30 novembER 2024, 19.30

Fuorimargine
Gloria Dorliguzzo

Dies irae + Symphony #2

Concert FOR voIce AND HAMS 

music Galina Ustvolskaya

direction and choreography Gloria Dorliguzzo

performers Teresa Morisano, Loredana Dragoni, Isabella Gentilezza, Samanta Tesi, Renata Oliva, Monica Barone, Lara  Bonvini, Fabiola Borrelli 
main voice  Monica Barone

choirmaster Gianluca Feccia

vocal coach Francesca della Monica

sound engineer  Filippo Cossu

a production by  Fuorimargine - Centro di Produzione di Danza e Arti Performative della Sardegna

thanks to Lenz and C&C Company

 

 

photo: Paolo Biassoni

The project Dies Irae + Symphony#2 reflects on the concept of power, violence, and persecution, and investigates the breath and the voice as organic and material sources, as a driver of wanting to say, wanting to exist. The project includes the performance of Dies Irae (1973), almost in its entirety and parts of Sinfonia #2 (1979), compositions of Galina Ustvolskaya (1919-2006), one of the most important Soviet composers of the 20^th century. The performance was initially born in relation to Dies Irae, (a famous medieval sequence attributed to Tommaso da Celano) in which the voice and the word remain veiled in the body of the performers and are expressed solely through its language. With the addition of Synphony#2, the voice takes over in the body of Monica Barone and in the female chorus, suddenly becoming material, demanding, appellative, repossessing previous emptied bodies, returning to resonate as a voice of death and a mournful, crying, revealing sonority.

The work is thus presented as a performative concert, in which the soundscape is made by the Russian composer Galina Ustvolskaya (1919-2006), the living incarnation of the Resistance, nicknamed "the woman with the hammer". Her music is constantly interrogative, absolute and extreme; for her musical scores, Galina chooses hammering and repetitive structures. This results in a broken, obsessive and stony sound, which sometimes gives rise to agonising piercing explosions.

In relation to this force, even the physical and sound gestures of these events can only be disarming, tragic and absolute. The performers dance the musical score to the rhythm of the hammers on wood and metal (anvils and metal sheets).

The work develops from some questions: 

What is judgement? Where does it come from? When does power become present? How does the body experience the concept of judgement, power and violence? How does it convey it? Can singing, the voice, the breath become an image? How does dance translate all this? What is the message to be addressed?
By integrating the voice in Symphony, the performers give life to actions, movements and gestures that allude to a mysterious ritual.
They move within a structured and severe choreography, yet also open, which allows for the possibility of encounter, integrating with the initial musical score in all respects.

If with Dies Irae the choreographic score appears severe, respecting the rhythmic tempo of the music, it is in the Symphony that everything opens.
Apparently more chaotic, the bodies flow on the stage, almost transported by the Symphonia; the instruments multiply and the voice enters the musical apparatus.
The text/prayer of Hermann the Cripple entrusted to Monica Barone (a performer with a serious masticatory disability that drastically affects her phonetics) becomes the image and matter of a cry, a song, a lament, a supplication and a prayer.

The Voice/Breath remains in the middle between the only way to say it and the question of what to say, the last judgement, the surviving judgement.