End of the race for autumn debuts in view of the new ballet and dance programs in December

[…] A few days after Sisyphus/Trans/Form’s debut, We Want Miles, In A Silent Way by the Nanou Group, has been visiting “Danae”, a festival active in Milan for twenty-one years. Opening a painful parenthesis, it seems right to note that Milan is a rather ungrateful city for contemporary dance; it boasts festivals of medium and small stature and hosts here and there also important names. However, it has none of the long and articulated festivals that have long reigned in Turin, Rome, Reggio Emilia. It is a black hole, even in its project, of which the city certainly cannot brag about. The Nanou’s dance pièce, here led by Marco Valerio Amico and Rhuena Bracci, has already in the title its inspiring source: Miles Davis, one of the greatest musicians in the history of jazz. It’s formalistic and in the style of the Ravennati Nanou does not give up those strips of light, here of various and changing colors, which serve as tracks, or create fences where the dance lives in a succession of frames.

Curious, as he is, a male figure in black suit of shoulders, appears immediately at the beginning and shows a foot off the axis of his balance, wearing yellow. He reappears at times, often for simple walks, or for “free” dances, very different from those elaborated with technique and precision by the three female dancers. Carolina Amoretti dresses in tights with a flesh-coloured bust and long hair; Marina Bertoni wears a puffy white shirt and tight green pants and the same Bracci, interpreter and co-choreographer, is the only one in everyday costumes: hooded suits, for example. At the bottom a panel closes the space in half and lets the interpreters appear and disappear: it also dyes itself in various colors starting from the red. The dance makes use of straight lines, of outstretched arms, of round evolutions in space and is different for each of the three dancers even if this diversity, with the exception of Bracci that often rolls on the ground, is dictated for the other two mainly by the speed of execution and the personality of both.

In one hour a homage is given to Miles Davis that does not start exactly from his music, but from his compositional method, from his “structures”. The percussions, beside the scene of the Theatre Out Off that hosted “Danae”, are led by Bruno Dorella and rework and transfigure Miles’s pieces of music, preferring also electronic inserts or pure and dry silences. In this chromatic-danced way and with live music also not by Davis, except in the final part, when the famous trumpet of the so-called “prince of darkness”- who died in Santa Monica in 1991- comes out. About Miles’ shady personality remains a lot of memories and testimonies. Among his most famous sentences resounds that “Why play all these notes when we can only play the best?”, a synthesis of a poetic based on the unmistakable languid sound and the controlled emotionality of his instrument of choice, rather than on virtuosity for its own sake. Explicit example of his greatness is Kind of Blue (1959), which perhaps remains one of the most popular jazz albums of all the times having sold over four million copies in the States alone.

In We Want Miles, In a Silent Way the Nanou , emerged at the beginning of the third millennium, try to measure themselves with the way of composing of this sample of sobriety and versatility who gave still alive an heritage not only to jazz but perhaps to all the music as a whole. The Nanou also debuted in New York and Ravenna Festival: everywhere demonstrating the rigor and seriousness of their research for which they even chose a professor of chromatology (Daniele Torcellini) for the collaboration to the stage device and for the colors, beautiful, that invade their show. Among unexpected and even playful touches, such as the masculine presence -perhaps the shadow of Miles himself -, the only drawback would seem to be the dance matter of two of the dancers (Amoretti and Bertoni): not so much because of the way how it is impeccably performed but because of a sort of repetition of movements often too identical, that could generate monotony.