It is mysterious and very difficult, the new show of gruppo nanou from Ravenna: a solid choreographic architecture that starting from a fulminant declaration of explicitly Artaudian brand poetics, “The body is without organs”, deepens a rigorous, ten-year path in the direction of emptying, non-identity. Three dynamic figures in T-shirt and black and orange shorts inhabit a scene cut on the ground by white stripes reflecting a set of almost immobile lights, creating a rarefied, lunar atmosphere. Rhuena Bracci, Marco Maretti and Sissj Bassani, with dedication as officiants, run through the space in groups that are composed and undo themselves in trios, duets and solos with dynamism and sometimes light and jumping, sometimes snappy and muscular. Sometimes they freeze in three-dimensional tableaux vivants, assuming positions drawn along lines stretched by limbs almost weightless: a reduction of rotations, measurements, inputs and outputs, stops, bends and elongations that act on the viewer for kinesthetic, or “muscular empathy”. One could perhaps qualify Untitled for the unknown not as an “artwork”, but as a “work of art”: questioning the conventional artist-spectator pact (in which the former is the depositary of a téchne who identifies him with eyes of the second), at the center of this creation is placed the effect that it can have on those who use it. In this sense the numerous references to the twentieth century (from Mejerchol’d’s Biomechanics to Foregger’s researches, from the abstract and anti-psychologic dance of Alwin Nikolais to the affective Atletism of Artaud, from the Anthropometries of Yves Klein to the Ėjzenštejn theorems on effective action) condense and renew in an example of “theater without show” that marks the full maturity of the Ravenna group. Disappearing, this work helps to appear on the invisible, to lend an ear to the unspeakable: what art should always do, perhaps.

Michele Pascarella
http://michelepascarellateatro.blogspot.it/p/hystrio.html