infinite insistence of the tide against the sand, the endless return of the same wave to the same shore.
Creation, dramaturgy Alessandro Sciarroni
Dancers Marco D’Agostin, Pablo Esbert Lilienfeld, Francesca Foscarini, Matteo Ramponi,
Alessandro Sciarroni, Francesco Vecchi
original music Pablo Esbert Lilienfeld
video and images Matteo Maffesanti