The audience is entering the hall at the Vascello theater in Rome and Paolo Ravaglia on bass clarinet is already playing an introduction – or do we want to call it an overture? – to the stage action Live *, born from a collaboration between the dancer-choreographer-filmmaker Francesco Scavetta and the composer Luigi Ceccarelli. He also puts in Ravaglia style music. But that’s not what matters. What counts is the fact that this prelude, which is still attributable to Ceccarelli’s writing, is conceived starting from the culture of radical improvisation. A pleasantly extremist Ceccarelli. The continuation of the score, built in close contact with Scavetta, reaffirms this happy choice of using perhaps the most exciting experiences in all the music of the last glimpse of the twentieth century and, even more, of this early twenty-first century.
During the construction phase of the work Ravaglia “donated” the sounds of his clarinets to the voracious and wise machines of Ceccarelli, who sampled several to combine them with the sounds of live electronics, and then left others (still written) to the soloist Ravaglia, always on stage also as an actor.
And Ravaglia disassembles the clarinets (also the fascinating double bass clarinet), plays them in pieces, uses a series of mutes, emits puffs, dotted notes, darting and nervous phrases, sounds of the underground and sounds of space travel. Ceccarelli wrote, Ravaglia interprets and composes in turn with the art of the virtuoso. But we are always in full Ceccarellian poetics: a poetics of the disenchantment of secular colloquiality: we never hear in Live * the expressionist drama of an Evan Parker or the apocalyptic viscerality of a Peter Brötzmann.

(Mario Gamba, il Manifesto, November 3, 2006)

A light poem of the body, an amusement beneath which a research that is anything but improvised is hidden under the track, animates in Live * the enchanted and mocking dance of Francesco Scavetta, mixed with rough intelligence in the sound space created by Luigi’s electronic music Ceccarelli and the live performance of Paolo Ravaglia with his clarinets …
Scavetta is a dancer, now a choreographer, who plays with a dreamlike caress on the relationship between daily gesture and pure dance movement. In Live * he proves it with a show in which entering and leaving reality, the questioning of the man / machine relationship lives on a shaken face to face. Scavetta doubles, sometimes triples in the video we see above, in the background of the scene. But no one can tell if the images are pre-recorded or if they are made on the spot. Scavetta and his companions use mobile cameras, remote controlled objects. Red sofa, blue ashtray. Scavetta is sitting, losing his balance, slouching dance. The video takes it back, freezes it in poses that contract time, then everything starts again, above and below, while the amplified, distorted sound of the clarinet presses, underlines, suggests, envelops. Technology in which contact with man and his humor is not lost, miraculously avoiding the hypnosis of the screen on the corporeality of the scene. Jokes between virtual and real in which a giant inflatable Godzilla participates. To remind us that you can not be trivial even without taking yourself too seriously.

(Francesca Pedroni, Il Manifesto, November 3, 2006)