My past influences my present and this latter - with its constant encounters, clashes and discoveries - certainly changes my future.
The remarkable work on speech and acting, in particular with the master Luca Ronconi, allowed me to immediately understand my personal interest towards the accurate analysis of the art of being on stage.
His lucid vision of bodies in space, the connection between thought, speech and physical action have stimulated my interest in such a way that my personal research has been directed more and more towards the relationship between non-verbal communication and the enunciation of the text, the actor and her movement, the actor and the scenic space.
Researching and studying I found in Rudolf Laban’s theories something that could help me to finally look at this field of study in a scientific and conscious way.
Fond of dance since the early age, I have wandered between the study of ballroom dancing, Argentinian tango, contemporary dance, mime and martial arts.
A boy from the 90s, dazed between a body culture that was exclusively related to sports and a dance that was excessively foreign or linked to television, I found in theatre and especially movement theatre an additional discipline and expressiveness that allowed me to understand the instances of the body.
Thus I began to follow as many possible “worlds” connected to movement, studying their principles and pedagogy.
I was interested in understanding how to bring the body/movement world inside the theatre of speech, so I began to assist some directors, including Luca Ronconi himself, for the physical preparation of the actors and their organization in the scenic space, hence building actual theatrical choreographies.
photos by Stefano Mazzotta
Over the years I have defined the role of the “movement designer”, that is, the person who tries to understand and interpret the spatial and physical needs of the directors and therefore the bodies and movements of individual actors, and for this I won the National Critics’ Award (ANCT) in 2015 as pedagogue and theatrical choreographer.
I immediately asked myself how to teach to young actors, within the drama schools of the so called drama theatre where I work – namely Scuola del Teatro Stabile di Torino and Piccolo Teatro di Milano.
This is my incessant research: the encounter with bodies, their organic and rational nature, the interweaving and limits of these categories, their world and the relationship with what I am.
From all this came the need to go beyond school hours in order to transform the study into a personal scenic language.
In the summer of 2016 I invited some of my former students to study independently, in an environment different from the school: so the AMR company was born.
Observing the real world, architectural spaces in their contradiction, bodies that explain themselves and react to the space according to social and physical codes, but also mechanical codes we’re often unaware of. The encounter with the spaces of freedom of the self and the other. I roam, I record and then I walk into the rehearsals’ room.
Constantly doubting and looking for a meaning of theatre today, I look for a grammar of movement that allows me to speak and say something close to but also beyond the meaning of words.
A code, a sense but also a sensation, that the nature of actions in the pure mechanics of the gesture can create without specific definitions.
I am a researcher of actions and therefore of actual and imaginary connections.
I am an investigator of bodies lost in space, in search of a self-identity but also of anatomical and relational freedom.
The encounter with the other and the consequent dynamics that can arise from it are beyond words – hence there lies my investigation. A physical but also emotional dynamic.
The other can be one or more than one, and as in a dialogue I act to react and viceversa. A greater number of others create a living and constantly changing community that follows laws that are not always logical, just like the movements of flocks or crowds – that’s the theme of my work “Choròs”.
Which physical, mathematical, literary and psychological anthropological laws stimulate these encounters/clashes? Who are the subjects in those? In every work there is a piece of the previous one, as a past that becomes present but also as a joint that is mechanically hooked with the new, in the attempt of a coherent – but also incoherent – path of research.