Date: 20 September 2024
Venue: Confucius Hall, 77 Caroline Hill Rd, Causeway Bay, Hong Kong
Time: 8pm
In Italian with English subtitles
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Chiara Guidi and Francesco Guerri present a composition exercise on Dante’s words, in search of an architecture that can manifest the passage of a presence: a body of sound in transit on the words of the Divine Comedy.
The exercises aim to compose a score that gives value and celebrates the inextricable union of Voice and Cello. There, on the pentagram, with drawings, the two artists trace the sound of the human larynx in close relation with the hendecasyllables and with the musical notation of the cello to give life to a single form that, like a non-visible sinuous line, shows the key to everything. The compositional writing becomes therefore the sketch of a generating axis that waits, through their interpretation, to give shape to a form that is formed. The artists trace signs on Dante’s path and those signs become a new path. For each canto they choose the length of the pauses, the restarts, the caesuras, the emotions of the collapses and the climbs guided by a feeling of image that, step by step, guides them in the composition until, having reached the end of the canto, they begin to walk again in another space.
To this date, the pieces they have composed: of the Inferno Cantos 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 12, 13, 17, 18, 26, 33, 34; of Purgatory the cantos 1, 2, 5, 15, 26; of Paradise the first Canto.
“It is a slow and constant process. Over time we want to go through the entire work“ – Chiara Guidi
Voice: Chiara Guidi
Cello: Francesco Guerri
Production: Societas
Chiara Guidi – co-founder of the Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, now Societas (a theater company that has distinguished itself on a global level for the creation of an innovative language) – develops a personal research on the voice as a dramaturgical key in disclosing the sound and meaning of a text, research that has earned her several awards and publications. For Chiara Guidi, the voice is a material to be known and shaped, but also a vehicle that brings the word to live beyond meaning. It is the implementation of a vision that does not rely only on meaning, but through sound brings the word back to its original gesture. Chiara Guidi has collaborated with musicians such as Scott Gibbons, Michele Rabbia, Daniele Roccato, Giuseppe Ielasi. Guidi has received, among others, a Special Ubu Award in 2013 and the Lo straniero Award in 2016.
Francesco Guerri traces a path that erases the boundaries between contemporary classical music and free improvisation, producing inventions characterized by the physicality of virtuosic play and the deep emotional bond he maintains with the instrument. He has long dedicated himself to an original solo repertoire that sees him perform at various Italian festivals. He has also played with prestigious jazz musicians such as Tristan Honsinger, Carla Bozulich, Laurence “Butch” Morris, William Parker and many others. In 2019, his new solo album, Su Mimmi non si spara!, was released, obtaining international recognition, which includes some songs that have drawn nourishment from his long-standing exploration of Dante.