After Femina left a lasting impression at last year’s NID – New Italian Dance Platform – in Vicenza, Compagnia Abbondanza / Bertoni re-affirmed their role as one of the leading companies in Italian contemporary dance.
En–Knap Productions and Kino Šiška are hosting a dance company that has shaped the Italian dance scene since 1989, forging an identity that is highly prolific, while remianing singular: their dance language is deeply rooted yet always in motion.
A meeting of two thinkers and two bodies – Michele Abbondanza and Antonella Bertoni – spurred an interesting career: from the school of Alwin Nikolais in New York to the poetic improvisation of Carolyn Carlson, from studying with Dominique Dupuy in France to the quiet discipline of Zen. Compagnia Abbondanza / Bertoni is a company that not merely performs, but teaches, researches, and shapes the horizon of dance. Their work does not soothe; it unsettles, it does not provide answers; it questions. It neither embraces nor excludes but moves, shifts, resists, reveals. Since 2005, the company has been in residence at Teatro alla Cartiera in Rovereto.
Femina (2023) is the second chapter of their three-year project Io è un altro (I Is Another), intent on translating the female form, its weight, its multiplicity, its contradiction, into movement. Finalist of the 2023 Ubu Award for Best Dance Performance and a lauded constant on European stages, Femina continues its unwavering original inquiry into identity, its fractures, and its fluidity.
Femina, not the woman. Femina, more than the woman. Femina, the concept, the mechanism, the ideal (?) of the woman, always becoming, never there, always quite, never right. Inhuman, more than human. Clad in delicate, skin-like lingerie and glossy, blond-like wigs, vestiges of female alienation, or is it emancipation, immersed in the relentless, synthetic sound and dryness of the rhythm in Dysnomia by Dawn of Midi, with an empty and clean, geometric backdrop, four dancers engage in a continuous minimal movement, a flow of interchangeable moves and gestures, their variations, deviations, only to become their sublimations, eschewing personality or individuality in favour of functionality or totality, becoming a mechanism or a mechanical sculpture of femininity, seemingly disassociated from pride or pain, sociality or solidarity, ultimately, for the audience to discerne glimpses of fragility and humanity under the rigorous, almost engineered choreography of coertion, or is it consent. An exercise in common, disassociated female struggle? A utopian or dystopian female liberation? Always becoming, never there, always quite, never right. Inhuman, more than human. At the end? A cut, in sound and set. A cut-out of the female and the feminine can only end in a cut of deliverance, no catharsis, of the sublime drive of Femina.
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Plaudit: captatio benevolentiae or j’accuse?
In the beginning was the clap:
an ironic swing,
hunters flushing out the prey,
or the beginning of a sabbatical.
An insistent, geometric loop
compresses and compels,
supports and generates
rigorously formal scores,
leaving concealed momentarily
the woman’s soul essence.
In the unfolding of the action
flows a surgical
self-flagellating choreography,
always with an ear
for a common and shared time.
At once bruised and battered:
“Batter yet listen!” (Plutarch)
With artificial disguise
and minimalist moves
the flow takes us
into an interplay of female identity,
effeminating, emasculating, deconstructing the four performers.
Disembodying and embodying self and each other:
two poles,
two physical places
on opposite banks of the same river.
Accomplices in appearance mirrored in each other,
restoring mirrored moves,
condensed and clad in a soundtrack,
electrifying and flowing
with no real interruption
and with no room for melody,
only a dry rhythm.
Femina is a space of translating and hallucinating
a scenic palette of possible forms and names
of the female and the feminine contemporary world.
—Michele Abbondanza
CREDITS
Authors: Michele Abbondanza and Antonella Bertoni
Choreography: Antonella Bertoni
Dancers: Sara Cavalieri, Eleonora Chiocchini, Valentina Dal Mas, Ludovica Messina Poerio
Light Design: Andrea Gentili
Technical Direction: Claudio Modugno
Music: Dysnomia – Dawn of Midi
Sound Editing: Orlando Cainelli
Organization, Strategy, and Development: Dalia Macii
Administration and Coordination: Francesca Leonelli
Communication: Erika Parise
Editorial: Marilù Ursi
Production: Compagnia Abbondanza/Bertoni
The performance in Ljubljana is made possible by En–Knap in collaboration with Kino Šiška and with the support of the Italian Cultural Institute in Slovenia.
