A Tribute to Charlotte Bara

Danza e mistero’, a tribute to dancer Charlotte Bara, highlights the beauty and the mystery of gesture and poetry. Preserved in the archive at the Ascona Municipal Museum, curated by historian Michela Zucconi Poncini, is the only visual evidence of Bara that survives for us. I was inspired to create movements of hands, arms and eyes based on the powerful elements I observed in these photographs. Hands were always the central focus of her dancing; she used to say that we breathe the world through our hands, which are able to translate the subtlest of thoughts, combining both physical and the spiritual dimensions. For her, every movement had to “send its vibrations up to the sky, and become part of the eternal rhythm.”

On stage, three dancers of great prominence project into space Charlotte Bara’s magical creative force, originating in her gothic poses and celebrated by writers, poets, painters and artists in a variety of fields. This magical power is combined by the dancers with movements of pelvis and legs, engaging Charlotte Bara’s historical gestures in a sincere dialogue with the dance of today: contemporary dance.

Music provided another fundamental component in Bara’s dance. In ‘Danza e mistero’, Mauro Casappa has included the music Bara was most fond of: Bach, Pergolesi, Leo Kok, Domenico Scarlatti’s adagio and Mozart’s Requiem. Against this backdrop, we have chosen to introduce elements of contemporary musical language, creating an atmosphere of stunning impact.

From earth to light, from dawn to dusk to give rise to actions, memories and emotions, in the magic of silence and light.
Five dancers of great depth meet in a space surrounded by 5 quintals of river stones, in search of the animal in them. Gestures and sounds vibrate freely to meet memories that the body tries to sing in the two fixed points on which we can always count: sunrise and sunset.Their gestures transform the scene into an energetic field in which bodies, spaces, sounds, looks and hands form a single entity, aimed at expressing the inexpressible and making the invisible concrete.

We have to live with fragile spaces that the time consumes and destroys; memories will betray us, forgetfulness seeps insight our memory. In our empty areas, together with interpreters we begin a journey of exploration to draw portions of spaces, micro-worlds invaded by beams of light, sound and vibrations of mechanical objects that pass through the body, carriers of gestures seeking our reason for a dance as a guide to truth and to our suspended humanity between reality and imaginary.On stage two dancers, two personalities who are distinguished by their different act and observe the situations which have occurred; the human being is in a continuous confrontation-clash. They wish to empathize between object-subject, is it correct to switch roles or simply trying to leave their body, their mind in other areas and volumes to suspend themselves and start their journey in an area without borders.