gruppo nanou turns dance into a perceptual device

There is much to say about goldroom, on stage at the Mercato Coperto for Ravenna Festival every day until Sunday 7 June (except Thursday 4, always from 7 to 10 pm). It is the second chapter of Overlook Hotel, a cycle of works inspired by Stanley Kubrick's striking film The Shining, through which the Ravenna-based company gruppo nanou (see our interview) investigates the relationship between body, image and memory through autonomous and interconnected choreographic installations. With the first chapter of the project, redrum, gruppo nanou won the Premio Ubu in 2024 as "Best Dance Performance" — which gives a sense of the quality we are dealing with. The "problem" is that goldroom, perhaps, has something more than redrum. What I would like to do is draw a comparison between time, memory and repetition in The Shining and in goldroom, with parallels along the lines of Jack Torrance from The Shining = the audience of goldroom, and the Overlook Hotel from The Shining = the Mercato Coperto — but my head is already spinning and a 10,000-character article seems excessive. Some interweaving, however, is inevitable.

There is a line in The Shining that probably contains the entire film. It is spoken by Delbert Grady, the former caretaker of the Overlook Hotel, when he tells Jack Torrance/Nicholson: "You have always been the caretaker." It is an absurd line. Jack has not always been the caretaker. We know perfectly well that he arrived there just a few weeks earlier. And yet, in the world constructed by Kubrick — and by Stephen King before him — that line is not simply a lie or a provocation. It is a possible truth. As Rhuena Bracci and Marco Valerio Amico (that is, gruppo nanou) say, goldroom evokes the ballroom of the Overlook Hotel — the Gold Room, precisely — inhabited by ghostly presences, but more than about ghosts, goldroom is in my view above all a work about time. A time that does not proceed in a straight line, that no longer distinguishes clearly between past, present and future, and that ends up enveloping the characters — or rather the Figuri, as nanou call them, since they are apparitions defined by movement, not by a psyche — in a spiral of repetitions. The performance has no canonical beginning or end; over the course of three hours the audience can choose when to enter and when to leave (an aspect that matters greatly for the perception of the whole). I arrived at the opening, but initially the upper space of the Mercato Coperto did not convince me — something seemed missing, as if it were not the right setting for nanou's work. Then, little by little, something strange happens, something that, after more than twenty years of the company's performances, I might have anticipated: the reality around you shifts, and it shifts because that is precisely what the choreography demands. But let us proceed in order.

To speak of gruppo nanou's style means first of all stepping outside several habitual categories of contemporary dance. This is not a company that relies on linear narrative, nor on pure abstraction. It does not tell stories in the traditional sense, yet it continuously allows fragments of narrative, images, memories and atmospheres to surface — fragments the audience is called upon to reassemble. And it is precisely there, in that almost subliminal address to the spectator, that everything around you shifts. What interests Bracci and Amico is not showing something, but constructing the conditions through which the audience can see. The gaze becomes an integral part of the work. No closed narrative is provided; the audience must inhabit the scene, establish connections, complete what is left deliberately unfinished. And so the mental exercise you are drawn into takes you elsewhere. The Figuri on stage are no longer dancers you are watching in a performance — they are entities arriving from another world, seeming like temporal fragments trapped in a place that is no longer the Mercato Coperto, no longer anything definable, a pure dwelling of creation. The bodies of the Figuri — Carolina Amoretti, Marina Bertoni, Rhuena Bracci herself, Andrea Dionisi, Agnese Gabrielli and Marco Maretti, simply extraordinary, as indeed in redrum — express no psychology; they become signs, vectors, presences in space. And goldroom frequently proceeds through an accumulation of figures, trajectories, postures and relations, rather than through traditional emotional development. It is the idea that time is not a road but a room — a concept central to nanou. An immense room in which every event continues to exist simultaneously alongside all the others. And indeed, while inside goldroom, one often has the sense that what was seen moments before has not truly passed, and that what is about to happen is already written somewhere. Images do not arrive in sequence — they resurface. They return. They overlap. It is the idea of déjà-vu as a narrative principle. Making this sublime mechanism work even more powerfully is the seventh Figuro: Bruno Dorella's score. It is clear that over the years the partnership between the Milan-based composer and nanou has gone well beyond professional collaboration, rising to the level of elective affinity — so much so that if the soundtrack was already essential in redrum, in goldroom the music becomes almost alive, corporeal, physically taking you by the hand to lead you through the depths of the choreography, including through the skilled use of non-original pieces — Bauhaus, Portishead, Massive Attack — that seemed to have been waiting all along to become part of this work. In the end, goldroom does not fascinate us because it features phenomenal dancers, but because it turns dance into a perceptual device. In a landscape often divided between narrative dance-theatre and abstract research, gruppo nanou occupies a deeply personal territory, where memory, vision and choreography ultimately coincide.