A few weeks ago, British dancer, choreographer and director Wayne McGregor was confirmed by Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, president of the Venice Biennale, for a two-season extension of his mandate at the head of the dance section of the biennale and its annual festival, which this year reaches its 18th edition with almost unanimous support from critics and an enthusiastic response from the public, largely young, who are spread across all the festival’s activities. McGregor arrived in Venice in 2020 in the midst of the pandemic, so he had to fight, at the same time, with several types of ghosts until he was able to assert his criteria and proposals. The motto for 2024 is “We Human”, and if you know what I mean, with the availability detailed in a luxurious and exhaustive 500-page catalogue, you already have a prismatic and impactful offer that takes into account the most pressing and current problems that affect the dance sector, either directly or tangentially, political and social issues, global dramas and sustainability, all of which are stirring in a complex concert with many open fronts of discussion.
The 2024 Dance Biennial is going to last longer than expected and than usual in previous editions. This is perfectly understandable, as there is still time to gain. It began on July 18 and will end on August 3. In addition to the inconveniences of the place, we must now add the frequent heat waves, the lagoon traffic and mass tourism, but here the contemporary dance public, which is militant and loyal, continues to attend all the shows, with phenomena already established worldwide for their uniqueness such as the American Trajal Harrell (this year’s brilliant Silver Lion) and the Colombian Rafael Palacios, who said: “I live in a society that forces art to confront the racism that we, black people, see every day.”
Both Rafael Palacios and Trajal Harrell can be understood as intellectuals of choreography, both have been close to the university environment, cultural anthropology and comparative literature, and for them dance is one more vehicle inserted in a complex of vindicative expressions. Palacios’ group founded in Colombia in 1997 is called Sankofa Danzafro, and Sankofa can be translated from the Akan language of Ghana as “Return to the roots.” Palacios himself explains that, more than a word, it is an African philosophy that proposes knowledge of the past as a condition for understanding the present.
The work that he has brought to the Teatro Piccolo Arsenale in Venice is entitled Behind the South: Dances for Manuelin a clear direct tribute to the most acclaimed work of the Colombian writer Manuel Zapata Olivella, Chango, the great whorewhich documents and analyzes the African diaspora in the American continent. Stripped of any fondness for fashions or the most global trends, Palacios seeks his modernity in his world, the African gods (Changó, Yemayá, Elleguá) alternate with humans in the story, the painful Atlantic adventure, the break with the continental roots of Africa and the idea of maintaining umbilicality as the only source of that memorial sap that must feed the hero and make him strong in the fight for his dignity and freedom. The gestural story of the birth, for example, of an enormous and powerful plastic beauty, is at the same time an epiphany towards physical plenitude and power strengthened by rhythm, enveloping and almost hypnotic music, with a whole tremor that makes the ancestral a new energy. The dancers, most of them black or mestizo from the Medellín area, master these languages full of curves, accents and repetitions of a phrasing that is at the same time a language, with its beauty and its strong carnal imprint; it is as if at the end of each dance, the spectator is still within that dance, hearing those pleas and demands. It is evident that there is a social and political activism involved in this proposal, but at the same time, everything is presented through a notable aesthetic effort of refinement and plastic taste. Rafael Palacios has been a favorite disciple of the great Germaine Acogny, and this master hand is evident in the ways of presenting himself, in the powerful and taut fabric of the dance that, in turn, stylizes elements of the past and adds new motifs.
Shiro Takatani (Nara, 60 years old) is adored wherever he goes. A multimedia artist who was co-founder and current director of the famous art collective Dumb Type, Takatani has a high position in the development of the great performance. Tangent (2015) was her first solo act and now she is coming to Europe, with the Venice Dance Biennale being her European debut after a brief stint in Estonia. McGregor’s very precise intention of proposing Takatani in the dance offering brings several questions to the fore: Where is dance then here? All or nothing. It is an Aristotelian principle brought to coexist with performative action. The dance of the spheres and the dance of ideas are one if man (the artist) wants to unite them. The artist Miyu Hosoi moves between those elements that are sometimes overwhelming, other times still to the point of having a Shinto scent, where there is order there is chaos. Coexistence is analysis and any solitude is welcomed in that all that is so especially lyrical and boundless.
Takatani unfolds Ryuichi Sakamoto’s music so that we enter a solar cycle that is at the same time the sought-after perfect circle, the coexistence of a grain of sand with the other grains of sand, countless and scattered. The beauty of these scenes woven with tenderness and intelligence is overwhelming, and of course there is dance. It is evident that McGregor has taken us to a terrain that always seems unexplored. The question is the same: an astronomer in the ziggurat piercing the stars with his gaze and last night at the Malibran Theatre the very ritualized Miyu Hosoi putting order on a board where ideas have precise forms, perhaps recurrent, but beautiful.
We talk a lot today about virtual art and even the virtual dancer. The 2024 Dance Biennial shows us that some artists, in a loop of anticipation, are already at it and will continue to surprise us in successive messages. At the end of TangentHosoi knocks with his knuckles on the huge metal plates that have been lowered onto the stage, and he also writes something on them, whispers messages to them. Then, those sidereal phylacteries rise again towards the ether, the darkness, the immensity. They carry Miyu’s message, her warning and her hope where dance is a universal resource.