POWDER

Creation for 7 performers
Choreographer and director Loris Petrillo
With Loris Petrillo, Yoris Petrillo, Luca Zanni/Maria Stella Pitarresi, Marco Pergallini, Aleksandros Memetaj, Guia Meucci, Romano Vellucci

Compagnia Petrillo Danza
Production Twain
Coproduction Teatro Comunale di Modena
in collaboration with Scenario Pubblico/CZD – Centro Nazionale di Produzione Danza / Orizzonti Verticali Festival/Fabbrica Europa | Festival Bellanda Suite/ERT FVG
in residence at Scenario Pubblico – Catania, Centro d’Arte e Cultura – Città di Ladispoli, Supercinema/Teatro Il Rivellino - Tuscania (VT)
with support from MiBact, Regione Lazio and Fondazione Carivit

Watch the trailer

GENESIS OF A WORK

Loris Petrillo thinks about the powder. Why?
The powder is the element that is constantly around us but we never think about it because we take it for granted. Maybe because it reminds us of that curse we find in the book of Genesis and that we all heard: powder you are and in powder you shall return.
Therefore, nobody thinks about the powder.
Hence comes curiosity in investigating so prevalent and so little considered element, although it has always been associated with man, with his spirit, his essence.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

The show took its first steps during a series of residences at Centro d’Arte e Cultura of Ladispoli (Rome), hosted by Twain Centro di Produzione Danza in 2017.
At this point, the research is expressly concrete. The powder is designed as a dense mass which twirls like an electron around the nucleus of an atom. Dancers on the scene avoided it playing with rhythm, falling and rising again.
Loris Petrillo draws his choreographic design starting from improvisations based to specific tasks, having with unique imaginative nucleus the use of the body like a vehicle and container of powder.
The questions are:

what happens to the matter-body when it is driven, thrown, mixed?
How does it relate to the Powder surrounding it? How does it react to the Powder which it is
made of? Can the body take different forms relating to its substance and space?

Based on what was already explored in “One plus one equals one”, the production extends the study of physical dynamics which affect body movement, specifically body-Powder.
The body becomes an instrument and a place for investigation and, linked to the element, evokes its significant, its sense.

The body-powder moves, breaks up and starts a dynamic movement, struggling with its component forces; it produces trajectories where dance becomes a technical act, a performance, an image, a poem

POWDER_primo studio

In 2018 the Company is in residence at Scenario Pubblico – Centro di Produzione Danza Nazionale, where Powder_first study sees his debut.
In this phase, the show takes life in the bodies of two male dancers and Loris Petrillo himself who, as a tired demiurge, directs on the scene now the acrobatic movements, then more dramatic imagery of the two dancers, by bringing the movement back in its purest form in the final scene, when the body and the powder, like two different forms of the same energy what man is, seem to spring from the same central nucleus.

The performance is a series of images, flashbacks of a story that incessantly breaks off, hobbles among glimpse of light and dark scenery, to signify the inexorable moving forward of a man, of his force, of his courage, to a universe made of powder to which he can only abandon himself.

POWDER#2 impromptu

In 2019, Petrillo lays the foundations for the second movement of the pièce, a markedly more choreographic movement, that will be staged at Teatro Comunale di Cormons, during the Festival Bellanda Suite IV, for the circuit ERT FVG.

Here the theatrical scenes are less used, while the performance focuses on a mathematic, geometric study, resulting in plots drawn on circular orbits, travelled by the three dancers on the scene.

POWDER

The project “POWDER” is born as a continuation and a development of the two previous chapters, to condense into a single work the two symbols previously explored: its more concrete meaning that concerns the body-powder and its relation with mathematics, and its spiritual and human one, linked to the history of man, to his spirit, his essence.

On this premise, Loris Petrillo will put what already made back on the table, reprocessing and
increasing it, by playing on the alternation of improvisation and choreography, interspersed with theatrical scenes, which have always distinguished his creations, clarifying the meaning of images and movements created.

On the scene, 7 performers, there will be the choreographer, 5 dancers and an actor, with who he will work on the laws of the bodies and the matter, on the study of the body-powder, on the
relationship between the spirit of which the powder is a symbol and the matter of which the powder is made, between the finitude of the matter and the infinite of nothingness.

This final version is coproduced by Fondazione Teatro Comunale di Modena, and will be presented in national premier at the Teatro Comunale L.Pavarotti in Modena.

Dates

17 February 2018 - Scenario Pubblico - Catania
18 February 2018 – Scenario Pubblico – Catania
4 July 2018 – Orizzonti Verticali Festival – San Gimignano (SI)
22 December 2018 – Supercinema – Tuscania (VT)
25 May 2019 – Teatro Comunale di Cormons (Go) | Festival Bellanda Suite IV
21 August 2020 - Anfiteatro Parco Torre di Lavello - Tuscania (VT) | Festival direzioniAltre 2020

Other creations