Performed in Latina as part of the Tendance festival, gruppo nanou’s new production deepens and expands its creators’ ongoing research on body, light, and sound.

To define Arsura as a “solo choreography,” as gruppo nanou themselves do in the presentation of the piece, seems to us a daring exercise of imagination. Seen in its national premiere at Tendance—the courageous festival that for twelve years has brought contemporary dance to Latina and to several towns in its often culturally stifled province—everything about it communicates anything but the impression of a stage inhabited by a single body. Never before have we perceived so clearly how gruppo nanou’s choreographic writing is, in reality, a complex mechanism, capable of condensing even light and sound into matter so tangible as to become visibly corporeal.
What emerges is a play of flows generated by the co-presence of a body-figure, a body-light, and a body-sound.
The enigmatic figure embodied by Rhuena Bracci, co-founder of the company together with Marco Valerio Amico, had already appeared in Canto primo. Miasma | Arsura , a hybrid performance/concert form which, since 2021, has seen gruppo nanou share the stage with the band OvO. This figure is constantly traversed by a process of de-individualization. The red garment strips it of any recognizable somatic features, while the veil covering its face makes it impossible to intercept its gaze.
“The face is the soul of the body,” wrote Ludwig Wittgenstein in one of the notes collected in Culture and Value. The concealment of the face thus turns this figure into a pure corporeal sign. The only story it carries, the only one it originates from, is movement. In this, it recalls certain figures from gruppo nanou’s earlier bestiary—heart-rending and fierce—particularly the one that appeared in Sulla conoscenza irrazionale dell’oggetto. (Traces to nowhere) . Yet those fragile fragments of narration that once surfaced, bound to a primordial eroticism, are here definitively shattered in favor of a pure expenditure within the dialectic between appropriation and escape from a space suffused with light.

And it is precisely light—almost always situated within the chromatic register of red—that becomes a powerful dramaturgical engine. Designed by Marco Valerio Amico, the dramaturgy of light turns into a constructive device of time and space, producing upon them an effect of curvature. This happens because, beyond defining the “temperature” of the performance, it offers space and time the possibility of reconfiguration through processes of thickening and rarefaction.
Thus, to give just one example, through the light-effect of tremor what we perceive is not a kind of slow motion but rather a true decomposition of time. On space, light intervenes just as decisively, generating the sensation of matter thickening and dissolving. One only needs to recall the sequence in which the red light settles on the long strip of red fabric—the only set element on stage: the result is not merely a deeper color, but the impression of matter coagulating.
By virtue of chromatic fluctuations, space then defines itself as pure density, within and against which the body-figure acts. Light, therefore, beyond conferring a material dimension to the scene, is itself tangible, malleable matter—in other words, a body of light.

The sound dramaturgy too takes shape with a forceful material vocation. Voices now pushed into the very foreground, now seeming to come from afar; glitch pointillism; sounds drawn from Ryoji Ikeda as well as James Blake—all signal a widening of the field compared to the electroacoustic matrix that had characterized earlier works, revealing a tension toward renewed linguistic exploration.
Conceived in this way, sound—or rather, the body-sound—encircles or interferes with the body-figure and the body-light. The performance holds these elements in tension, following a dramaturgy subtly punctuated by passages where collisions occur between them, and others where, like fissures, subtle or pronounced dislocations open up—spaces in which the possibility arises to renegotiate their mutual relationship.
Arsura thus systematizes both the continuation of an ongoing line of research—one long pursued on the body and its languages, and another on light and color, begun in 2017 with the project Il colore si fa spazio—and a renewed questioning of the code of choreographic writing. This inquiry takes shape, with gruppo nanou’s customary stylistic austerity, in the creation of a lucid mechanism in which body, light, sound, and their interactions ceaselessly sketch and project new hypotheses of meaning.