Demi-Véronique

Etymologically, in the mimetic literature of football, veronica can refer to the smarcatura used from Maradona in the quarterfinals of the 1986 World Championship to Mexico City when in Argentina-England he conquers the ball to midfield, gets rid of opponents and after a long run scores to one of the most beautiful goals in the history of soccer, veronica meaning the dribbling that a player performs to displace, unbalance and overtake one or more members of the other team, a creative, technical and exciting act that can aspire to legend.

Morphologically, according to bullfighting perspectives, the veronica may refer to the typical bullfighting figure performed by the caped bullfighter, holding the cloth close to the body, placed in profile to the charging bull, while at the last moment the matador discards it, passing it from right to left.

Semantically, in the lexicon of worship, in spiritual iconography, the Veronica is so defined with close reference to the posture of St. Veronica who, according to Christian tradition, lingers to removing Christ's sweat with a linen mantle (the so-called "veil of Veronica") in the odyssey of his ascent to Calvary.

Literally, Veronica is a character in Hoffmann's short story The Golden Vase, she is a character in Robert Musil's short story The Temptation of the Silent Veronika, she is the main character in Paulo Coelho's novel Veronika Decides to Die. Cinematically, she is a character in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's film Veronika Voss.

Musically, he is the figure in a Fo-Ciotti-Jannacci song sung from Jannacci, he is a song by Edoardo Bennato, by Adriano Celentano, by Elvis Costello, by Baustelle, he is in an Alice Cooper song, and in a Bob Dylan song.

Demi-Véronique, to come to our non-currently classified show, is the fluxus of a rapid transformation, it is the oscillation between limitless humanity and gentle irony, it is an alternation of dark melancholy and ferocity from panic, it is the vibration of a non-theatricalopera that is transposed into choreography of bodies and notes, it is the collective creation de la vie brève inspired by Gustav Mahler's Fifth Symphony and shaped from Jeanne Candel, Caroline Darchen and Lionel Dray. What fascinated these present-day creators was the physical sense of Mahler's Fifth. As if that symphony produced a palpable track, an epic performance, a secret dramaturgy ready to to make its way into our skin as well as our hearts. As if in the deepest, most radical and visceral corners of our feeling a half-veronica erupts, an unconscious act from bullfighting, a kicking from world championship final, a bold piety from profane via crucis, and we come to to perceive the imminence of the charge of a bull, the oblivion of an Aleph by Jorge Luis Borges, a pause after which everything can begin again. As if completing the cycle of a metamorphosis, the effect of a smoldering kiss, of whimsical ears, of a tragic palpitation, to breaking the straight line of our daily survival.

Theopera, the score, the chart, the multidisciplinary, the scenic seismograph, the magnitude of this material listening to Mahler's Fifth is, I might say, perhaps erroneously simplifying, theatrical. But within this reorganizing of art there are intuitions of the author-directors who seek, without certainty, the intuitions of the recipient-assumers. It is in this no man's land of non-canonical sensibilities that the fate of the art of the time yet to come is determined, an art of non-repetition, non-responsiveness, cloned non-excellence. Important is to understand the stimulus associations, to make deductions from the orientation path, from the playground of our three regenerative artists of the stubborn but composite contradictions of the symphony. Beyond to Mahler, the influence of major reminiscences has here to to do with the set of a room from bed that ended up burned, with its accompanying portfolio of images of a house gone to fire, an interior landscape of soot and ash immortalized by the tenant then photographer Karin Borghouts. Extraordinary and collimating was the relationship between those disturbances of a memory of a fire and the jolts and pressures of movement of the Fifth. The result was Demi-Véronique which, with the exception of the prologue, is spectacle without speaking, with staging of music, of imbalances, of fragments separated from each other, with figures who will never be characters and instead switch, leaving from aside the theme of meaning. Here, we say that it was preferred and achieved to create literally another world.

Let us assume that Mahler has a specific position in the history of Western music, between the symphonic tradition of the 19th century and the split of the Second Viennese School, a music that was said to be haunted by its own death, also, however, a music that works and recomposes existing sonorities, both cultivated and popular. Here the creators to six hands of this reattraction material staged in the musical tracks a whole series of their own ghosts, projections of what haunts and accompanies them to level of memories, stories. That is, they have allowed conscious and unconscious to mingle, injections of free quotations, limitless caesuras. And to this point their Mahler is no longer a distant composer but a chaotically to us proximate author. And the observation helps to accredit the special section that Spoleto Festival 2022 coined for the culture of a music from do more than from perform, from perform and not only from play, from make visual and choreographic more than concert.

Then, beyond the important other of modulating, transfusing and spectacularizing music, there is an unprecedented and decisive culture of "how" to derive a different language from it, of "how" to site a further discipline by leveraging the ordinary foundations of sound writing and performance. Here it happened that Mahler himself provided dynamic axes and lines for movement, action. And now one has chosen to times to be carried along by the music or, on the contrary, to ignore it or even operate against it. The material in Demi-Véronique's set proceeds with the same creative imbalances that inspired the composer, and it is material that in a contemporary way destroys, punctures, tears, knocks. The first movement echoes Japanese myths of the destructive fish. The music is taken in and with it something is (de)structured. The question arises: who leads who? Is it the actor who drives the action, or is it the music? Positions shifting, alternating. During the prologue Lionel Dray exhibits the hidden figure of the leader who is also the alchemist of matter. The matter is the audience. There it is, the stakes of the show: what do we do with what is happening to us, with what the music hides in us?

Rodolfo di Giammarco