Dialogues that ignite in dance

Like in a merry-go-round, Nico and the Navigators dance the harmonies and dissonances of friendship with ironically alienated and sharp German distance. Three men and one woman, one Italian, one German, one British and one Japanese. A barefoot violinist with a long skirt and long hair lulls us into Nordic-like dance rhythms reminiscent of Stravinsky. A young man accompanies her with electronic and acoustic piano sounds. "Although I Know You" could be a modern version of Schnitzler's "Reigen" as adapted for film by Ophüls. The play and film were about successive love connections of lifelike characters; here they are entanglements of friendships in which human figures dissolve in the echoes of feelings, hurts and hidden thoughts. This echo resounds in the interstices of a friendship relationship that, by definition, commits to nothing, yet radically drags everyone along with it. In the disjointed dialogues that ignite in the dance - the circling in a carriage, the undressing under a cloth, the surprising appearance of a woman handing out white calling cards (and dancing quite "ordinarily" without artificial mastery) - one recognizes quotations from famous correspondences, for example between Goethe and Schiller, Nietzsche and Wagner, Hesse and Mann, and from other waters of German literature rich in such plankton. At moments, it seems as if in the apparently unfinished exchanges, in the desperate search for a presence, one comes across the fragile actors from Éric Rohmer's films. The stage design is in brown: A wall encloses these little stories, these questions into a void as we all know it, this irony that, not to offend, is dressed in the garb of a traveler from centuries past, similar to the skirts of old that we wear in our nostalgic days. Basically, we are caught in the old vicious circle that the baroque theater already told: Helena loves Demetrius, who loves Hermia, who loves him back but is loved by Lysander. Here the protagonists have no names: They are called A, B, C, D and the feeling in this play is a hypocritical, disappointing, surprising, pretending and treacherous friendship full of ulterior motives. "I will never trust you because you always tell the truth." Sentences, fragments of feelings. Unexpected actions, mock battles, abandoned characters, sudden appearance of violins on a wall that begins to live, splits and closes again. We are in an existential cabaret that smiles speechlessly and carries European air to Bologna. Thanks to the Teatri di Vita: it proves, even in times of tight budgets, to be a space where cinema, theater, music and thoughts question us about our own turmoil.

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