goldroom by gruppo nanou premieres at Ravenna Festival: a choreographic installation inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s Overlook Hotel, a space of ghosts, memories, and apparitions.

Oneiric atmospheres à la David Lynch drift through the space, where the boundary between reality and the subconscious grows thin. The explicit reference, however, is to Stanley Kubrick's film The Shining — to the ballroom of the Overlook Hotel, the Gold Room, a place of ghosts and visions of past parties, of isolation and the trap of an infinite, repeating present; a space of illusion and the dark side of the "American dream." It is the dance of six performers that lends gestural breath to that imaginary, shaping their phantasmatic, fleeting, evanescent yet concrete bodies, which appear, flow, imprint themselves on the gaze, dissolve, and return, in a continuous cyclicality that leaves mysterious traces. Second chapter of Overlook Hotel, a cycle of works by the Ravenna-based gruppo nanou aimed at investigating the relationship between body, image, and memory through autonomous and interconnected choreographic installations, goldroom — choreography and project by Marco Valerio Amico and Rhuena Bracci — has found an ideal space within the structure of the Mercato Coperto in Ravenna (premiere at Ravenna Festival).

On the upper floor of the structure, amid the ordinary sounds and human crossings that rise from below, among leather armchairs, small lamp-topped tables, stools, a bar counter, transparent curtains that shape the wide space, a few spotlights in the corners, one positions oneself freely — seated or standing, pausing briefly or at length, exiting and returning, no longer mere spectators but recipients of visions. goldroom is an immersive place to inhabit with lightness, inside which we share a physical proximity with the performers, a shifting of gazes that expands the vision and contains it, opening it to personal suggestions and a dimension outside of time.

The time that flows is non-linear, as the sonic traces of a composite and mixed playlist (partly original, signed by Bruno Dorella) are punctuated by the sole sound of a needle dragging in the groove of a vinyl record. These are musical tracks that determine the atmospheres and mark the movement of those pulsing or calm, disconnected or attuned bodies, whose postures and gestures — solitary or simultaneous — sculpt themselves in the shifting chiaroscuro of the space, then under the reflection of a beam of light that stretches the shadows, dissolves them, bounces them across the three long golden carpets laid on the floor.

Here the dance teems with solos, above all, and scattered duets, brief ensembles, following trajectories and sudden yet always watchful pauses, composing and dispersing mental images summoned also by a long enveloping golden cloth — moved, twisted, stretched, manipulated within the emotional imaginary of the dancers, who wear barely-there black masks, change costumes, reshuffling and multiplying identities. These are traces of memory, of the disorder of surfacing recollections: scattered fragments of a past that blurs into the present and alters perception.

Is what happens around us seeming to have already happened, or has it? In this vibrant choreographic layering of instability, amplified by the black-and-white images scrolling across a large screen placed high above — sequences of the dancers filmed in the same space — the allegory of a human mind lost and in search of identity finds its full meaning. We finally rise and leave the scene; they, the ghosts of the gold room, remain. They are Carolina Amoretti, Marina Bertoni, Rhuena Bracci, Andrea Dionisi, Agnese Gabrielli, Marco Maretti.

A performative and installative object that at each showing composes itself in an unrepeatable way, adapting to the space that hosts it, goldroom is expected at the Fuori Programma festival in Rome, on July 7 and 8.