The choice of the beautiful painting The Juggler by Antonio Donghi, suggests something inherent in the art of the circus, without exhausting the mystery hidden behind the multimedia installation. Through the Frame – When the Journey Begins, will be on view and on stage from Jan. 17 to Feb. 3 at the Italian Cultural Institute in New York. The event is due to the versatility of choreographer-director-costumier Marco Pelle and his brother Federico
(composer), but it would never have come about without the question posed to the authors by Fabio Finotti, who has been the Institute’s learned Director since 2021. Can a painting, indeed a portrait come out of its frame?
“Through the Frame,” Pelle explains, ”is a project that is deeply close to my heart for various reasons, but above all because it represents the culmination of a collaboration, that with Fabio Finotti, the director of the Italian Cultural Institute in NY, which began in 2021.”
“From AbunDance (2021), to Statuesque (2022), and now with Through The Frame (2024), what started as a simple project has become a major artistic collaboration, culminating in this very project. I always say that Fabio is my artistic enhancer. And it is true. But Fabio is also much more than that. From the famous question he asked me in 2023, ‘Can you take a painting beyond the frame?’ to designing the visual path of TtF, to creating together the sketches that open all the paintings/videos in the exhibition, scenes that are ironic and at the same time acute, conceived as a confrontation between him and me with respect to the themes narrated by the painting itself, Fabio has been an integral part of Through The Frame. We walked together beyond the frame, to use the very title of this project of ours, in what can be called a common feeling, of four creative souls, his, mine, my brother Federico’s on the music and Ernesto Galan’s on the photography.”
Reversing the paradigm of Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There, choreographer Pelle has challenged Lewis Carroll, author of the famous cited text, by making it so that it is no longer life that enters the imaginary frame, but rather its opposite. He did this through artificial intelligence, but above all through dance, its energy, its essence, the epitome of the “here and now.” Preferring three ballet stars such as Mara Galeazzi former étoile of the Royal Ballet, Luigi Crispino (American Ballet Theatre) and Graceanne Pierce, a free-lance étoile, also on Broadway to the albeit effervescent dancers of the New York Ballet Theatre – a small but combative academic repertory company – of which about ten years after his 30-year establishment in the Big Apple he became resident choreographer, Pelle wanted to enhance the exceptionality of the event meeting even the wishes of director Finotti. The Italian Cultural Institute in New York always aims – it is after all, its mission – to represent the Bel Paese. Fabio Finotti adds to it and demonstrates in Through the Frame – When the Journey Begins, in which he concretely participated, that “Italy as tradition that renews itself, past that turns into future, beauty in perpetual metamorphosis.”
More than suggestive are the transformations that take place in this multimedia installation, and quite unexpected, such as the choice of the six paintings belonging, in part, to magic realism. The Juggler by the aforementioned Donghi (1936); Woman with a Blue Robe by Bruno Croatto (1932); two paintings by Felice Casorati: Per sé e per suo ciel concepe e figlia (Dante, Purgatorio 28) and the disquieting Silvana Cenni (1922) are part of that pictorial current that spread in Italy from the 1920s and 1940s, indebted to Giorgio De Chirico’s early Metaphysics and the courtly models of the past.
In contrast, Gustav Klimt’s Hygieya (1897-’98), a fragment of Medicine destroyed in 1945, is an Art Nouveau masterpiece, and Arthur Rackham’s Alice enriches the many illustrations created for Lewis Carroll’s books (1907). The dance of Mara Galeazzi, an expressive interpreter of women’s portraits, with the exception of Alice, entrusted to Pierce, as well as that of Crispino, a somewhat “Moulin Rouge-style” juggler, takes place within the elegant, wooden spaces of the Italian Cultural Institute. It is, however, a space/not a space. Immediately the portraits reveal what for the choreographer would be their essence-accompanied by the music of his composer brother. In fact, Federico Pelle lives in Italy: an expert in electroacoustics and sound production in cinema, he holds teaching positions at the Conservatory of Castelfranco Veneto and the one named after Claudio Abbado in Milan. His sonic ups and downs need no special explanation: Federico has always, when involved, interpreted Marco’s thoughts with impressive precision.
So here is the flame of Hygieya, the Greek deity of hygiene, of cleanliness of the body, of sanity: Mara, all in red, strips off her glow, her symbolic amulets with quick dexterity and always looking into the eyes of the hypothetical spectator. Very slow and sensual is the movement of the Woman in Blue Robe who opens and closes her wide Tiffany mantle as if she were Eleonora Duse.
The very graceful Graceanne’s Alice gamboles, runs, flies; transforms her black and white into the color of skies, streamers and virtual merry-go-rounds only to return almost reluctantly and demurely to the painting that contains her. Virtuoso is Crispino’s The Juggler, with his hat and pipe a bit Magritte-like and the music galloping as the dancer, while he lulls in Per sé e per suo ciel concepe e figlia taken from Dante’s Purgatorio, along the banks of the River Lethe, where Dante meets Matelda, the guardian of Earthly Paradise; a creature of absolute beauty, both in appearance and pure gestures, symbolizing the human condition before original sin. Here, Casorati’s painting takes its cues from the dream and figurative tradition of the Italian Renaissance classicism of the 1300s, and Pelle plays with the expanded blue hues and that rosy cluster that the maternal figure holds in her arms as if it were a little child with intermittent rosy luminosity.
Casorati suits Marco Pelle and Mara Galeazzi: they reach full originality in the portrait of Silvana Cenni. A seated figure, rigid, with lowered, almost closed eyes: if she looks like a deceased woman, the two artists eulogize her subversive, mad fury. Silvana/Mara casts off her modest dress, untangles herself, stands up, unsettles herself, and then retreats back into the armor that is so much like a straitjacket of her “non-life.” Hard to comprehend all this? Between the serious and the facetious Pelle and Fenotti engage in an introductory, paradoxical, philosophical, playful dialogue between glass, mirrors, glimpses of nature and chess games before each frame opening.
We could conclude by revealing a secret: in each of the three performers of Through the Frame – When the Journey Begins lies the autobiography of the choreographer. Galeazzi represents his triumphant Italy, and in dance, his virtuosity. Crispini, “with his great talent,” is the memory of his youth, when Marco Pelle arrived in New York without a penny and a job, and finally, Graceanne Pierce is the tribute to the country that welcomed him and made him what he is now: a world-renowned artist who in Milan has made not only Bolle and the star dancers of La Scala Ballet dance, but also the student-economists of Bocconi University, where he teaches, to the sound of their heartbeats. In the ethically important and inclusive project (it is titled “Wholehearted”) he has already compared the beat of an Israeli heart and a Muslim heart. The result? They are identical: those who don’t believe it, should go to Pelle’s to dance.
On Friday, Feb. 17, Through the Frame will be inaugurated in the presence of Fabio Finotti, Marco Pelle, Ernesto Galan (director of photography), Luigi Crispino, Graceanne Pierce and Federico Pelle, the latter of whom will be in attendance from Italy.
