to the world’s “unassuming ragamuffins”...
This was what became of Virgilio Sieni’s Tristi Tropici: Meaning lost among Concepts. Say whatever you want, I don’t think a piece with a thirty-some page ethnographic libretto can be of my interest. Let the play stand for itself, there is no need of a lengthy explanation of influence and personal Ars Poetica, or rather flow of consciousness of a choreographer, however relevant it may be to the interpretation of the dance.
On the stage we see the unfolding of a matriarchic micro-society - a tribe of six females (he calls “these unassuming ragamuffins”) : two children, two young women and two old elderly, with no attempt to hide their nude age. The different statuses do not hinder them from supporting each other. We see rituals we do not understand, symbols we cannot identify with on the surface level. We see geometric forms, dead animals and huge white birds (supposedly peacocks) come and go and we just feel there is something deeper going on. Something we can try to observe, to describe but we cannot ever touch. In the end we empty our mind and participate in the pilgrimage - to our inner self.
The choreography was inspired by the Triste Tropiques, the popular curriculum of Claude Lévi-Strauss, which is a lament over the loss of the “New World”, the Amazonas, caused by the oppressive monoculture of the modern era. The anthropologist claims to become a “detached observer”, yet, he remains with the desire to control the inferior other, the primitives, as he calls them. But are these people really primitive?
The promiscuous twitch shows that the indigenous have no intentional control over their body. They are on the border between animal and man, yet, they have very tender humane-like feelings. The sharply cut scenes obliqued into twilight, the leaden industrial music wash away the difference between then and now, there and here, them and us. “Blessings such as silence, coolness and peace, which we thought had vanished, reappear. When we hear before the performance itself that one of the dancers, Dorina is blind, our feeling of compassion rises…compassion, a feeling “that derives from the identification with the other” who is a stranger to us; a feeling that we are all identical.
