The Waste Land

Idea and Choreography: Ismael Ivo
Music: Igor Stravinskij “The Rite of Spring”, Andreas Bick “The Waste Land”
Produced by La Biennale di Venezia with the collaboration of Goethe Institut Mailand
Premiere: 20 June 2009

The first season of the Arsenale della Danza concludes by bringing to focus teaching and practice under the Masters invited over the past few months, with the creation of a performance under the director and choreograph, Ismael Ivo. The 15 dancers of the Arsenale della Danza, young performers aged between 22 and 30 from Italy, Switzerland, Venezuela, Turkey and Japan will thus have the chance to test their skills and creativity in a truly professional setting. From this process arises The Waste Land, based on a masterpiece of the early 20th century, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, rendered immortal by Nijinsky, questioning our relationship with our environments in a world increasingly at risk. The celebration of the rite, the return of spring, the joy of the dance all seek a new horizon of meaning. Similarly, the music sees the introduction alongside of the sound-based experiments of the German composer, Andreas Blick, which reproduce noisy natural events by sampling or recording, “the scream of the earth and its disintegration” (I. Ivo), which will accompany Stravinsky’s Rite, which already expressed a barbaric, primitive work, with all its explosion of senses and violence.
This is a creation that seeks the degree zero of movement and of the relationship with the earth to spur the dancers to find a new beginning for today’s tormented world.