OVER UNDER

Most men are like a dry leaf, hovering in the air and swaying down to the ground. But others, a few, are like the fixed stars, going by their own definite course, and there is no wind to touch them; they have in themselves their own law and their own path.                     

    
Hermann Hesse

 

 

With OVER/UNDER, the resident choreographer of the National Dance Production Center DANCEHAUSpiù, Matteo Bittante, returns to reflect on the themes he holds dear, of nature and creation, human and artistic, and of the great wager of living, today, creatively.

As in his other creations, the choreographer chooses to play and have his performers play with the objects on stage, mixing meanings and signifiers. And it is a game made of metamorphoses, an arcane "roundabout" capable of suggesting visual landscapes that are never static but in continuous becoming as in continuous becoming are the landscapes of the soul drawn by the performers' bodies in their relationship with objects. Transitional spaces, in psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott's definition, whose essence lies in their precariousness, in their straddling between objective and subjective reality. It is only by accepting the rules of the game that we will be able to see in a ball made of rags a dry leaf swaying in space, then become a mountain as high as to rip through the sky and finally become a bright, fixed star. Is this not the condition of every creative act, on stage but also in everyday life, "to see a world in a grain of sand and a paradise in a wild flower" as the English poet William Blake wrote? And is it not this creative perception that more than anything else makes the individual feel that life is truly worth living?