nicola galli

Il mondo altrove is a choreographic pièce in the shape of dance ritual, which celebrates the motion of an unexplored world according to a scenic mindset.
The pièce traces an ideal path between West and Orient and it's freely inspired by South America's indigenous rituals, Japanese's symbols and traditions of Nō theater, and the composer Giacinto Scelsi's obsessive - to some extent mystical and eccentric - musical research, focused on a spherical concept of sound.
From the main door - which overlooks the scenic area and hides a elsewhere - four shamanic figures finely adorned move forward to lead a magical and timeless ceremony. The movement of bodies and the features of their faces - veiled and reconfigured according to canons extraneous to Western culture - preserve and offer to our gaze the ritual of a possible different tradition, acted inside a circular bordary which delimits a space still attributable to the sacred and which collects the result of a harmonious coexistence between natural habitat and human action.
The action takes place at sunset, embraced by the bright colors of gold, cyan and purple, and then it dissolves in a nocturnal gestural dialogue, as expression of mutual support, perpetual gift, universal and celestial communion.
Faced with this physical language, we are invited to decipher the "hieroglyphs" of this unknown, wild and upside down civilization; we are guests encouraged to train to overcome the border of the known, discovering ourselves as foreigners among foreigners. Welcoming a new world and opening up to an unknown system means to come into contact, without pre-established hierarchies, with the poetry of an opaque language, whether it belongs to the animal world, the plant world or any alternative culture. Accepting the questioning of something about oneself and rediscovering own humanity in the reflection of the encounter.

Nicola Galli

"[...] Galli, as an agile shaman, accompanies his group to experience different possession rituals, revealing them in a well-defined choreographic score. With precious masks on the face shaped by themselves during the creative process, the dancers outline different shades of movement in which the reference to the various hieratic forms of Asian dance theatre (in a mix of Japanese, Balinese and Indian techniques), is dissolved in pelvic and torso pulsations typical of Latin America. In this dramaturgy perfectly designed, to be gently "savoured" and with extreme attention, the smooth and sinuous bodies of the good performers express themselves in perfect symbiosis with the different costumes they wear at each entrance into the sacral space. These stage dresses of different shapes and colours lead us to reflect on the multiple relationships that bind them to the chiastic forms of the choreography, sealed at the end by a mystical embrace created with chain movements that marries the masculine and the feminine.
The young Nicola Galli, endowed with a recognisable authorial figure, has shown with Il mondo altrove that he does not remain chained to languages already beaten. His creativity, in fact, tends towards the freedom to always explore new territories, offering us pieces sewn with embroidery skills."

Carmelo Zapparrata [ Danza&Danza Magazine - 07/2021 ]

"[...] We have particularly appreciated the last creation 'Il mondo altrove' directed Nicola Galli which, danced on an obsessive music full of mysticism by Giacinto Scelsi, leads us to distant worlds, from West to East, in atmospheres reminiscent of a lost and ancestral world: the paintings and vases of ancient Greece but also the dances of Bali and Katakali, the Japanese Nō theatre and the mythical atmospheres of South America.
[...] The dancers hiding an unknown elsewhere, they enter through the door placed in the center of the stage and approach as like mysterious ministers, giving us back the sense of a lost sacredness that suddenly seems to still belong to us."

Mario Bianchi [ Krapp's Last Post - 27/07/2021 ]

"In some way, the thirty-year-old Nicola Galli does very well to explore an 'elsewhere'. In Sansepolcro (Italy) this artist who had already convinced us of his artistic qualities and his musical research, completely out of the mainstream, now escapes towards a mysterious East that he punctually recreates with an aesthetic taste and sensitivity.
He is a new Antonin Artaud discovering the Balinese theatre, with its colourful masks, its almost three-dimensional costumes similar to the Barong, Galli immerses us in a ritual full of courtships, amorous encounters, fights."

Marinella Guatterini [ Wall Street International - 29/07/2021 ]

"[...] An evocative creation, not always narrative, in which Galli acts as the officiant of a minimal and rarefied ritual, performed in a geometric space with monochrome backgrounds: rows of stones, masks, stylised postures and "foreign" gestural codes give life to an exotic and sacred, mysterious and enveloping imaginary.
The “folkloric” risk is avoided also thanks to a decisive musical choice: the microtonal landscape outlined by Giacinto Scelsi constitutes a solid and unexpected soundtrack that harmonises at a tonic and rhythmic level with the choreographic score, creating a bewitching and unclassifiable unicum.
At Kilowatt Festival the creation was preceded by a traveling performance that crossed the streets of the city center and which gave the artist the opportunity to show, with his mature refinement, a ravenous, energetic, surprising force."

Michele Pascarella [ Hystrio magazine - 4/2021 ]

Nicola Galli