choreography: Michele Merola
music: Ludwig van Beethoven, Symphony n. 6 Pastorale - performed live by the duo pianist Giancarlo and Stefano Guarino
lights: Gessica Germini
scenography: Alice De Lorenzi
costumes: Carlotta Montanari and Nuvia Valestri
assistant to the choreography: Paolo Lauri
performers: MM Contemporary Dance Company (9 dancers)
duration: 47 minutes
national premiere: 21 October 2020 - Teatro Sociale di Trento
MM Contemporary Dance Company production
With the support of Centro Servizi Culturali S. Chiara - Trento / Circuito Danza del Trentino Alto Adige / Südtirol

On the occasion of the 250th anniversary of Beethoven's birth, Michele Merola created for the MMCDC a new choreography on the Pastoral Symphony, which debuted in national premiere on 21 October 2020 at the Teatro Sociale di Trento, accompanied live in the version for two played pianos. by the piano duo Giancarlo and Stefano Guarino.
Starting from this romantic musical score, the choreography draws inspiration from the nature to which it is paid tribute, analyzing the ancestral relationship between this and man. The setting, thanks to the choreographic language, sets, costumes and lights, is renewed and contemporary.
 ”The choreography was born in symbiosis with the stage space created by Alice De Lorenzi. A large earth-colored net, malleable and polymorphous, dominates the stage and suspended sacks emerge from it like bowels. A quote from the well-known Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto, whose sculpture-installations are a visible and sensitive re-proposal of mother earth, De Lorenzi's scenography 'breathes' together with the dance and creatures that Merola brings to the stage, contemporary and archaic at the same time . The circularity of Beethoven's Symphony No. 6 (op. 68) reverberates in Merola's abstract and emotional choreography, perpetually confronted with the five movements of the symphony. From the quieting of man upon arrival in the countryside, to settling in, to his identification with it up to the explosion of a country party where the rhythm becomes pressing, to the disorientation of the storm until the return of calm, in view of a new rebirth. A cycle that brings man back to awareness. After all, Beethoven noted in the introduction to the symphony, it is "for the rocks, trees and woods that pass the resonances that man needs".
  Maria Luisa Buzzi

In this context, the dancers become actors, spectators and mediators of a new ecological knowledge and consciousness of the Earth, of a new sense of identity and memory of the same. The nine dancers thus become a projection of contemporary man, of his motivated and renewed ability to grasp the meaning and value of landscapes, both geographic and human, whose protection is now an essential goal.