Florence, 25 June 2024 – Heterodox. In ways and themes. It has always been an urgent dance choreographed by the Northern Irishwoman Oona Doherty, driven by social and political reasons, but also capable of questioning itself through its own expressive freedom on the very value of the artistic act and of our being in the world. After the dazzling “Hard to be a Soft – A Belfast Prayer”, which brought her to the international spotlight by telling the difficult life of the lower classes in Belfast, and the prestigious Silver Lion achieved at the 2021 Venice Biennale, the desire for rupture and denunciation of the painful conflicts of his hometown is existentially transfigured to the entire universe.
The fragility of the human being, the marginality compared to the expanse of an infinite and indefinite space, are the heart of his latest masterpiece “Navy Blue”, on stage tomorrow evening at the Chiostro Maggiore of Santa Maria Novella as part of the thirty-fifth edition of the Florence Dance Festival. Inspired by astronomer Carl Sagan’s “Pale Blue Dot”, Oona Doherty pushes the company’s twelve dancers Od Works within an atmosphere suspended between the classical reminiscences of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 and the horror vacui, the growing tension becomes existential terror in the second act, when the bodies free themselves, the gestures become fists of struggle and resistance, and the pulsating and adrenaline-filled soundtrack by Jamie xx punctuates the words of the voice-over, written by the choreographer herself with the author, actor and director Bush Moukarzel.
Bodies that rebel: against History, Politics and Nature, because that raised fist remains the last and desperate attempt to pierce with acrylic blue the galactic black of deep space and the night sky dotted with shooting stars. In hope – utopian? – of a possible future.
