Pinar Sefkatli
The strange theatricality impregnating the pieces and the high quality of the repetitive or exuberant dance of Emio Greco and his dancers are strictly framed by the choreographic score to construct enigmatic fictions of the flesh in each piece. The body, this stranger with its wealth of sensitive worlds, therefore appears reflected in it, as if it were the very author of these stories, absorbed, immersed in unexpected and mysterious spaces that the luminous set design, playing with colour or monochrome, helps reveal, in dialogue with the chosen music.
(source: http://www.ballet-de-marseille.com/en/biography)
Trailer of ROCCO / 2011 / choreography Emio Greco I Pieter C. Scholten.
In ROCCO dancers become boxers and boxers become dancers. In a boxing ring one challenges the other by striking punches, fast footwork and virtuoso tactics. The dancers represent brotherhood in all its senses: the good and the bad, devil and angel, the androgynous and the incestuous. They are Kaïn and Abel, Romulus and Remus, Laurel and Hardy. A dance performance about the physical and psychological extremes of boxer and dancer. A dark full ride.
ROCCO is inspired by Luchino Visconti’s movie Rocco e i suoi Fratelli. The original story is about brotherhood and the struggle for a better life. A story about the search for identity by those whose roots are severed out of necessity. The potential of physical and psychological extremes that Visconti explores in his film layer by layer, resound in this dance performance of Emio Greco | PC. The intense surrender which is evident in the boxing scenes of the film, finds its parallel in the physical dedication of the dancers.
The research for this piece, called Double Points: Rocco, was done in the context of the Opera Estate Festival in Bassano, Italy. Trainings with an Italian boxing teacher served as point of departure. Following the research the choreographers Emio Greco and Pieter C. Scholten were inspired by the similarities in the mental preparation of boxer and dancer as well as by the virtuosity and intelligence of the boxing and the dancing body.
