Innovative Italian choreographer Emilliano Pellisari creates a jaw-dropping spectacle of dance inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy. Playing with perspective, reflection, and distortion, Pellisari’s surrealist vision boggles the mind and eye as the audience slowly descends into the Inferno.
The women and men, terrestrial and divine, mortal and immortal, narrated by Dante in his Divine Comedy, are not bodies. But minds, memories, visions, wishes, ideas: they are souls. And souls have no weight.
This physical and poetic insight is the basic point from which Emiliano Pellisari’s choreography takes, literally, its flight.
Thanks to the recovery of stage and deceiving techniques typical of the Baroque theatre, his dancers, acrobats and actors make quite credible, part after part, this reconstruction of Dante’s journey.
From Inferno (Hell) towards Paradiso (Heaven) the way is over and over dematerialized: all references, never realistic, yet recognizable at first in the incidents and the various characters of the Poem, gradually become less obvious. And at the same time, more and more in focus is the visual heart of entertainment, into the understanding and restitution of the progressive loss of Dante himself, in the prevalence of an astonished spiritual feeling, in a suspended and white lightness.