[…] disoriented, passed over – over-looked, like the hotel room that hosts them […]

[...] gruppo nanou with Camera 2046 - Overlook Hotel – the second chapter of a multi-year project in which the Ravenna-based company continues to explore the relationship between performative and cinematic imagery, drawing in this "stage" above all on the Wong Kar Wai of In the Mood for Love – insists on the tones and codes of seduction, on a compositional rarefaction and lightness that at the same time sink into a set design of defined colours and equally concrete architectural references, with a distinct visual "weight" of their own.

The back of the hall of the Sant'Anna complex, with its columns, its pediments and its classical-style capitals, is in fact highlighted by the lights – as if it were precisely the profile of an exclusive yet slightly decadent suite in a metaphysical hotel.

In the empty space further on, performer Marina Bertoni moves about with a mix of grace and delicate uncertainty, always in contrast, however, with the extreme cleanness and awareness of the gesture: a gesture that, as often happens in gruppo nanou's compositions, is undulating, progressing according to almost "algorithmic" rules, in a certain sense self-sufficient in itself yet also functional in continually capturing and diverting the gaze so as to prevent any static, definitive focus.

It seems clear that in this case complicity plays out above all between dancer and spectators – all the more so when, over the course of the performance, a kind of climax builds between the sounds, which move from the initial crackle of fires to actual music, and the choreographic design, which from its initial shyness closes with the display of the naked body.

But, more subtly, a very peculiar relationship also seems to take shape between performative action and stage lights, between dynamic intention and lighting design: the glare of the lamps often changes in origin, now from the side, now from above, now almost entirely frontal, modifying the two "poles of inspiration" of the writing and creating atmospheres at times more abstract, at times more, precisely, plastically cinematic, with heightened, vivid contours. Here, then, the intimacy promised by the sinuous character of the gestures dissolves into the oscillating plurality of fictional dimensions, into the amalgam of codes and languages that at times merge but at other times – one might say almost with delicate violence – separate, as if revealing a different chemical composition. Thus vision and the spectator's gaze, perhaps initially self-assured, feel at moments disoriented, passed over – over-looked, like the hotel room that hosts them…