Azione #1 / Step #3 - Produzione Sardegna - New York - Sardegna a cura di Fabio Acca

MAURIZIO SAIU

C’È ancora un filo di luce nel mio cielo
in the frame of AmIna

Italiano

Maurizio Saiu’s project is rooted in pluriannual experimentations the artist undertook, focused on the interaction between dance and vocality. The voice, intended as an element of conjunction and memory, exposes the experience of the present times to an archaic world. Driven by the imagination, Sardinia becomes an evocative place, reproducing the sounds and the ancestral pulsations that have been the foundation of Saiu’s performative narration. In this journey, the voice moves you; it produces in who it traverses, sonic and mental states that combine, in an unexpected way, different cultures, ending up finding some common resonances, paradoxically. They recuperate the echo of a just apparently buried culture, and they put us in touch with what our present time wants to tell us. 

Saiu pushes himself in unexplored sonic territories, in a universe existing “before the words”, making the experiences of some other extraordinary researchers like Demetrio Stratos, his own, to then put them in relation with the big tradition of the Sardinian “canto a tenore” (a tenor’s chant). The voice becomes stone, forest, animal, fire; and even more, it becomes land and air. The time of the performance makes the infinite spectrum of the expressive intensities which regulate the work resurfaces, in synthesis as complex as indecipherable. 

The first stage of this process had place in New York in September 2019, strong of the collaboration with Marco Cappelli, a musician and performer of the contemporary New York’s musical scene, very active in the field of groundbreaking experimentations.

A next step will have the goal to intercept the poetical imaginary of a great Sardinian artist, Maria Lai, an undisputed icon of contemporary art and an immortal soul of the land of Sardinia. Maria Lai weaved books made of fabrics, textures of threads telling the myths and the Sardinian people through fables. One of these exceptional books is made of a concretion of signs that can be read in a musical key, like an actual musical score. This will function as a starting inspirational point for Saiu, from which he will expand his research putting it in communication with the works of Maria Lai, reinterpreting with his voice that universal tension that Lai, a native of Ulassai, embodied throughout her long-lasting life.  

This second research will take place in April 2020 in Cardedu, at the Maria Lai house and with the complicity and precious collaboration of the Maria Lai Archive.
Maurizio Saiu's work will be supported in this second part of the research by the musician Daniela Cattivelli.

Maurizio Saiu (Domusnovas, 1954), is a dancer, choreographer and singer based in Cagliari, Sardinia. He is considered one of the historical representatives of the modern authorial Italian dance. After his formation in the 80s with Merce Cunningham, and the various New York experiences, in the 90s he inaugurated his original path in the field of creative choreography. Back in Sardinia, Saiu, turned his attention to the folkloric tradition and to the contemporary art, between the dance and the singing languages, thanks to the artistic vicinity with the musician Giorgio Tedde and the artistic collaborations with the dancer Cornelia Wildisen, and then with Maria Lai, Aldo Tilocca, Claudio Morganti, Fernando Grillo. In 2010, Saiu brings his work to Berlin, Brussel, and Mexico. In his creations, he interlaces the popular tradition with the contemporary art, music, dance and vocal experimentation, in an aesthetically visionary and stylized tension. He collaborated with prominent figures of the contemporary scene, such as Kinkaleri, Daniela Cattivelli, Nezaket Ekici, MK/Michele Di Stefano. Starting from 1991 to this day, among his most significant work we remember Anghelus, La leggenda del Sardus Pater, Squarci, Generazione all’Aurora, Solo (neanche l’ombra), Morte Araba, Pan-seminario per un errore, Calimero, Down Down, Pastorale, Morte Araba: la genesi, Vivo invisibile, Flaming Doors. And also, some both outdoor and indoor creations, performed in the major national and international contexts, such as the "Piattaforma della danza d’autore italiana (Roma)," "Music Day World (Stoccolma)," "Contemporary Music Festival (Daarmstadt)," "Podewil and Swelle 7 (Berlino)," "Settlement House University (New York)," "Teatro Vascello (Roma)," "CRT Teatro dell’Arte (Milano)," "Lincoln Center (New York)," "Boston University (Boston)," "Dansem (Marsiglia)," 'Festival “Indisciplinados” (Lima),' "Bolzano Danza (Bolzano)." From 2007 to 2012, he has also been the Artistic Director of the “Il corpo sottratto” performative arts exhibition.