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

"[…] What goes on stage is a sort of primitive ritual, it is a dance that concerns the magic rituality archetypes where space and objects turn into sceneries overlooking the untold, the eternal, the mystery of life and creation. This liminal sense - to quote Victor Turner - passes through the performance of Nicola Galli who translates his contemporary style into a sort of a mimic score that lives by ethnological and iconographic suggestions of a primitive and rupestrian art which emerges out of the body posture."

Nicola Arrigoni [ SIPARIO.it - 27/11/2020 ]

"[...] 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 ]

"In a beautiful urban action entitled 'Il mondo altrove: a gestural dialogue', Nicola Galli led the audience from the streets of the center of Sansepolcro to Piero della Francesca gardens.
The shambling and polyrhythmic action complete with a mask was immediate, seductive, in a proximity between the spectator and nature that did not allow for mediations; this is a creation of great performative force because it is capable of taking all the risks of a promiscuous contiguity."

Stefano Tomassini [ Artribune - 08/08/2021 ]

"[...] 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 ]

"At the Tor Fiscale Park (Rome), in front of the aqueduct, a small performative mystery approaches the audience.
As dusk hastens to darken the view, the wordless mask picks up small objects, they look like stones, in reality they are made of wood, polygons that, once placed one on top of the other, rise into a small totem.
[... ] This is the sensation of disorientation that one has in the face of a performance that could be traced back to dance only because of the presence of music (evocative at first but with a sense of danger and emphasis later) and the absence of words; but, like the mask and the costume, the ancestry of the gestures is to be sought in the practices of the Far East, in Balinese-style memories, with the aim, however, of repositioning the signs of those cultures and their imagery in other places to create, precisely, new horizons and not mere imitation."

Andrea Pocosgnich [ Teatro e Critica - 16/06/2022 ]

"Nicola Galli's work is focused in a research that does not feed on the vocabularies or phrasing of this contemporaneity, it does not gloss over the present certainly, but sinks into an archive of imagery and references that are anthropologically powerful and perturbing enough to give our present new questions and liminal mystery affections to the ritual, to the participation between gesture and gaze.
[...] With a mask that is in its own way prodrome of the Commedia dell'Arte, it latches on to rural rites or archaic pleniluns, projecting that body out of itself beyond itself, removing the 'encrustations' of the now, finally displaying an immemorial tale. She moves stones, cadences almost smoothing the air with a perplexing gesturality, orchestrates the space of an ancient celebration in that absolute of presence and nature with a beautiful danced discourse."

Paolo Ruffini [ Limina teatri - 26/06/2022 ]

"Nicola Galli stands on stage bare-chested, crouched like an expectant god, with a mask over his face.
A small god, with an Inca mask, is therefore at first glance Galli, despite the mighty physique of a former gymnast that he continually reconfigures in different balances, in a choreographic path full not in the elevation and the leap but in the interrogative sequence of the relationships between limbs, torso, head, of his own virtuosity, of a personal language but full of memories.
[... ] Galli works with both dramaturgical and choreographic confidence, so much so that, with naturalness - and with a certain dose of that bookish eroticism that brings his choices closer to those of the fathers, almost fellow citizens, of the Cesena-based Socìetas - he does not adopt a generic ethnic, smoky musical background, nor does he surrender to pure silence, but adopts the complex, panting sonorities of the orchestral Giacinto Scelsi, with their motionless progression of insistent research over a point, vertical as a drop that must make its way.
Galli succeeds with honesty, without pandering, in profoundly touching the limits of man and nature, thanks to a refined musical choice, the translation of a cultural gesture reaching out to all possible ‘elsewhere’, free of superficial masquerades and automatisms."

