BALERHAUS
—
director and admiral
Marco Maria Linzi
—
dance floor commander
Lara Guidetti
—
Helmsman
Marco “Sig. Mario” De Meo
For those who don’t know a step,
for those who know them all
For those who stumble,for those who fly …
Or for those who only know how to jump.
ORCHESTRA &
CREW
orchestra captain Ale “Kape” Sicardi
stern musicians I Morbidissimi
Balera siren Nicoletta Bernardi
Manager boatswain Fabio Ferretti
crew Saverio Bari, Micaela Brignone, Sabrina Faroldi, Marcello Gori, Stefano Slocovich,
Cecilia Vecchio and the dancers of the Sanpapié company
with the contribution of the Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities – Entertainment Sector and Cariplo Foundation
SYNOPSIS
IDENTITY 2.0
Balerhaus is a real dance evening with live music; a happening where ballroom dance (which the audience can learn through live tutorials), contemporary dance, and theatre cross over and intertwine, retracing the history of a place – the Balera – which has marked the uses and customs of entire generations of Italians and whose power of attraction today is once again strong even among young people.
The typical styles of couple-dances determine the sections of the evening; in Balerhaus everyone dances, performers and audience, led by tutors: not professional teachers, but a couple who have lived the dance floor for a lifetime and that lends itself to guide the public to discover the steps of waltz, of polka, of the cha cha cha … Everything happens quickly, there is really no time to learn, but only to get an idea, yes, because after all that matters is not form, but the desire to give it a try. There are always two possibilities: shamelessly unleash your own waltz, your own rumba, or be guided by those who can do those dances.
CHARACTERS
In Balerhaus there is a presenter, an admiral of the evening, who welcomes the public, and gives the “Instructions” of the evening, guides and scolds the audience; the frontman of the orchestra that plays ironically with the imaginary roots of the various dances and music proposed; the dance floor commander, which indicates the rules of the various sections of Balerhaus, the performers, who work alongside the two tutors in teaching each dance to the public, the Electrobalera, which mixes verses of dialectal poets with reinterpretations of the most famous pieces of Balera music in a techno-electronic key.
And suddenly performances appear… each one plays with themes coming from the imagination of Balera and its social relationships – the invitation to the dance, the choice, the gaze of others, the early women’s emancipations; glimpses on inner worlds that move between fear and desire, between fragility and revolt, in the constant search for a popular but not trivial language, profound but not elitist that reinterprets that world both through an ironic reading and through a sincere search for a lost naive element.
The characters that enter the scene are the same ones with which the viewer stops to chat at the bar, and maybe a few minutes later, the ones that will invite him or her to dance the cha cha cha. The evening is completed with the projection of films that enhance the dynamics of the dance and introduce costume notes from the 1950s and 1960s. In Balerhaus everyone dresses as they want, everyone brings out their vision of ballroom dancing and how they would like it to be, for how they feel about meeting the other in an “out of this world” context; the important thing is that you get dressed and feel “da balera”. Balerhaus stands at the crossroads between participation and enjoyment, it brings together different desires that allow communication between new and old generations making them participate in a game, gradually taking them to an artistic Balera, that never existed.
