White Out
concept, direction, choreography, scenography, soundtrack: Piergiorgio Milano
costumes: Raphaël Lamy, Simona Randazzo, Piergiorgio Milano
light design: Bruno Teusch
sound design: Federico Dal Pozzo
duration: 55’
premiere: Festival Mimos, Périgueux, 2021
performers: Javier Varela Carrera, Luca Torrenzieri, Piergiorgio Milano
coproduction: Torinodanza Festival/Teatro Stabile di Torino - Teatro Nazionale, Malraux scène nationale Chambéry Savoie, within the project Corpo Links Cluster supported by PC INTERREG VA - Italy-France (Alsotra 2014-2020), Les Halles de Schaerbeck, Fondazione i Teatri Reggio Emilia Flic – Reale società ginnastica di Torino, Teatro La Caduta
supported by: Maison de la Culture Famenne-Ardenne, La Cocof, Théâtre Marni, FEAS – fédérations des théâtres
special support by: Compagnia di San Paolo, within the project “ORA! Produzioni di Cultura Contemporanea”
residences: Flic – Residenza Surreale, Fondazione Emilia Romagna Teatro, teatro Asioli di Correggio, La corte Ospitale, Teatro Frida, Dinamico Festival, Garage29, Festival Moncirco
The highest ambition of this show is to transform mountaineering into an artistic language. To create a choreographic experience and a visual synthesis in such a strong way, that the vast mountain landscape could be transported inside of a theatre, so the audience could really feel the cold, the snow, the storms, on a rocky vertical cliffs.
Piergiorgio Milano
White Out means the complete loss of space-time references and the consequent impossibility to advance or retreat. A stall condition that can lead to extreme consequences. A gentle boundary between life and death, soft as the clouds and the snow. Alpinism belongs to all nations, and has a deeply human history. “White Out” is a tribute to all the climbers who have disappeared, or embrace that kind of risk, in the endless white of heights. The conquerors of the useless. “White Out” is an ironic and dramatic journey, fun, engaging, not only through the natural landscape evoked on stage, but through human interiority, opening up glimpses for other looks. Therefore is a big challenge to translate into choreography, into an emotional place, the Alps landscape. To bring the verticality of the mountain into the horizontality of the stage; To give rhythm to something immobile, that doesn't have it. To express vastness in a closed theater. And not only that. To convey the sense of fatigue, of challenge, of courage; and the feelings, the fears, the loneliness, the attraction to risk, the desire to reach the summit, the ambitions and contradictions that follow those. The mountain like a mirror that reflect the man.
Piergiorgio Milano is a cross-curricular artist trained between Italy and France. After international career as an performer who collaborated with James Thiérrée, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Rodrigo Pardo, David Zambrano, Roberto Olivan, Raffaella Giordano, he founded in 2015 in Brussels his own artistic collective and started producing performances and projects. Among the creations presented during the last ten years, most of his titles won important awards and prizes. Through this work, he also intensifies the authorial strong feature that will mark next creations, always related to dramaturgical alliance with the idea of “funny tragedy”. He explains that “tragicomedy has always been the fundamental driving force behind his creations... being able to play down even the most difficult situations and deal with the most awful things, finding the strength to be ironic even during a tragedy”. A crucial turning point in his production sphere is the creation of “White Out”, delivered in two versions. The second one, staged in 2021, has successfully being performed on the most important stages, touring across Europe and beyond. With this project he places the relationship with landscape at the heart of his research, since mankind often relates, clashes and merges with nature and it’s sometimes opposite forces. This dialogue between man and nature underlies a successful production of artistic identity that runs through a series of his recent and important creations…
Piergiorgio Milano, choreographer and performer with an admirable mixture between dance, theatre and circus arts, walk us, with the poetry of the movement, with the strength and aesthetics of the gesture, with the charm of imagination, inside a world not only evoked but marked by life stories. And we were fully fascinated by it.
© Artribune.com
Poetic in all that whiteness, amusing in the light moments, realistically dramatic in the clash with anguish, wisely ironic in the closing, White out manages to surprise and create something truly new in a world, like that of performance, that in almost everything seems to have already been explored. And its message is more universal than it seems: those who deal with theatre know the necessary utility of the useless very well.
© Madeinpompei.it
