Live*
Francesco Scavetta / Luigi Ceccarelli
for prepared clarinets, live electronics and elaborated sounds
surround diffusion 4.1
duration 60′
video: Tone Myskja, Francesco Scavetta
video editing: Tone Myskja
live video mixing: Tone Myskja/Giampaolo Rampini
light design: Ruth-Marie Bottheim
objects: Johannes Dimpflmeier
production leader: Gry Kipperberg
Prix for the music for theater and dance – June 2003
30° Concours International de Musique et d’Art Sonore Electroacoustique de Bourges (Fr)
Commission: Biennale di Venezia, settore musica e settore danza
musical production: Edison Studio
production: Wee/Francesco Scavetta,
with the support of Norsk Kulturfond,
Fond for lyd og bilde
and Norwegian Foreign Affairs
in co-production with La Biennale di Venezia
and with the collaboration of
La Corte Ospitale/Teatro Herberia di Rubiera (RE),
Teatro Comunale di Cesenatico,
Teatro Comunale di Cagli,
Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Oslo,
Progetto Sonora
BIT-Teatergarasjen of Bergen.
review
The audience is entering the hall at the Vascello theater in Rome and Paolo Ravaglia on the bass clarinet is already playing an introduction 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, although still attributable to Ceccarelli’s writing, is conceived starting from the culture of radical improvisation. A pleasantly extremist Ceccarelli. The rest 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 so, 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 of them 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 takes apart the clarinets, plays them in small 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 …..
Mario Gamba, il Manifesto, November 3, 2006
representations of Live*
Jun 15-17, 01 – Venezia (Ita), La Biennale, Teatro Fondamenta Nuove
Sep 24-25, 02 – Cagli (Ita), Teatro Comunale
Oct 0, 02 – Sandnes (Norway), Kulturhus
Oct 10-11,02 – Bergen (Norvay), Oktoberdans Festival
Oct 12-15, 02 – Oslo (Norvay), Ultima Festival/Black Box Teater
Oct 19-20,02 – Trondheim (Norvay),Teater Avant Garden
Feb 23, 03 – Longiano (Ita), Teatro Petrella
Feb 27, 03 – Genova (Ita), Teatro Archivolto/Teatro Modena
Mar 4-5, 03 – Catania (Ita), ZO Centro Culture Contemporanee
Jul 18-19, 03 – Bologna (Ita), Teatri di Vita, Vita nel Parco 5
Jul 26, 03 – Klagenfurt (Austria), Festival “zwanzig+”
Oct 15, 03 – Avellino (Ita), Festival Tempo Incerto, Teatro Carlo Gesualdo
Nov 22, 03 – Barinas (Venezuela), Teatro Orlando Araujo
Nov 25, 03 – Maracaibo (Venezuela), Teatro Baralt
Nov 27, 03 – Valera (Venezuela), Ateneo de Valera
Nov 30,03 – Caracas (Venezuela),Teatro San Carlos
May 01, 04 – Cesenatico, Teatro Comunale
May 19, 04 – Potenza (Ita)
Jun 11, 04 – Bourges (France), Festival IMEB, Theatre Jacques-Coeur
Dec 3-4, 04 – Tartu (Estonia), D.A. Festival/Harbour theatre
Dec 8, 04 – Tallin (Estonia), Kanuti Gildi SAAL
Oct 30-Nov 1, 06 – Roma (Ita), 43° Festival di Nuova Consonanza, Teatro Vascello
Nov 16, 06 – Repubblica San Marino, Teatro Nuovo di Dogana, stagione
Mar 2-4, 08 – Roma (Ita), Teatro Furio Camillo, Rassegna ETI
May 6, 08 – Firenze (Ita), Stazione Leopolda, Spazio Musica
May 7-9, 09 – Vancouver (Canada), The Dance Center – Summer Dance 2009, Scotiabank Dance Centre
Apr 21,r 10 – Beirut (Lebanon), Bipod-Beirut International Platform of Dance, Maqamat Theater of Dance
Jul 4,10 – San Pietroburgo (Russia), Dance Festival Tyuz (Teatr Yunkh Zriteley)
Cultures Electroniques n 18
Live* – DVD
excerpt
duration 7:30
2005
DVD/CD: LDC 278079/1 serie IMEB/UNESCO/CIME
CD – Nuove Creazioni per la Biennale
(music by Ceccarelli, Galasso, Mancuso)
Live* (part I and II) (suite)
for prepared clarinets and clarinets sounds
clarinets Paolo Ravaglia
duration: 3’45″ + 3’ 53″
CD La Biennale di Venezia.
