Nuovo Balletto di Toscana
Composition
Bayadère is a show steeped in idealized exoticism, both in its melodramatic plot and the aesthetic of the whole.
I had to compose music that dialogued and somehow incorporated some preponderant parts of the Minkus score. The result is a dreamlike and shadowy journey from which fragments of the original music emerge, sometimes clear and sometimes transfigured. The overall shape is that of acceleration and crescendo
Michele Di Stefano:
Historically, La Bayadère’s most famous scene The Kingdom of Shades presents itself on the borderline between this world and the other world. Here, the shades appear as if frozen in their tragic condition and perform ritual movements.This act expresses a vision that goes beyond its context and opens onto a passage of pure movement, abstract and lucid in its formal simplicity.
I focused on the compositional potential that this scene holds; not with the intention of duplicating it, but to unleash all its dynamic force and to restore to Solor’s hallucinations their true psychedelic nature.
Designed for a group of young dancers – the Nuovo Balletto di Toscana – this new Kingdom of Darkness – so mysterious and evocative – belongs to the exceptional times in which we live. It refers to something lost yet feasible, something about the presence of bodies and the intertwining of their trajectories. All within a space which is no longer just an afterlife, but it’s also a present which wishes to be reinvented, with delicacy and passion.
