[Review] Seen in Milan: the very best and absolute worst of contemporary dance

The annual MilanOltre Festival of contemporary dance at Milan's Teatro Elfo Puccini, which has three performance spaces, has presented some of the best dance seen in this city over the past decade, and probably longer as the first festival was back in 1986. During the opening days of the three-week programme was the exuberant Pithecanthropus erectus, already reviewed on Gramilano, after this came one of the most delightful and witty pieces of dance theatre I have ever seen, followed by one of the worst (of which there was very little dance) that had people walking out from boredom.

First, the best.

Luciano Rosso and Alfonso Barón's two-hander Poyo Rojo has been touring the world since 2008 and they perform it about 120 times a year. After so many performances, the show is slicker than Brylcreem with such impressive precision of the physical gags and comic timing that this spectator was crying with laughter for an hour. The two Argentinians (already on stage and limbering up when the auditorium opened) are in a locker room with a radio, bench and little else. They challenge each other physically – an aggressive in-yer-face confrontation can almost turn into a kiss – they sing, and flirt, and fool around.

There is little music, though at one point some comes from the radio. They change radio stations and an Italian voice is heard – I thought it was impressive to record a track just for one performance. Then, from the static, comes another Italian voice, and with another twiddle of the dial a newsreader says, “…Giorgia Meloni was in Milan this afternoon…” But that was today! The day of the performance! In fact, the radio was live, and their dancing to its melodies and mimicking to its spoken voices, was all improvised. Rosso, who has rubber for joints and a Mr Bean face (though better looking), has a virtuoso scene with a box of cigarettes (eventually having five in his mouth as well as up his nose and in his ears) and improvises to a voice coming from the radio – it is hysterically funny and seems meticulously rehearsed.

They leap from hip hop to ballet (there's the final pose of The Dying Swan thrown in), with vaudeville-style slapstick and knowing tongue-in-cheek sexy posturing. Rosso, at one point, casually knocks over a bottle of water above the locker he's leaning against which gives him a moment to try and seduce Barón like a model under a shower for a Playgirl shoot. However the pair and the piece are never vulgar, and risqué moments are quickly undercut with comic business – the various children in the audience roared with laughter.

In this context, when there are true, tender moments – and there were – they grab you by the throat.

As an encore, Rosso mimed to an Italian children's song, Il Pulcino Pio. Side-splitting. It put Jerry Lewis to shame.

The following evening Barón and Rosso offered their latest piece, Dystopia, set in a green-screen room with the pair appearing every now and then in green unitards with only their faces peeking out, and sometimes with naked torsos, with the cameras dotted around the stage placing them in improbable settings. The composite image was shown on screens over the performers and at the side of the stage.

There is a pre-recorded video of the pair as Almodóvar-esque female television presenters who look on in increasing astonishment as the live green-clad Barón and Rosso perform a series of unconnected and senseless movements. Realising that the cameras were not functioning, they are switched on and we see them repeat exactly the same sequence that now makes sense as they hurtle down a ski slope or mix among a huddle of penguins. Months of rehearsal have gone into this performance.

Yet the show loses pace, and the Instagram filters giving them panda eyes or viola hairdos wear thin. They make serious political points about power, greed, and false perspectives (which reality is real?), and certainly the piece will function better if you don't need to read the subtitles of the often quickfire Spanish dialogue, as well as watch the performers ‘live' in their green box and glance at the projected combined images with fast-changing backgrounds and bodies.

I imagine that the live performance is so intricately integrated with pre-recorded sequences that cuts and changes would be a major undertaking, but it seems that it could do with a few snips – and they probably know that too.

And the worst?

Kristo. The choreographer Roberto Zappalà offered one of the most poetic pieces of theatre in 2021 with Rifare Bach to celebrate the 30^th anniversary of his company. Kristo was not like that. At all. There is a man who thinks he is Christ, a toilet bowl in the centre of the stage, a penny farthing, lots of chairs and other paraphernalia, and Mantegna's painting of the dead Christ to one side. Zappalà throws all cliches possible at the work: nuns with whips (they are dressed as prostitutes under their habits… obviously!), there's smoke and cascading water, the toilet bowl is smashed to smithereens and the wooden club used to do it disintegrates to splinters over the stage. Ok, there were no flames, but the extra firemen that Italian law requires for fire on stage cost a fortune.

The admirable Massimo Trombetta as Kristo is on stage for the 80-minute show, his sinewy body and his (heavily miked) voice working overtime, but it's over emphatic throughout, like being hit over the head with a mallet for more than an hour. Text is shouted (though it has some good – if obvious – things to say about religion and power), and it is a performance tediously screaming, “Look at my commitment – I'll win awards for this!”

There's one moment that you could see coming, but worked well: the naked Kristo is walking along a line of ‘last supper' chairs as rain pours down, and as he arrives at his position, in the centre, the rain turns red.

There was lots of whooping (presumably from friends and relatives) at the end of this Italian premiere, but mostly there was courteous applause, and many didn't clap at all – for a tour de force piece of theatre the reaction was woefully limp.

Gramilano( Editor )

Graham Spicer is a writer, director and photographer in Milan, blogging (under the name ‘Gramilano') about dance, opera, music and photography for people “who are a bit like me and like some of the things I like”. He was a regular columnist for Opera Now magazine and wrote for the BBC until transferring to Italy.

His scribblings have appeared in various publications from Woman's Weekly to Gay Times, and he wrote the ‘Danza in Italia' column for Dancing Times magazine.