Twenty years on, the Ravenna-based collective takes stock of its choreographic research: from the cinematic to the choreographic gaze, passing through the power of the body in its relation to the chronotope of the contemporary scene.

Dance as a tool for investigating the possible relationship between performative act and spectator, for reflecting on time as a state and for rediscovering a choreographic vision and fruition outside the usual twentieth-century rituals of the performance. nanou group is now 20 years old and one of the most interesting realities of contemporary dance in Italy.

"Ours is a heretical story with respect to traditional dance per- courses," explains Marco Valerio Amico, together with Rhuena Bracci among the founders of the ensemble. The idea came from meeting Rhuena, now my partner on stage and in life, and Roberto Rettura, who remained with us until 2020, coming from film sound. I come from the theater, trained at Paolo Grassi as an actor. During my school years, on the side, I was in the dance theater class. Everything started there. Rhuena, on the other hand, has a background as a gymnast. Since 2020, the company's sound and music project has been in the hands of Bruno Dorella.

We are three individualities that have come together, putting together different artistic paths and visions." Interweaving looks, but also a desire to difrequent a polysemy that is encapsulated in the company name group nanou: "Nanou is a volcano, it's two Aphex Twin songs, it's also Conny Templeman's film. It was also a very vintage South American porn site," Bracci explains. "We chose a name that was evocative of different semantic experiences and realities. It was difficult to compete with the site's indexing for obvious reasons."

A multiplicity of stimuli that translates for Amico into a tension to go beyond the already given, but also to question the codes that accompany fruition and creation. "The meeting with Rhuena at the Lavori in Pelle Festival in Alfonsine, directed by Monica Francia, was the beginning of it all, the occasion for our different formations to dialogue. I believe our work can find a focus in the reflection on time and the body as a force in space," explain the founders of the Ravenna-based company, this year's winner of the Ubu Award for best dance performance with the work redrum.

It pleases to start from this latest work to try to understand the status of nanou group art, not to retrace backwards the work accomplished, but to try to highlight the urgencies of a reflection that calls into question the very semantics of live performance.

"We started from movement, from the body as a figure, from the gesture and action that is performed on stage and that we give, give away, show to the spectator," Bracci explains. "Such delivery leads to an act of responsibility. It is up to the spectator to construct the narrative, to inhabit and live that condition that our bodies in space pose."

"The Motel trilogy allowed us to highlight our relationship with a certain type of cinema and our affection for twentieth-century photography, also as a dramaturgical device," Amico observes. "Then we began to essay the installation format with Strictly Confidential, a rib of the Motel project. Strictly Confidential was our way of celebrating ten years of activity by collecting traces of our work and "musealizing" them, obtaining a path made of affections, but building a different kind of relationship with the scene and the gaze."

"From 2016 to 2020 we questioned a lot about choreography. We neglected cinematic imagery to figure out how to make our choreographic language clearer. We went through Alphabet (which has now become a popularization and training method, with the possibility of scholarships to study with the company), made the whole set design a two-dimensional map, studied color as a tool to change perception, which would highlight the choice of a trajectory and the alliance between the scenic instruments out of any narrative theme."

Out of the pandemic came several reflections that led to Paradiso, Arsura and the more recent redrum. "What we are interested in is experimenting with another fruition of performance, relying on an exploded time that allows the viewer to manage his or her relationship with the performative act in complete freedom. Therefore, I believe that theinstallative aspect can represent a possible challenge to rethink the relationship between spectator and artist, to understand how we can imagine a different proxemics and timing, compared to the theatrical ritual that perhaps needs to be renewed, rethought and redefined. In all of this, the force of the body in space from which we wish to start is that of the figural, a being that inhabits and haunts places, that interacts with the presence of the spectator, settles into it and with it creates a virtuous circle of generation and regeneration of narrative (of shimmering, again paraphrasing The Shining)."

02/2025 - Nicola Arrigoni, Hystrio