Virgilio Sieni’s choreographic art, his works, his performances and his staging are already recognized as one of the most important theatrical experiments developed in the last few decades. The quality of
his work lies above all in the fact that he confronts dance as contemporary visual expression, dismantling that constricted and nostalgic vocabulary of steps and figures that is the academic repertory, and with it those traditional, decadent ideas still fond of romantic atmospheres, their scenes, their spectacular flights and their sentiments. In this sense, his effort has been to step back from a form of dance and performance still subjugated to the laws of representation and acting and, in the wake of everything that has occurred and is occurring in contemporary art and theater, to render Italian choreography and its staging adult and international.
Sieni places the score and the combination, fixes the poses, in spatial scenes that have the same nature as installations or contemporary sculpture. A Sieni performance raises choreography to the level of true theater art; that is, it transforms the show into a rite and a celebration, loosing the language of the dancer in an expressive dimension that is not only the dramatic one of the scene but also the figurative and therefore iconic one of visual art.
The search for a personal language is not an end unto itself, it is not a mere stylistic exercise, but rather aims towards a process of transformation of material, technique and content into a form reduced to the essential but copious with regard to vocabulary and meaning. In Sieni’s work, it is evident how movement and the body are used in the search for a language made up of thousands of words and phrases, grammars, sings, images: a form in continuous expansion composed of figures and conjunctions that never conclude to end up in a repertory.
In 2006 Atelier Osso at Forum Neues Musiktheater.