ATSUMORI, spectrum in repetition — visibility mechanisms — interstitial topography — apotropaic dance
ATSUMORI is a dance play for a quintet and a radiant stage. This creation is based on the Japanese play Noh Atsumori, written by Zeami Motokiyo in the 15th century, in which the ghost of a warrior-child returns to the battlefield to avenge their own death. Catarina Miranda studied this play in Kyoto (2018). It inspired her to develop her own narrative, addressing the double affection about the loss and the beginning of a cycle, as well as the appeal of the unknown. The transgressed body wishes to make contact and to assert itself in its maximum power. The quintet of dancers uses clapping, whistles, sparks, whispers and vocal callings, while it occupies an interstitial space through an apotropaic and rhythmic choreography, in a game of spectres, shadows and metamorphoses, revealed by different levels of visibility. There are echoes and traces of gestures from ancestral dances and contemporary social dances, here twisted and reshaped, as if both bodies and time could be unfolded, dismembered, passable, embodied by Cacá Otto Reuss, Hugo Marmelada, Lewis Seivwright, Maria Antunes and Mélanie Ferreira. The stage lighting, designed by Letícia Sckrycky and Joana Mário, plays an active role in this game of shadows, amplified by the musical composition by Lechuga Zaphiro, revealing the bodies that dissolve, transform, and seek to emerge and coexist.
