Songlines
Songlines
Creation for 22 dancers of the CCN - Ballet de Lorraine
Duration: 45 minutes
Premiere on November 8, 2023 at the Opéra national de Lorraine (Nancy)
Rehearsal pictures
The idea for Songlines came to me while reading The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin, in which he describes the spiritual life of the Australian Aborigines.
Precolonial Australia was the last landmass on Earth populated not by herders, farmers or village dwellers, but by hunter-gatherers. Their labyrinths of invisible pathways across the continent are known to us as Songlines, but for the Aborigines they are the tracks of their ancestors. They travel along these “roads” to carry out typically human activities – singing, dancing, marriage, sharing ideas and defining territorial boundaries through negotiation rather than force.
In my project, I would like to transpose the questions raised in the book, which are both archaic and terribly contemporary: why is Man the most restless and unsatisfied of animals? Why do nomads view the world as perfect, while settled people are constantly trying to change it? Do we agree with the theory that all of Man’s problems arise from his inability to sit calm in a room? Songlines will try to find answers through choreography. A dance performed in a magical space, consisting of force fields, sacred places and points of light, in which our outer and inner lives are One.
Marco Berrettini
Italian-German dancer and choreographer Marco Berrettini was born in 1963 in Aschaffenburg, Germany. He became interested in dance in discotheques, and in 1978 won the German disco dance championship. This experience led him to take classes in jazz dance, modern dance and ballet. At 17 he began his professional dance training, starting at London Contemporary Dance School/The Place, and graduating from Folkwang Academy in Essen, where he trained under Hans Züllig and Pina Bausch. While there, he developed an interest in Tanztheater (dance theater), and made his debut as a choreographer. After his training, he started working towards forming his own company.
Alongside his desire to make a name for himself as a choreographer, Marco Berrettini studied European ethnology, cultural anthropology and theatre sciences at the University of Frankfurt in Germany. In 1998 he moved to France to work with other choreographers and create his own pieces.
Since then Marco Berrettini has produced around forty shows with his company. He was awarded the ZKB prize at the Theaterspektakel in Zurich for Sturmwetter prépare l’An d’Emil, the Prix Suisse de Danse for iFeel3 in 2018, and the Prix Suisse de Danse for his entire body of work in 2022.
Marco Berrettini’s activity ranges from performance pieces in museums to collaborating with filmmakers, creating installations with visual artists and dining with VIPs who don’t know him. His greatest achievement, however, is his daughter, Stella.