Salvo Lombardo: Birdsong

After a trilogy dedicated to revisiting the nineteenth-century Italian dance repertory left by choreographer Luigi Manzotti, Salvo Lombardo stays firm in his quest to explore intangible heritage. This time, he focuses on bird-singing, a Mediterranean vocal tradition that initially emerged as an imitation of the bird sounds by hunters, and survives today as a whistling competition. This practice inspired Lombardo’s latest work, Birdsong, which premiered at this year’s Oriente Occidente festival at the beginning of September. Performed by Marta Ciappina and Daria Greco and the elder bird-singing champion Camillo Prosdocimo, the piece blends movement and vocal expression to explore communication between different worlds, such as across human and animals, generations and genders.

The two female performers mysteriously appear and disappear within a thin layer of white smoke that spreads close to the stage floor, recalling cold winter night fog or low-hanging clouds. They come and go like a dream, initially disconnected, moving between a forest of slender standing lights (designed by Maria Elena Fusacchia) that resemble bare trees, stripped of branches for birds to rest or nest. Dressed in white scouting shorts, boots and kneepads, complemented by a crest-like triangular scarf adorning Ciappina’s head and a visor hat with a white collar for Greco, they simultaneously embody both the predators and the prey. Hunting gestures and birdlike movements are diluted and filtered through pedestrian and carefully measured movement choices; every now and then appears a tail flicking or a gun gesture, and the use of binoculars to see far away and beyond the fog. A melodic and enchanting bird-singing – performed by Prosdocimo – arrives gradually, after trio conversations in incomprehensive verbal codes that imitate almost descriptively the tweets produced by the birds (these mimetic sounds in the form of ‘siou-siou’ and ‘cra-cra’ are for now the least convincing part of Birdsong). The struggle for communication turns into a smooth flock-like dance in unison to the melancholic recorded voice of Lana Del Rey’s Bluebird, singing ‘find a way to fly’.

Lombardo, once more, approaches tradition with delicacy and subtlety, allowing it to fade and disappear underneath the smoke of theatrical artifice. In doing so, he gives space to vocal and corporeal exploration that may transform a traditional hunting practice into a choreography of constant renegotiation, where individuals reach for proximity and mutual understanding. ●

Ariadne Mikou’s trip to Rovereto was supported by Oriente Occidente