artistic direction Lorenzo Pallini
general coordination Marina Bistolfi
artistic coordination
dance: Roula Karaferi with
Nabil Ouelhadj and Lisa Brasile
music: Alessandro Di Puccio and Pierre Level
with Ferdinando Olivieri and Jimi Renfro
media: Francesco Ritondale
with Xavier Bourlard and Nicola Melloni
with the Musipolitana R&R orchestra:
Alessandro Di Puccio (conductor and drummer), Ferdinando Olivieri (guitar), Massimo Duino (mandolin), Gianfranco Narracci (guitar, frame drum and voice), Floriana Mungari (voice), Hamada Chadli (guitar and voice), Sandro Garbey (trumpet and voice), Brahima Dembelè (voice, balafon and djembè), Paolo Casu (percussion), Farhad Orouji (voice, setar, percussion), Sharhzad Orouji (percussion), Nicola Pedrazzoli (percussion), Alessandro Piccinetti (wind instruments), Pasquale Rimolo (accordion), Michele Staino (double-bass)
and with the R&R International talents:
Said Aaron (France), Ferdi Abel (Netherlands), Flutura Agaj (Albania/Italy), Karen Albonetti (Italy), Irene Alfambra Paredes (Spain), Annika Allen (UK), Saira Awan (UK), Pamela Barberi (Italy), Ava Barnett (UK), Silvia Basso (Italy), Bianca Borri (Italy), Sascha Bürger (Germany), Filippo Carli (Italy), Sofia Choleva (Greece), Lorenzo Ciacciavicca (Italy), Nicola Cisternino (Italy), Antonio Cortés Lobato (Spain), Xavier Dascho Georgi (Belgium/Italy), Taciana Elie-Arets (Germany), Martin Foglia (Italy), Smita Gayadin (Netherlands), Théodora Guermonprez (France), Martina Giordano (Italy), Elena Gkatza (Greece), Arlid Hajro (Albania/Italy), János Hegedus (Hungary), Faisal Hiola (Netherlands), Derya Kaptan (Germany), Viktor Kiss (Hungary), Marion Léger (France/Italy), Said Mamèche (France), Juliana Maruri (Spain), Réka Nagy (Hungary), Resi Nakaj (Albania/Italy), Francisca Nesti (Italy), Thomas Papoulakos (Greece), Olga Pavlenko (Ukraine/Italy), Ben Rodenburg (Netherlands), Xu Ruichi (Italy), Elena Ruuskanen (Finland), Orlando Saenz Hidalgo (Peru/Italy), Kuorosh Salarvand (Iran/Italy), Gianluca Saporito (Italy), Niclas Schütten (Germany), Francesca Svampa (Italy/Spain), Olimpia Szalay (Hungary), Nicolas Tabary (France), Rebecca Turini (Italy)
organisation Marika Errigo, Stefania Chiti
technical design and direction Saverio Cona
technical coordination Margherita Cavalli
collaborations:
sound Vincent Pereira
set up Costas Lamproulis
in charge of the project Maria Omodeo
Roots&Routes A_Maze is an original creation of music, dance and media, realised by coaches and talents from Amsterdam, Athens, Barcelona, Budapest, Cologne, Florence, Helsinki, Lille, London, Rotterdam, freely inspired by Philip K. Dick's novel A Maze of Death.
In the novel, written between 1968 and 1969, a small group of people, dissatisfied with their lives and their world, find themselves in an unknown space colony whence there is no return. Fear, suspicion, prejudice and reciprocal competition spread rapidly, and relations deteriorate until a ferocious free-for-all erupts: a maze of death with no way out. In the end we understand that journey, migration, colonisation are nothing but products of a virtual "role game", the desperate pastime of the group being "in reality" trapped in a spaceship adrift, condemned to follow an orbit with no possible escape. In reality, as in fiction, there is no way out of the maze: it is the dramatic metaphor of colonists and emigrants, travellers fleeing from material and moral misery towards a possible luxury and happiness, towards a better life.
