Performer, choreographer, multimedia director and curator of performative projects, Salvo Lombardo arrives in Belgrade for the first time to present tonight, 18 March, at Ložionica in Belgrade, at 18:00 and 21:00, the ballet Sport (tickets available here: https://belgradedancefestival.com/en/performance/sport )
Sport is the third and final chapter of the reworking that Lombardo has carried out in recent years of the three ballets that the choreographer and mime Luigi Manzotti conceived and staged for La Scala in Milan at the end of the nineteenth century. The trilogy (Excelsior, Amor and, indeed, Sport) was created with the aim of promoting a sense of national identity and spreading certain rhetorical narratives in a country, Italy, which at the time had only recently become a unified state and was also seeking to develop its own nationalism in competition with that of other European states of the period.
“I was interested in rewriting these three ballets from another perspective: to the pseudo cultural identity, still to be constructed, of a country which 130 years ago aspired to be recognised with the same dignity and ambitions as the other European countries engaged in the challenges of nationalism and colonialism, of which Manzotti was an interpreter, I wanted to oppose a reworking based on different principles, and this precisely at a time when we are witnessing the return of this nationalist sentiment. I wanted to imagine and develop forms to deconstruct this nationalist imaginary, founded on rhetoric of power, whether expressed in the exaltation of the human body or of a nation,” Lombardo explained during the press conference led by the director of the Belgrade Dance Festival, Aja Jung.
“Manzotti’s three ballets articulated three different forms of the same rhetoric: with Excelsior, colonisation; with Amor, masculinity; with Sport, the power of the body as a metaphor for the power of a nation. For my part, I have approached this work from another perspective, in light of the tragedies of the twentieth century (the ballets were presented between 1881 and 1897) and the tragedies we are experiencing today, also as a result of the resurgence of various forms of supremacism. In Sport, if muscular strength is in some way a metaphor for Western societies, in my interpretation the fall becomes the moment in which the human being reveals itself: on the one hand, trying to avoid falling, on the other, having to learn to accept it. It is within this ambiguity that my stage discourse takes shape and develops, with the fall as a revealing moment of true human nature, far removed from the rhetoric of the monumental, unassailable body. For this reason, in Sport I worked on the movements of Greco-Roman wrestling, a representation of the will to prevail, of resistance, and of the acceptance of falling, of defeat, as part of our being,” explained Salvo Lombardo.