Contemporary dance, music, cinema and visual arts coexist in the new immersive installation by the Ravenna-based duo Marco Valerio Amico and Rhuena Bracci, touring to other venues starting with Teatro India in Rome on 7 July.

gruppo nanou – Marco Valerio Amico and Rhuena Bracci – presented the world premiere of goldroom at Ravenna Festival, the second chapter of the Overlook Hotel project, following the first, redrum. A choreographic installation staged in the spaces of the Mercato Coperto, from 1 to 7 June, with further dates and venues scheduled across the summer months.

A wonderful ratatouille of times. goldroom scatters across the second floor of Ravenna's Mercato Coperto a confetti of vectors drawn from heterogeneous origins and identities.

First frame: the time of the Mercato itself, chosen this year by Ravenna Festival as the venue for the premiere of goldroom — a temporal arc running from dusk to night, light filtering through the tall windows and shifting the colour of the scene. Then the time of the spectator, expressed through actions that remain permeable to the performance: drinking, conversing, watching. The time of the dancers' gesture — fragments of quotation, engrams of memory, casings of forms that saturate with evanescence, fill with echoes of Lynch, the other Kubrick (Eyes Wide Shut), or a displaced Gene Kelly. And finally interior time — the time that lives in the silence of a John Cage concert, that waits for the image to form and certifies its dissolution in the murmur of what happens regardless.

The spectator chooses whether to follow the back-and-forth of the video behind Marco Valerio Amico — who co-authored the choreography with Rhuena Bracci, and who freezes, suspends and releases moments both in delay and in real time. Or whether to impose an order on the narrative of a scene that unfolds across what Studio Azzurro would call a sensitive space. Sensitive because activated by Bruno Dorella's original music, which contaminates periphery and centre, opening the outside to the inside and binding into a rhythmic clock the differentiated times of the individual, extraordinary performers: Carolina Amoretti, Marina Bertoni, Rhuena Bracci, Andrea Dionisi, Agnese Gabrielli, Marco Maretti.

Clockwork times with jammed bezels, fragments of a discourse that — like a text by Isgrò — erases connectives, syntactic coherences. Fragments rain down and become gold, arriving from an off-screen space that — as in the ballroom of The Shining — presents itself without revealing its substance. External memories that layer like fractals, where every grammatical boundary of a gesture contains another, without interruption. Something happens before it becomes narrative, before it occurs — past perfect and impossible present; it happens elsewhere, and to offer itself fragility to life it mingles with life, liquefying among those sipping an aperitivo and those sunk into the Mercato's sofas scrolling through their phones. A species of spaces, a postmodern revisitation of Kantor: stage and off-stage no longer separate life from death but contaminate each other in a melting pot. A cascade of attempts — at improvisation and at structure alike.

After all, Jannis Kounellis once asked us: what is the difference between a photographed floor and a floor? These gold carpets do not transform gesture into gold as Midas did — they are the threshold between abstract and figurative, between the plastic volume the fabric extends into space and the pure, abstract rhythmic dimension of a movement's repetition.