gruppo nanou investigates the subtle boundary between vision and presence, where the human gaze and mind are drawn in and challenged. The Ravenna-based contemporary dance and performing arts company brings “redrum” to the stage. An intense and immersive synthesis of space, body and perception animated the spaces of Cango, Cantieri Goldonetta last April, before continuing its tour across other Italian cities. The catalytic atmosphere draws its inspiration from The Shining, Stanley Kubrick’s cinematic masterpiece, echoing the mirrored inscription on the door that overturns every illusion of normality. In the installation, the stage becomes a set where moving lights and hypnotic music envelop the audience in a vortex of reverberations, making them an active part of the performance.

The audience member finds themselves inhabiting both the scene and time itself. Free to approach the performers and observe them at close range, they can move slowly from one end of the space to the other. The dancers advance towards the audience, place a chair beside them, seem to seek a confrontation — yet their actions remain unpredictable, and a sense of awe and absorption mounts. At times you meet their gaze, or catch a flicker of emotion. The visitor thus becomes an extra in a crossing of scenic boundaries, and that space becomes inexplicably familiar.

Marco Valerio Amico, choreographer and director of the work alongside Rhuena Bracci, reveals more about this vibrant and magnetic performance.

The starting point is an idea of place before narrative. The Overlook Hotel of King and Kubrick — a place that holds its guests in an indefinite present, suspended between luxury and spectrality — corresponds to what we wanted to build: a performative device. The imagery of The Shining worked as a shared threshold of access: an alphabet of spatial tension that many people already carry with them. The word redrum — murder read backwards — says something about the method: the same things, read in a different direction, produce a different meaning. What we were interested in defining is an environment to inhabit, rather than a representation.

They follow movement scores, compositional structures that define gestures, pathways and spatial geometries with precision. Within those scores there are variables that depend on context: the response of the space, the density and behaviour of the audience, the duration of the installation. It is not improvisation. It is a supple compositional system that produces real differences from one performance to the next, without losing the formal integrity of the whole. This process and these choreographic rules sustain the vitality of an environment that continually renews itself, and affirm the value of the live event and its unrepeatable nature.

From cinema we take a compositional reference: a certain kind of cinema that works on direction, cinematography, editing and sound as elements in dialogue, without hierarchies, to build forms capable of stepping outside genres. What interests us is that idea of composition as architecture. We build "live cinema," as we often like to say lightly, because we move away from the cinema hall and its frontality, from the fixed viewpoint, from defined and finite durations, to give the audience the freedom to move, to choose where and for how long to remain within the work. As in certain auteur cinema, lights, music and space participate in the construction of the perceptual environment with the same dramaturgical authority as the performers. The cinematic imprint is the threshold of access from which to build a live work.

Overlook Hotel is a cycle of autonomous and interconnected choreographic installations that is developing and will continue to develop over the coming years. redrum declared our relationship with cinematic iconography. The second chapter, goldroom, places the emphasis on the grammar of dreams, on choreographic editing as a tool for generating a form of writing that can stimulate perceptions as in dreams. It will be previewed at BASE Milano on 23 May, in world premiere from 1 to 7 June at Ravenna Festival, in summer in Rome for the Fuori Programma festival, and in autumn in Pesaro for the Hangart Fest festival. Finally there are the Camere, small stage drifts emerging from this path that bring into focus the particular qualities of the dancers involved. Follow us this summer.