The annual programme of the Venice College, part of the Biennale of the Italian city, has been changing over time, and constant experimentation has allowed it to improve in many practical and artistic aspects. Now, in addition to the 16 selected dancers, the Biennale provides grants and technical support to several choreographers to develop choreographic proposals, dividing the resources equally between the Italians themselves and those from elsewhere.
Enthronement is both an anti-Voltairean and an eighteenth-century word that first Today it is rejected, but that is really what happens when a young choreographer – in this case two, a tandem – is called to create at the Venice Biennale, and the prestigious entity produces a work for eight dancers. And, if everything goes well, as has been the case with the group, Memory Number 7, honey on flakes, because we can begin to open as many doors as Troy had. The work This was meant to find you It is a beauty of movement, synthesis and ensemble. Javier Ara Sauco (Huesca, 1993) and Enrique López Flores (Barcelona, 1995), who are not exactly newcomers, emerge into the choreographic field from their respective experiences as performers, and thus now travel the steepest and most abrupt part of the path. They do not seem obstinate in the search for a style, but rather for a sincere exposition. As young artists of today, Javier and Enrique have already accumulated many hours of global travel and practice with various choreographers and directors. These dialogues and inquiries can be seen in their choreography.
In a new exhibition space inside the Arsenale called Isolotto, the dancers appear from a dark distance, unhurriedly, in a stage tempo without too many exaltations, elegantly circulating and relating in a kind of continuous adagio, with sought-after unstable balances and a white light from above that creates a precise outline, almost sharp dancers subtly enter and exit the illuminated ring, with a dance full of open and ascending spirals, in some with a virtuoso use of the turn and in others with the search for contact. The beginning perhaps wants to speak to us of loneliness, or of a circumstance shrouded in doubt. The atmosphere is apparently cold, but that quickly gives way to poetry continued by the dance itself, strongly supported by the music created by the Asturian Alex Aller, who contributes decisively to the result, tense from its own lyricism to a still, faded ending where a dancer, alone, seems to demand a new beginning: it is an experience of searching and affirmation through dance. Abstraction has given way to an intimate and strongly demonstrative reading, both in the group and in the solo acts, of a desire for affirmation and positivity.
The choreographic materials swing between an apparent instability, on the planimetry, seeking to align themselves in a minimum of expressiveness that does not divert attention or compete with the main formal – plastic – aspect: dancing very well. There is a noticeable concern for the form and the finish, and that carelessness in the stage packaging that caused so much damage two decades ago seems to have been left behind. A return to order? Not necessarily, but an effort that includes how to present the choreography in the best possible way, giving the public a finished product down to the smallest details, and this is appreciated.
The work of Dorotea Saykaly, given below in the adjoining room of the Isolloto under the title Lethe, a search for the waters of Oblivionis a display of tenebrist composition, highly sexualized and articulated on the poses and stillness of the living picture from before with the premise of the mythological subject as a background texture. The bodily associations of the performers address dramatic unions and distancing. Among the performers (also eight other members of the cast of the College), Iker Rodríguez Sainz from San Sebastián, who was a member of the National Dance Company (CND) since 2018 and where he made his first choreographic sketches.