Scavetta’s dance goes global
> BY JANET SMITH
Dance-theatre artist Francesco Scavetta is an Italian who lives in Norway but, these days, his workplace stretches far beyond Scandinavia to the far reaches of the globe. In fact, when the Straight contacts him by Skype, he’s running workshops and performances for his Surprised body project in San José, Costa Rica. Japan, Argentina, and Cuba have all been recent stops, and he reports that this morning he received an invitation to a festival in Egypt next year.
“I was just counting the other day and I’ve been in 72 or 73 countries—not just for work,” says the cofounder of Wee, his Oslo-based company. “It makes you laugh sometimes. Very often my friends start a Skype conversation with me by saying ‘Where are you?’ And it’s true: I could really almost be anywhere, like in any hemisphere.
“It happened that I was in Montreal at minus-28 degrees and suddenly the next Sunday I was in Senegal and it was plus-35. You’re going from climate change to culture change with this little group.…but I never feel like a tourist, because I am going straight into the reality of the place. I’m connecting with individuals and that’s the beautiful part of the work that we do. It’s teamwork—a sharing of knowledge and experiences.”
That highly collaborative, improvisational approach led directly to the creation of the playful Hardly ever, a quirks-out, kitschy ’70s-set group piece that’s coming to the Scotiabank Dance Centre. It grew out of a conceptual work about artifice and reality, Sincerely yours, in which every set piece was made out of cardboard. In Hardly ever, the questions about truth and lies revolve around an elaborate game in which dancers tell you what they are about to do, then either live up to your expectation or gleefully subvert it.
“So I say, ‘I am going to,’ for example, ‘sit down.’ Then I wait for a few seconds so the viewer can imagine the action; it’s necessary to have that few minutes of neutrality. Then, of course, the answer could be matching or mismatching, like lying down,” Scavetta explains. “I’m actually wording my reality and then shifting it.…the audience gets hooked up in this active process and they try to guess what it is before the dancers generate it, and that creates a lot of humour.”
Built with text and movement, Hardly ever becomes an ever more complex performance of setting up and overturning expectations. And the set gives it even more of a sense of fun, with its gaudy couch and wallpaper, and polyester-heavy costumes to match.
“I have a strong connection with the ’70s, but we were searching very long for the right era that we wanted to create—the right landscape,” Scavetta says, adding that the cutaway print flooring and wallpaper also suggest a map, reflecting the way the dancers navigate through truth and lies. “And then it looks like a living room, and there are references to the movies of Wes Anderson, with the little [children’s] camping tent. It’s a space that feels homey but a bit artificial.”
The creation process for Hardly ever, like so much else of Scavetta’s inspired dance for his company, is never over. The work, he says, has been influenced by all the different places he’s taken it to. In Japan, for instance, with a live translator onstage, his troupe realized certain references didn’t work (“like Pamela Anderson,” he says), so they altered the script to make it more universal.
Says Scavetta of the effect of touring so much: “You gain a distance from the work; you can refine different things and rediscover it”—whether it’s 28 below or 35 above.
Hardly ever.