Svarupa-vyakta, created and danced by Stefano Fardelli received the second prize at the Gdansk International Festival Solo Dance Contest 2014 in Poland and was later performed worldwide. The project has been supported by Pindoc Onlus and distribuited by Anticorpi XL Network. 

Svarupa – vyakta is a solo that takes inspiration from a trip to India. 

The scene is basic: a dancer, five ivory-coloured balloons, an amber spotlight and Ben Frost’s music: “Forgetting You is Like Breathing Water”. 

 

The choreography is based on the dialectic between the dancer and the five balloons, representing the projection of the “Self”. Svarupa – vyakta , actually, means “Self” in two different ways. 

 

The image that suggested Stefano Fardelli this idea was born in Varanasi. Varanasi is a city on the bank of the river Ganges. Access to the water is granted by a big stairway called Gat. One morning, at dawn, he sat on the steps looking at the atmosphere around him. The humidity created a sort of mist and the white hue of the sky melt with the horizon. On the other side of the river there is nothing but the desert, and the sand seemed to end in the vacuum, giving him the sensation of floating on the clouds, as if he was on an imaginary island, which didn’t exist. 

 

While he was living this unique experience, hundreds of Hindu pilgrims, in front of him, were washing themselves in the waters of the river, dozens of wooden boats were crossing the dirty waters of the Ganges, and at his left, a burning pyres was lifting a column of grey smoke that melted with the white sky. Time had stopped, corpses were burning, but among the relatives of the dead ones there was no sadness nor desperation, boats went up and down the river without going anywhere, the noises of the city did not disturb the silence of that strange, suspended dimension created by that place between life and death, reality and illusion, between him and the image that Stefano Fardelli had of himself, between him and the others – because everybody think to be different from the others, but Stefano believes we all come from the same place somewhere . 

 

The river seemed to put on the stage the eternal play of life. And Stefano thought he was looking at himself through the mirror of the waters, and through all that doing and being. The “self”, through the wire and the flowing of life, observes its own projection – as we observe our shade while we are walking, when we are able to see it. In the same way, in this choreography, Stefano Fardelli dances and observes his shade suspended above his head – the balloons, tied to invisible wires, which represent “himself” in another dimension.

 

He use an amber spotlight, trying to delimitate the space where he danced with a circular area of light – outside which the scene will remain dark but not absent, so that the dance will look suspended in a different dimension from that of the audience. 

 

Stefano chose Ben Frost’s Forgetting You Is Like Breathing Water because this piece of music helped him to recreate the sensation that he felt in that faraway place and because, as the title suggests, he think that when we forget ourselves we start suffocating among the illusions of our everyday life, separating ourselves from our true “Self”.