year: 2021

by Michele Abbondanza, Antonella Bertoni, Maurizio Lupinelli
with Francesco Mastrocinque, Filippo Porro
light and technical direction Andrea Gentili
touring technician Claudio Modugno
musical processing Orlando Cainelli
Project organisation, strategy and development Dalia Macii
administration and coordination Francesca Leonelli
press office and communication Susanna Caldonazzi
production Compagnia Abbondanza/Bertoni, Armunia/Festival Inequilibrio, Nerval Teatro
with the support of MiC – Ministero della Cultura, Provincia autonoma di Trento, Comune di Rovereto, Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Trento e Rovereto, Regione Toscana
photos Tobia Abbondanza

Premiere: 23 and 24 June 2021, Festival Inequilibrio in Castiglioncello (LI)

UBU Award – Best Dance Performance 2021

The double, duality’s contrasts, the opposite as the source of mystery: this work addresses and articulates above all the encounter between the bodies of its two performers; Francesco Mastrocinque, disabled actor and participant in Nerval Teatro’s Laboratorio Permanente; and Filippo Porro, dancer. The project also launches the debut collaboration of two different artistic practices which converge where art and diversity meet, sharing the experience and poetics of their respective worlds that, despite their apparent differences, are nurtured and developed by the same sensitivity and passion.

From the very beginning, we tried to find a recognition in the eyes of the two performers above all of themselves and to stay attuned to their reciprocal re-cognition during this embryonic phase. What then evolved, quite naturally and mainly from the performers themselves, was a symbiotic development of the action leading to an isolation and entanglement of limbs and light, sounds and silences; all through an almost entirely somatic process of relating.

An oxymoron in dance, an attempt to reveal – between wise ignorance and dissonant beauty- the double nature of the sphinx: two contrasting bodies onstage that search with disruptive vitality and disarming candour for how to be, a vision created through the abstraction of reality.

Two identical bodies that recognise each other and remain in the embrace, mandala, cell that contains them. Two primal beings, primates, taking their first steps. Between evolution and involution, they choose the non-existent “volution”: a shared inertia that evades the inescapable destiny of growing and shrinking.
A journey of gestures and gazes; delicate, strong caresses; mocking and ruthless betrayals. Tightrope walkers: always precariously balanced between life and death, the heights and the fall. Midway, their figures: caught in the fragile and unsolvable enigma of suspension.

” A high-definition show so powerful that it drags the remains of what has become lifeless away (this is the symbolic closing of the performance) and is so perturbing that it leaves the audience disoriented. In our common destiny of “double wayfarers”, we are invited to leave behind known certainties and find new ways of relating: Doppelgänger is not something “beautiful” to see, but something that will change your gaze.”

[Rossella Battisti, Rumor(s)cena, 24 July 2021]

Teaser Doppelgänger