The challenge posed by Roots&Routes is to recount the possibility of a different story. Although apparently excluded from Dick's mortal maze, hope is however alive and we know it can flourish, even in the violent stories that are the frequent daily drama of the migrants of our time, and even more so in the creative energies of the talented youngsters who seem to be the miraculous outcome of such mazes. For this reason the layout of this original creation, structured in successive connected frames and created in Florence, for Fabbrica Europa, in a week of workshops and rehearsals, is intentionally open and necessarily generic: not only because the work is at the outset, but also because of the shared decision to allow the young talents involved in the planning and preparation of the work to have the greatest possible operative freedom and the widest faculty to include elements of current social reality, personal biography or experience. The democratic and creative use of the media, music and dance and the balanced competences among differing roots and moving future may dismantle the dominant nightmare of fear and competition among the dissimilar, fighting for control, all in all incapable of travelling in any true sense.
So we are a_mazed by this marvellous, formidable maze of life that is Roots&Routes: a real instrument, a chance, institutional yet free, to shape and develop projects that investigate differences, confrontation, the right to grow and learn, and the creation of opportunities for the talents of nations however diverse historically and numerically, that have for a long time been the theatre of forced migration, of encounters/clashes between cultures, customs, identities and languages. The deeply-felt music and the true stories of young people who choose to move towards a better life, who are dragged into familiar migrations and a terribly difficult search for identity in motion, with hardly any support or consideration from the patrons of public and private culture. But also the magnificent experience of youngsters whose talents draw other youngsters, the very young and the not so young, towards a future identity holding greater potential, more complex, better able to assert without imposing and to change into the irresistible art of awareness of free citizenship. The secret, no secret at all as it is revealed here in rare poetry and evidence, is the creative listening to one's own roots and those of others, so many and so different, to be met on the routes of a world - not just here, not just in Europe - that is changing, and that knows it is changing.
Roots&Routes is a three-year (2005-2008) promotion project for young musicians, dancers and media makers with different cultural 'roots', to open up 'routes' for them, both live on stage and in the media. Roots&Routes is realised by cultural organisations in twelve European cities, (Amsterdam, Athens, Barcelona, Bologna, Budapest, Cologne, Florence, Helsinki, Lille, Lisbon, London and Rotterdam) and is supported by the European Commission. Roots&Routes is promoted by: Miramedia (Netherlands, project leader), Roots&Routes Foundation (Netherlands), Sziget Festival (Hungary), JFC Medienzentrum Köln (Germany), Dimitra (Greece), RiF (France), XenoMedia (Spain), Associação Journeys (Portugal), ABI (United Kingdom), Stadia (Finland). Partners for Italy are COSPE - Cooperation for the Development of Emerging Countries, and Fabbrica Europa Cultural Association, with the collaboration of the Department for Education and Youth Politics of the Municipality of Florence, CAM - Centro Attività Musicali Firenze, the Audiovisual Documentation Centre of the Municipality of Pontassieve, the Opus Ballet Cultural Association, Rumi Productions and Controradio.
ROOTS&ROUTES AFTERHOUR
Many identities meet in the a_mazing maze of Roots&Routes; in this dialogue each one expresses its own curiosity, versatility and ability to place its own specific identity at the service of the search for another reality that is shared and held in common. At the end of this first public presentation of Roots&Routes A_Maze, broadcast live by Controradio, a number of local Florentine groups which have made major contributions to the progress of the project will "unveil" their specific identities, concluding the evening with a R&R Afterhour, a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural dancing party-session: the Musipolitana orchestra, started in 2006 by CAM - Centro Attività Musicali Firenze and directed by Alessandro Di Puccio; an original choreography based on a mixture of contaminations, Alla ricerca di un insieme (In search of a whole), presented by Lisa Brasile and the students of the hip hop training course of the Opus Ballet Choreographical Centre, conceived and directed by Rosanna Brocanello and Daniel Tinazzi; and last but not least the Neglizi & Mr.Tuka R&R Band, started from the encounter between two young Albanian rappers from Valona, Resi aka Neglizi, and Arlid aka Mr. Tuka, with the musician and teacher Claudio Chiacchio and with the Florentine and Tuscan laboratory of youth cultures, and ripened throughout the three-year R&R, so much that it has ranked second in the regional selections of Italia Wave Band 2008.
