Review: Still I Rise gala in Milan – Alessio Carbone gathers dancers from Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Madrid and Italian companies for a charity event
Gala time. Oh dear, two in three days. No, no, I can’t face it. I’ll just go to the one in Ravenna and leave out Milan. Well, yes, I know it’s for a good cause. Yes, I know there are some interesting items on the programme. Ok, ok, I’ll go… just because it’s you.
And I’m glad I did.
The Still I Rise Gala at Milan’s Teatro Carcano was organised by former Paris Opera Ballet dancer Alessio Carbone with proceeds going to Still I Rise’s latest project – to construct a school in India. Still I Rise is a humanitarian organization founded in 2018 to bring education to refugee and vulnerable children around the world, opening schools to “empower the most disadvantaged”.
There were only three repertoire pieces during the evening – from La Syphide, Swan Lake and Nutcracker. The white swan pas de deux was curious for a return to the stage of Danish Ballet’s Alban Lendorf who was sadly forced into ‘retirement’ at just 29 after a knee injury. A handsome, confident presence. For La Sylphide were Cristina Casa Gomez and Mario Galindo from the Compañía Nacional de Danza in Madrid. She was quite delightful with an engaging personality, and the very young-looking Galindo is a promising dancer with an impressive technique, and his fresh face gave his James an exceptionally naïve quality.
However, the biggest emotions in the compact, 70-minute programme, came from the contemporary pieces.
Hannah O’Neill and Germain Louvet from the Paris Opera Ballet were magical in a scene from Carolyn Carlson‘s Signes, created for the POB in 1997. Aside from the quality of their dancing, they both have beautiful, communicative faces, and are intense interpreters. They captured the attention of the suddenly silent audience from the opening seconds – mobile phones were mercifully forgotten for a few minutes.
Italian choreographer Mauro de Candia’s Paganini is danced for the most part below a suspended violin bow. Dinu Tamazlacaru from the Berlin State Ballet is a communicative dancer (perfect for his party piece, Ben van Cauwenbergh’s Les Bourgeois, which was also in the lineup) and performs with wit and intelligence. Of course, he finally reaches the bow and plays on his invisible violin.
Another work by de Candia was Aria Suspended (to Bach’s Air on the G String) with leading dancers Claudia D’Antonio and Danilo Notaro from the ballet company at Teatro San Carlo in Naples. Former Paris Opera Ballet étoile Clotilde Vayer directs the company and she is doing excellent work, as was seen in this beautifully performed pas de deux – both dancers strong yet soft.
Among other goodies – I will not mention them all to avoid this becoming a shopping list – was the Ukrainian dancer Denys Cherevychko from Vienna State Ballet who danced the anguished closing scene from Roland Petit‘s L’Arlesienne. The medium size of Teatro Carcano’s stage may have cramped his expansivity during the final manège sequences, but it didn’t diminish his power, and at the end instead of diving through an upstage window onto an offstage comfy mattress, he leapt towards a projected window and, after the snap blackout, dropped to the floor.
Sasha Riva and Simone Repele perform their own choreography as well as creating for others, including Eleonora Abbagnato who I would see dancing with the pair in Ravenna a couple of days later. Their pieces are always very atmospheric, often accompanied by smoke and moody lighting, and the tragicomic flavour that runs through much of their work almost always hits the emotional gut hard. The ‘comic’ vein is rather like that of Chaplin’s Little Tramp where the pathetic, vulnerable quality makes you weep rather than laugh. For Sinking they danced to two pieces by Gavin Bryars, both written when the composer was still in his twenties. Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet starts with the recording of a homeless man singing and then is overlaid with orchestra, while The Sinking of the Titanic was inspired by the musicians on the Titanic who continued to play as the ship sank, and imagining how their music would continue to reverberate through the water after their playing stopped. Riva and Repele’s familiar humped, round-shouldered pose of the broken everyman, who dreams and then sinks, combined with their precise coordination and poetic physical images, generated perhaps more applause than anything else in the programme.
Who knows, the Still I Rise gala may become an annual affair and I’ll be bullied into going again… and I will not mind at all.
Still I Rise: https://sostieni.stillirisengo.org/iniziativa/campagna-india?o=22
Graham Spicer, aka ‘Gramilano’, is a writer, director and photographer based in Milan. He was a regular columnist for Opera Now magazine and wrote for the BBC until transferring to Italy. His articles have appeared in various publications from Woman’s Weekly to Gay Times, and he wrote the Danza in Italia column for Dancing Times magazine. Graham was the historical advisor on Codice Carla, the 2023 documentary on Carla Fracci.
Graham also works as a dance photographer, and his photos have appeared in many books, theatre programmes, and magazines, including Dancing Times, Dance Spirit and Ballet2000, as well as all the major Italian newspapers.
He is a member of the Dance Section of The Critics’ Circle.