Carlo Lei [ Krapp's Last post - 9/07/2022 ]

"The perception of time, sometimes dilated, sometimes compressed, between the insistently repeated gestures, performed in conceptual harmony with Giacinto Scelsi's ideas, was cancelled: just as the artist of sound repeated a note countless times, until he lost himself in it and grasped the mystical essence of each tiny variation of the same technically imperceptible frequency, the ritual of 'Il mondo altrove' is based on the repetition of gestures that remind us sometimes of African shamans, sometimes of Indian dances, of the leaps of Latin American tribes, of the gestures of Japanese theatre, and sometimes of the frescoes of the palace of Knossos in Crete, or of the Etruscan tombs in Lazio. As in any mystical journey, the performance alternates between moments of hypnosis, of excitement, of losing oneself in the invisible, of fatigue that, once overcome, makes us aware of the strength we have to surmount obstacles and keep going.As in any mystical journey, the performance alternates between moments of hypnosis, of excitement, of losing oneself in the invisible, of fatigue that, once overcome, makes us aware of the strength we have to surmount obstacles and keep going.
In Nicola Galli's performance there is all the sacredness of scenic action, theatre, dance and music reduced to their roots, to the minimums of action, gesture and sound that, repeated, cared for, experienced in every moment as if they were eternal, rediscover all the mystical potential of their origins to let us ferry to the next elsewhere."

Elena Zeta Grimaldi [ Paneacquaculture - 05/08/2022 ]

"[...] The shaman slowly advances with a fixed, needy, questioning gaze: he is asking us something without saying even a word, distance is cancelled and we feel intimately questioned about what we have just witnessed. We remain silent even before his retrocession, in which the dancer carefully groups together wooden stones and uses them as footsteps on which to proceed backwards. He retreats discreetly, comes out of the nest of foliage and timidly builds with those same elements of path a totem that he leaves us as a legacy, perhaps the symbol of an accomplished metamorphosis. With this act Nicola Galli gives himself definitively to the audience as an instrument of sublimation between human being and nature, in which he transforms himself without ceasing through the sacred dimension of ritual, aimed at the germination of new possible combinations of coexistence, in search of possible alternative worlds."

Margherita Alpini [ 21/07/2023 - FU ME festival blog - Altre Velocità, cultural journalism workshop ]

"A performance that literally seems to open a portal on stage to the other dimension referred to in the title. As if the force of nature and of a primordial energy suddenly became attainable thanks to the dances we see on stage, performed by Galli bare-chested and with his face covered by a mask, recalling a bit the animal world, a bit a disquieting and metallic distortion of the human face. Disquieting, but at the same time liberating, the choreography never appears too forced, and indeed preserves an impression of freedom and spontaneity. Indeed, it is millimetrically designed and perfectly performed to give a dramaturgical structure that seems to start from the evocation of a ritual, of which the performer is initially in control, but from which he is then partly overwhelmed and injured, but perhaps finally freed."

Valentina Balestrazzi, Giulia D'Amico [ 06/2023 - Krapp's last post ]

"We entered the Basilica hesitantly, a little in awe. The space is huge, immense, Palladian. The silence troubles us for a few minutes as the lights dim. Under the high vaults, golden and silent, the lion of Saint Marco scrutinises us. His gaze points downwards. Who knows what kind of animal it will be - he seems to say - that one moving on the ground. They are slow, feline gestures, those: perhaps a cheetah, a puma. At times, however, the beast exhibits ape-like movements: yes, it is a human animal. The mask, also golden, hides his face. And in the middle the two eyes gleam like precious stones. Indeed, they are precious stones and shine in the semi-darkness. That mask evokes Aztec or Inca America, the gestures evoke the fables of Indian dance narration, the bharatanatyam, for example. And the puzzle of small wooden pieces, over which the performer moves, ritually, like a feline, have the colour of African essences. Their smell perhaps. And then there is Bali, there is Japan. There are even some Etruscan echoes.
To support the view, the orchestral power of the composition ‘Pezzi su una nota sola’ by Giacinto Sclesi (1905-1988) explodes at one point. A composer overshadowed by the development of the century, a niche musician, but powerful, spiritual, cosmopolitan. The rustic, red bricks that Palladio designed in the architectural rigour of an all-white Renaissance vibrate with that sonorous reverberating authority. The Basilica resounds as one body, while the beast, the now shamanic dancer, hieroglyphic, indigenous saint, wanders about in search, perhaps, of an escape route from the mediocrity of the present. "

Roberto Canziani [ 10/2024 - Quantescene! ]

Nicola Galli