Verklärte Nacht by Arnold Schönberg,
Serenade in do maggiore for arches op. 48 by Pëtr Il’ič Čajkovskij

coreographyCristina Kristal Rizzo with Annamaria Ajmone, Marta Bellu, Linda Blomqvist, Jari Boldrini, Marta Capaccioli, Nicola Cisternino, Lucrezia Palandri, Giulio Petrucci, Stefano Roveda, Sara Sguotti, Cristina Kristal Rizzo light design Carlo Cerri costumes Laura Dondoli e Cristina Kristal Rizzo musical assistant Federico Costanza production LuganoInScena coproduction LAC, OSI and CAB 008 with the support of Armunia Centro di residenza artistica Castiglioncello (LI) Festival Inequilibrio sponsor of production Clinica Luganese Moncucco | in collaboration with Hotel de la Paio with the sustain of MiBACT, Regione Toscana and Comune di Firenze



The creation researches the deepest close relationship in between dance and music, emancipating the expressive potentialities of the body, the elegance of the gesture, the reversibility in between the space of an impulse and a decision, a determination and a glitch, the state in which human perceives itself as pure intensity. The choreographic structure is based on two diverse methodologies, different in the approach to form, but specular in the generation of an aesthetic experience in which the space in between rea-lity and appearance, the individual and the collective, constitutes a renovate space of freedom for the sensible, a different political posture of the bodies.
Verklarte Nacht in the version of 1943 for an arches Orchestra opens up the performance and it is the incipit to articolate a visceral dance, with a succession of duets in which is the instinct of the body in within the musical listening which prevails on the concept, de-signing the dynamic image of the artistic gesture. It’s the score from Schönberg, which the author in 1950 described as a pure music, to conduct the inner reality, to make reso-nate the impersonal of dance as a potential, as the origin and the matter of a sense not yet to come. Serenade op.48 in do maggiore for arches, is the first original ballet which Balanchine created in America in 1934 for the students of the School of the American Ballet Theatre. The ballet is a historical stone in the history of dance and it is nowadays in the repertoire of the New York City Ballet. The creation of Balanchine, thought as a sort of technical ballet dance class on stage, foresees 28 dancers with blue costumes in front of a blue backdrop. It’s therefore the most direct relation with the choreographic form which is proposed as a discipline and rigorous dedication to the question that each profound transformation of the body and of the language produce.
It’s an ecology of the experience in which everything proceeds in involving in a unique instant the processes of the thought, the sensibility, the imagination, the physicality of the movement, the attention, the aesthetic cohesion to a vertigo, without anymore distinction in between matter and form. It’s a slowly proceeding, relentless, the proceeding of an in-dicative present where the instant is only the appearance of a more extended time, the antique character of an eternal coming back. And again it’s Schönberg, with his own words, that gives us us the best sense of what is at stake: When the form is in place eve-rything within it can be pure feeling.



DEBUT: international premier LAC/ Lugano in scena | 25 November 2017 with OSI Orchestra della Svizzera italiana | director Nicholas Milton



LIGHT DESIGN The light design curated by Carlo Cerri is an organic element of the creation. Black as in a dark night envelops the entire space, a black abyss from which the phosphorescence of the skin of the bodies emerges, the emotional hit that trickle from the skin. From here, from the dark transfigure night, we step with a not chronological tempo-ral jump into the pureness of the Balanchine form, at the beginning of the Ballet as we know it today. Balanchine affirmed he didn't want to say nothing, he said to have con-structed Serenade under the contingency of who he had in the rehearsal studio every day and so to have made a ballet not on the interprets, but for some bodies, to have used the body as a punctuation and he also said he had continuously re worked to this ballet in different time, modifying it or improving it, changing the costumes or the light. So it is possible to go from one zone to the other with an absolutely freedom, connecting this co-hesion to form as an open space, imagining no interval in-between the two pieces, but a simple movement opening to a new vision, from the black to the compact and milky elec-tric blue Balanchine.



COSTUMES The costumes realized with the young costumer Laura Dondoli, are thought as suits not closing the bodies or designing them, but as a chromatic contribution to the equilibrium of the entire vision, bringing out the emotive nuance of Verklärte Nacht, to then transform in a mirror image for Serenade. So nuances tone on tone, nocturnal co-lors, the sky and the wood, suddenly enlightened by warm colors, sustaining the idea of a soul state transforming as a fickle landscape. The Wood, the Night is in front of us or maybe is everywhere around us.



PRESS REVIEW
(…) What Rizzo does, on these monuments of the west choreo musical tradition, it is not an operation of memory, but an act of rupture of the limits of the imaginary and the imagi-nation in itself, so that a different experience of the present can be possible. (Stefano Tomassini _VN Serenade libretto)

(…) ‘ composer’ of the scene, singular director and owner of a not conventional know how, Cristina Kristal Rizzo is that figure capable of not having enough of the territories conquered, pushing herself towards a continuos research in disregarding in primis her-self. In the new project she measures with two totem of the twentieth-century, the Schönberg of Verklärte Nachte and Serenade in major do for arches by Cajkovskij, two parts of the same program which has the title of VN Serenade, a very beautiful show concentrated on the unity of the form in transfiguring the relation, first with couples and then with the totali-ty of the interprets, clarifying the possibilities of movement investigated already in the previous work Prélude and that today find a perfect synthesis. Rizzo in herself, leaving the space to her dancers just cutting out the only interference of a cameo, is in a state of grace. (Paolo Ruffini_ LIMINATEATRI.IT)

(…) For the clear parameters of beauty, elegance but also of a strong corporality, they are essential choreographies, but also very intense and suggestive that one of Cristina Kri-stal Rizzo. (…) We are in front of some images that, confronting themselves with the mu-sical score, are not simply a comment or a visual narration but, in their dynamic crescen-do, in the alternation of the lines and of the forms designed in space, in the variation and the repetition of the gestures, movements and trajectories, they became one and the sa-me with it. The audience was involved,enthralled and enraptured from the rich sequenze of images of great carisma, strength and expression and naturally from the great skill of the dancers. (Marinella Polli_ CORRIERE DEL TICINO)

(…) Rizzo is interested in a visceral dance, instinctive, a dance which digs into the musi-cal listening, as to follow a more pictorial line either then a narrative one, disguised in the music from Schoenberg. (…) In this way Rizzo realizes, with a fresh invention, a junction of the musical motions with the gestural ones, and the images seem appearing as for germination. (Giuseppe Distefano _ ARTRIBUNE)

(…) Here nothing is hold, the gesture is natural and the release technique overlooks. And the surprises are continuos, cause the game of cross references is astute. Making her own the thinking of Balanchine who defined the ballet as “ only dancers moving on a marvelous musical piece. A serenade, a dance if you like, illuminated by the moon”, our good choreographer 83 years later has found her best chant of the moon. (Marilù Buzzi_ DANZA&DANZA)