Sarabanda
Compagnia Excursus

With the Sponsorship of the Baroque Festival of Viterbo 2005
Choreography Ricky Bonavita
Dance Company Compagnia Excursus, directed by Ricky Bonavita and Theodor Rawyler
Dancers Monica Lavezzari, Sara Rossi, Francesca Schipani, Daniele Amenta, Ricky Bonavita, Yari Molinari, Theodor Rawyler, Giovanni Scura
Music Johann Sebastian Bach, Arcangelo Corelli, Georg Friedrich Haendel, Antonio Vivaldi

Where possibile the performance can have live music
Orchestra da Camera della Campania
Conductor and Solo cellist Luigi Piovano
Solo Violinist Grazia Raimondi

Light design Danila Blasi
Set design Antonella Bonavita
Costumes Marco Carrara

With this production we intend to go deeper into the intriguing experience of combining pre-modern music (baroque) with contemporary dance. An experience that began with our 2003 production of Folìa, which is still in our repertory. 2004 saw the beginning of our collaboration with the Orchestra da Camera della Campania, who specialise in pre-modern music; and with their conductor, Maestro Luigi Piovano, first cellist of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome. The music of Händel, Bach, Corelli and Vivaldi was chosen in collaboration with Maestro Piovano.

Baroque music, with its quest for perfect equilibrium, for sublime harmony, gives rise to a reflection on the dualistic nature of reason and sentiment, of spirit and matter of immanence and transcendence. It is precisely in the music of the century of Enlightenment that the tensions lacerating the spirit of those times are most clearly felt, the pragmatism of science counterposed by a refuge in mysticism and metaphysics. Dance, both spectacle and as artistic expression of power and order, experienced a moment of splendour in the Baroque, and this period also marked the beginning of its academic codification.

Today our choreographic and artistic research, drawing on twenty years of personal experience, has points of reference deriving from a much broader cultural spectrum. This includes both the contemporary language, or languages, of dance, and a different conception of the body; and also the fruits of multiple reflections on the mixing of cultures, of the arts, and of their codification. At the same time baroque culture retains its fascination for us, and the tensions and conflicts in its depths constitute the point of departure for our very contemporary research.