Ipercorpo continues with its journey in space and time meaning to carry on with a reconnaissance focused on state-of-the-art Italian artists. Theatre, the place for meeting and sharing experiences par excellence, is still the starting point. Nevertheless we have expanded our action on music, contemporary art and video-dance, hoping that each participant works, for his part, on the construction of his own kaleidoscope to divide and retie the planes we tried to build for him.

Assuming that the word “contemporary” is still likely to make sense in the artistic field – and in the theatrical one especially –, this is possible only regarding hybrid and spurious experiences which are able to regenerate themselves opposing the physical and psychological ruins of these days. This is possible by encouraging and reinforcing the meeting between different professionalisms and sensitivities, both cooperating in the development of a thought which turns into action. This is possible through the search for listening and silence, distancing oneself from the topicality of the limitless, shared and multiplied digital externalisation. This is possible through the diversification of signs and experiences that refuse to consider art as an ornament, but consider it as an unavoidable and necessary strategy for the crossing and reconnaissance of life. This is possible by avoiding easy mechanisms of understanding used only for fomenting consensus. This is possible by sinking one’s own sharp spear in the language’s flesh, in order to show its cuts, wounds, pulses. This is possible by making different countries and stories closer one another, making them talk and confront each other, envisaging a future audience that is capable of considering art fruition as an act of responsibility, hence as a central and significant aspect of his own experience.

Is it legitimate to ask oneself “what remains” if all these splinters of alleged contemporaneity could actually deflagrate, taking the place, even if just for a second, of human splinters, that, making themselves explode, carry out an action of absolute negation of life?

This edition is dedicated to the memory of Roberto Angelini, Duana Iridi and Luigi Neri. They left us within a few months after having accompanied us till here. These inevitable experiences for each one of us don’t allow me to find an answer to the “what remains”, but make the question every day stronger and more real.

Claudio Angelini

TEATRO

Ipercorpo’s gaze goes looking for the essential, for that which remains. It is a look which watches the sign of the times attentively, and the artists who are able to describe it by weaving connections between body, sound and image. It is a gaze which burns with the desire to ask questions about itself and others, bringing about artistic meetings that whirl round and round like black holes, like catalysts, able, even just for a moment, to hold back no less than light, and therefore space and time. Each going in different directions: Muta Imago towards desire, Silvia Gribaudi and Andrea Costanzo Martini towards a body which escapes from the tyranny of appearance, gruppo nanou towards a door which opens “strictly confidential” spaces to meeting with the other, Dewey Dell and Teatropersona towards an imagination nourished by comics and paintings which aims to observe the dynamics of existence and its perpetual conflicts. This year Ipercorpo is also projecting these questions and meetings in a new section devoted to video dance, starting with a focus on the Swedish choreographer Pontus Lidberg, where the strength of human relationships is under investigation. These questions and meetings take on various shapes but are all connected by a profound aesthetic refinement, like an amulet, which is fragile and invincible at the same time, because, exactly by moving away from speech, they move it into a deeper sphere, letting it come back to light through a renewed look, impressed by a light which is able to flee the forces which restrict it and hold it back.

Claudio Angelini

Valentina Bravetti

Mara Serina

MUSICA

un progetto sull’ascoltAzione

Listening to music only is close to experiencing silence. And the desert. The ill-concealed question which is asked by this project is simple: is music still self-sufficient? That is to say: is it enough to qualify an experience? Once everything has been taken off, except for the sound, does anything  remain? Our answer is affirmative, sonic and based on the practice of listening, implementing a temporary obedient condition. (from ob-audire: to submit to listening).

In order to do this, both the figure of the artist and the idea of performance must be abolished. It is the Master of Listening figure who stands out instead; he produces and offers an auditory experience, a small lay rite in which one takes part, mute but not deaf.

There are only two rules:

– Admittance will be free, while attendance at the Listening Space must be in total silence;

– Once the Listening Space has been left, it won’t be possible to go back in until the end.

Davide Fabbri / Elisa Gandini

ART

Unlike earlier editions, in which at the centre of the story told with pictures, presented in the course of the festival, were the Verzocchi Collection and the attempt to measure the distance between the Italian post-war period portrayal of work and the present one, this year’s invitations meet the need of having a closer dialogue with the festival and its expansions, reacting to the title’s suggestions: what remains.

Therefore: what remains of a work of art (in space), when it is no longer there? How can its presence expand itself beyond – that is before and after – the here and now of experience? What remains – in the form of remains and traces – after a performing art piece? Is it possible for a sculpture to unleash an energy which extends itself into an action?

The artists that take part in this edition of Ipercorpo – Chiara Camoni, Flavio Favelli, Alessandro Piangiamore, Italo Zuffi – have all worked, in different ways and from different viewpoints, on the topics of memory, recollection and passage of time.

So, for example, many works and performing art pieces by Zuffi reflect upon a dimension of time which becomes duration, resistance and the testing of a limit; Piangiamore’s sculptures are sometimes a non-authorial production, the ruins produced by landscape and atmosphere; Favelli’s works – pieces of furniture, paintings and objects – came out of the assembly of private and collective memory fragments; in Camoni’s work, the landscape takes the shape of a kind of an archaeology of experience and of the present.

The works and interventions by the participating artists will be displaced in spaces which are different from the ex poultry processing unit of Romagna and will be arranged, throughout the festival period, with slight time shifts: they won’t form a consistent story, but considerations and openings, sensitive points of the very same geography.

Davide Ferri

At its fourth edition, the Italian Performance Platform confirms its position as an important appointment for artistic directors of festivals and theatres coming from several European countries. This year the number of days devoted to it has been increased from 2 to 3, offering an intensive programme consisting of viewing performances, video dance, meetings with the artists, presentations of extracts of new companies’ works and an exchange of views among who is in charge of organizing and selecting international programming. The original identity of IPP is that of a small, high quality, platform, able to promote the establishment of relationships between operators and artists. After all, the results prove it: in 4 years, about 50 operators from 12 different countries have attended the platform and enriched it with experience, creativity and opportunities; not just Ipercorpo but also its guest artists and the city of Forlì, whose town centre, Verzocchi collection, museums and galleries keep attracting, above all, the European operators, ever more pleased to come back here.

– Mara Serina

I testi di Claudio Angelini, Mara Serina, Valentina Bravetti, Silvia Mei, Davide Ferri, Elisa Gandini e Davide Fabbri.

Le foto degli artisti di Ipercorpo 2016, I contatti dell' ufficio stampa.