Il mondo altrove
year: 2021
production: TIR Danza, stereopsis
co-production: MARCHE TEATRO / Inteatro Festival, Oriente Occidente
concept and choreoraphy: Nicola Galli
dance: Margherita Dotta, Nicola Galli, Leonardo Maietto, Silvia Remigio
music: Giacinto Scelsi, 3/4 had been eliminated
props: Giulio Mazzacurati
masks and costumes: Nicola Galli
light and sound: Giovanni Garbo
artistic residences: DID Studio / Ariella Vidach, Centro di Residenza della Toscana (Armunia - CapoTrave / Kilowatt), Oriente Occidente Studio_Passo Nord
with the support of: Rete Almagià
took part to the process of creation: Nicolas Grimaldi Capitello
length: 50 minutes
selected work NID Platform 2024
production: TIR Danza, stereopsis
co-production: MARCHE TEATRO / Inteatro Festival, Oriente Occidente
concept and choreoraphy: Nicola Galli
dance: Margherita Dotta, Nicola Galli, Leonardo Maietto, Silvia Remigio
music: Giacinto Scelsi, 3/4 had been eliminated
props: Giulio Mazzacurati
masks and costumes: Nicola Galli
light and sound: Giovanni Garbo
artistic residences: DID Studio / Ariella Vidach, Centro di Residenza della Toscana (Armunia - CapoTrave / Kilowatt), Oriente Occidente Studio_Passo Nord
with the support of: Rete Almagià
took part to the process of creation: Nicolas Grimaldi Capitello
length: 50 minutes
selected work NID Platform 2024
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.
"[...] 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."
"[...] 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."
"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."
"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."
"[...] 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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"[...] 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."
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 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 ]
"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."
Carlo Lei [ Krapp's Last post - 9/07/2022 ]
"[...] 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 - blog del festival FU ME - lab. di giornalismo culturale di Altre Velocità ]
