FTA | Survive time

Two men come forward, hand in hand. After a moment of suspension, they take position, eyes in the eyes, and begin their dance. Clinging firmly to each other, they move quickly, with short, jerky steps, hop, run around the stage, then grab each other and turn quickly on their own.

Iris Gagnon Paradise
The Press

This sequence, the dancers Gianmaria Borzillo and Giovanfrancesco Giannini repeat it tirelessly during the 20 minutes that the show lasts. Save the last dance for me, by Italian artist Alessandro Sciarroni. At first focused on performing correctly the series of fairly complex steps of this folk dance born in the Bologna region and called the polka chinata, they gradually let themselves be contaminated by the pleasure of the dance, communing in the movement, the smile on the lips. Impossible not to get caught up in them.

This scene, which we witnessed on a beautiful sunny Sunday in the public square of the Maisonneuve Market, will be repeated in two other public places in Montreal as part of the FTA. Save the last dance for me is both a tribute to this Italian ballroom dance born at the beginning of the XX^e century and a contemporary reinterpretation of its aesthetics, accompanied by electronic ambient music, replacing traditional folk music.

Reached in Italy, Alessandro Sciarroni explains how he discovered the polka chinata thanks to ballet teacher Giancarlo Stagi. The latter, after coming across videos dating from the 1960s, decided to save this dance, which had practically disappeared, from oblivion by teaching it to some of his students.

“When I saw these videos, I was very intrigued and decided to go to Bologna to meet Giancarlo. At that time, only five people in the world knew how to dance the polka chinata. It is a dance that is really very beautiful, traditionally danced by two men, since it was born at a time when society was very divided. It was all the more fascinating. »

This dance, very physical, offers an acrobatic side, because the men grapple and spin very quickly on themselves.

“Over time, the polka chinata became a sporting activity, there were performances in public places, it was almost a kind of competition for the fastest couple”, specifies the choreographer.

Reactivate memory

A former actor who was particularly interested in performance and body art, Mr. Sciarroni found himself in dance, because his proposals were “too minimalist for the theater and too baroque for the art galleries”. The iconoclastic artist, who received a Golden Lion for his body of work in 2019, has always been interested in several physical practices, without ranking them, driven by a fascination for movement taken out of its context.

One of his pieces diverted juggling; another was inspired by goalball, ball game for the blind. His piece folkspresented at Usine C in 2017, was inspired by the 1000-year-old Austrian folk dance schuhplattler.

The fact that the dance is traditionally performed by a couple of men also challenged him. “There is a lot of tenderness between these two men who perform these movements together. It’s really a dance where you have to trust the other. I like to go under the surface of things, to highlight the patterns that emerge. »

His work thus challenges the stereotypes of the genre, setting up a game of complicity between the two performers, who learned to dance for a period of six months, once a week.

The artist’s approach is not to “save” the polka chinata from extinction, because, he says, “dance is stronger than any species”, but to reactivate its memory by presenting it, taken out of its original context, in different public places.

The choreographer pushes the endurance limits of the performers, who perform the dance well beyond the usual two or three minutes. “It shows how challenging this dance is; the repetition of structures means that we see the body change, the face relax. The idea is to go beyond pain and fatigue to find pleasure,” he concludes.

Tuesday May 31 and Wednesday May 1^er June at the Cité-des-Hospitalières, as well as June 2 and 3 at the Casa d’Italia.