Marzo
Subscribe
X

Get the latest from Beat

Marzo

marzo.jpg

How did the show come about to begin with? Was it one person’s idea or a group concept? ”As a group we wanted to explore something new and different in respect to what we had done previously. We were looking for a new way to ‘speak’ with the audience that wasn’t just through movement, as we’ve done in the past. We also felt the urgency to push our dance and poetry out of the ‘dance world’ itself, to find a new and disorienting field. We started writing the plot together, dividing the different scenes, studying the characters as if we were creating a short film. We had been rehearsing for two months when we got the drawings from Yuichi Yokoyama. That created a bit of disorder because we realized we couldn’t move in the direction we originally thought, but at the same time this put wealth into our research because we had to force the costumes to fit some movement, without being their “victims” but forcing the shapes to give birth to a character. Only after having realized them we had a month of work with Kuro Tanino, who put in the psychology of the character to complete the figures.”

Is there a narrative? How is the show structured? “Yes, the piece is centred on a narrative, a first for Dewey Dell. Marzo (the month of March in Italian) has always been the right moment to return to the battlefield after the long cold winter. At the same time though, it is also the moment where, in the boreal part of the world, the spring begins. March is the period in which the love and the need to return to fight collide, arising up together in the same time. This story tells what happened to a warrior in this particular moment of the year, in a planet very far from ours.”

What can audiences expect to see? “There are six performers on stage. All the figures are dancers inside elaborate costumes. The costumes are invented by Yuichi Yokoyama, a Japanese comic artist who designed the characters based on our script. Once we received his drawings, we realised that we wanted to create costumes as true to the original drawings as possible.”

What has been the biggest challenge in putting this show together? “The biggest challenge for Dewey Dell was to collaborate with two important and established artists. Working with Yuichi Yokoyama, the comic designer, was exciting because we knew perfectly his aesthetic and his comic characters, and so we had just to recreate the shapes and faces that he would have chosen for our specific characters. Totally different was working with Kuro Tanino, the theatre director of the company Niwagekidan Penino, with whom we worked together to create the dialogues. The biggest challenge was creating with these two artists a contemporary dance work with using speech, leaving behind our normally abstract approach and moving into a narrative based work.”

How did the various Japanese co-creators and Dewey Dell find each other? “We’ve always been a super fan of Yuichi Yokoyama’s work and we really wanted to try to get him to collaborate. It wasn’t easy at the beginning but in the end he accepted. We met Kuro Tanino in 2011 when we were both performing at the same festival called Next in Kortrijk, Belgium. There we became friends and we got to know his work, which deeply impressed us as it was so traditional and unique at the same time. As soon as we decided to use word-s and dialogue in our work we immediately thought of him.”

Is Marzo more funny than serious? “It’s hard to tell. The work will never be completely funny, but it will touch very dramatic moments. We wanted the audience to feel a very wide spectrum of feelings, from fear to joy, passing through tenderness, anger, love, violence. We don’t know if we got our aim, you’ll tell us!”

For audiences not overly familiar with the manga or Japanese comic book, aesthetic, is there a difference in how the show is perceived? “Absolutely not, we didn’t create this show to bring manga figures to life; we just wanted to create a story told through movements and words. It’s just a coincidence that Yuichi Yokoyama is a comic designer, in fact to be more precise he prefers to be called a visual artist because he paints as well.”

Does Marzo reference any earlier works by Dewey Dell? “To be honest, no. At the same time yes, you could find the same poetic modified and stretched to something different.” Is there any part of the show that Dewey Dell especially like? “Probably the scene called The Spirit, but we can’t really reveal any more than that!” Where, if anywhere, has the show received the best reactions? Does it speak to any place or group of people in particular? “Usually young people like the work more for the electronic music and for the volume (quite loud), but it depends, really: we had great conversations with older people who very enjoyed it. We think this work could be watched by anyone, children included.”

BY LIZA DEZFOULI