20012001
The live* performance owes its origin to the collaboration between the choreographer and dancer
Francesco Scavetta and the composer Luigi Ceccarelli, that recently won the prestigious Ubu Price 2002,
for the project “New works for the Biennale of Venice – Department of dance and music 2001”.
The video installation plays an important role in the work and was conceived in collaboration with the video artist Tone Myskja.
Developed from an analysis on vision and illusion, everyday life and unreality, artificiality and distortion, the performance takes place in a visual and acoustic environment where reality and its electronic/virtual reproduction, are never well outlined, but interact with each other, in complex and ever varied relations. The performace takes place in a setting with monitors and television cameras, a sort of ring where technology plays hide-and-seek, where vision and sound perceptions are constantly questioned.
Because of the triangulation among the cameras, the monitors and the superimposing of the different sources of the images, different levels of reality are created, not simply between what is happening on the stage and what is showed on the screen, but also in relation with what is visible on the screen itself. The reality of the scene, reproduced live, does not coincide with its reproduction on the screen. It is as if a short circuit in the transmission of the images would project a complex being, made of an inextricable mixture of reality and thought, hallucination and memory, as an ever new fluxus of interferences.
The mixture of curiosity, incertitude and surprise the audience feels is in tune with the work of
Francesco Scavetta on the theme of epiphany, on creating expectations and a familiarity only to negate them: some little diversions of the imagination where each interpretation allows a multitude of solutions, a something/anything.
The reality in which we live often gives us the sensation that facts do not exist outside their technological registration/reproduction. The ever present camera is not always faithful to what the eye has seen, it lies with a sort of grimace. All this reminds
us how artificial, and adulterated is often reality when registered by the so-called objective and neutral eye of the camera.
The musical score of live* is assembled by Luigi Ceccarelli with the sounds of the clarinettist Paolo Ravaglia, the ability and originality of whom have a significant role in the realization of the performance.
During the performance Paolo Ravaglia dismantle and reassemble various clarinets.
The instruments so obtained, with the aid of different types of mufflers, allow a greater variety of sounds and tones: from the deep ones of the bass clarinet to the ultra sharp harmonics, impossible with the traditional instrument.
The clarinet sounds are amplified and, through a computer processed score, electronically elaborated, and transmitted in the room with a system of multichannel speakers.
The live sounds are superimposed with those taped and obtained by the digital elaboration of the same clarinet.
The general effect of live*’s soundtrack is complex and varied, not withstanding the presence of a single player. The clarinet becomes a polyphonic and multidimensional instrument, always on that borderline between the virtuosity of an exacerbated live performance and the the virtual dimension, where time and space take part to the creative play of sound.
Elaborated in a tense relationship with the musical score – both live and virtual – dance absorbs the theatrical flavour of the daily gesture and, at the same time, the artificialities of the natural. Scavetta’s goal, or better, his utopia is after all the scornful athletism, the absurd acrobatics of a body in balance, that state of precariousness, I mean, not only physical, in which one might fall at any moment, even if this will not happen. A movement which does not show itself, but which happens. A disjointed body manipulation, a concentrate of fluidity and deformation, humour and folly.
review
A light poem of the body, an amusement under which a research that is anything but improvised hides 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 *
try it with one show in which entering and leaving reality, questioning the relationship between man and machine 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 him back, freezes
him in poses that they contract time, then everything starts again, above and below, while the amplified, distorted sound of the clarinet presses, emphasizes, 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