Petrarch on the mountain

The Italian Renaissance poet Petrarch, father of all mountaineers, climbed Mont Ventoux in Provence, France, in the spring of 1336. His description of the sense of the stupefying beauty of this world he experienced up there, detailed in a single letter he wrote to a theologian friend, has secured him a place of honor among the humanists. These are the people who once doubted that suffering cruelly on earth was enough to get you into heaven.

This old story of the ascent to the summit of self-knowledge is now also summiting the art of dance. The two Italian dancers Mattia Russo and Antonio de Rosa, who once fled to Spain from the ballet company of the famous La Scala in Milan, have created a masterpiece in Madrid together with their author Agnés López-Río and set designer Alejandro Da Rocha.

Two worlds collide, magically capturing the spirit of the times. A huge window dominates the stage at the Centro Cultural Conde Duque in Madrid. Suppose this window was in Carpentras, a village near Avignon where Petrarch grew up, the almost 2,000-metre high peak facing him every day. Of course he wanted to go up there, to leave behind the hustle and bustle of trade that raged around the papal palace at the time. In front of him stood this ladder to heaven, disappearing into the clouds. Here all the fears and worries of the city air, there the bucolic promises of country life, whose “physical exertions make you swing from the physical to the incorporeal,” as Petrarch noted centuries ago.

This glass window divides the space: the speed of the city in the front, nature and contemplation in the back. Two choreographies exist in parallel: precise, virtuoso rhythm on one side and a slow, lyrical, quasi-neoclassical dance form on the other. Here the dizziness of technological society without pause for breath or respite, there images of monstrous effect: a dancer as a medieval cyborg knight or a rabbit in the shell of a beetle dying in a gas chamber. Like Petrarch’s realization that people are there “to marvel at the peaks of the mountains and the immense floods of the sea and the far-flowing rivers and the edge of the ocean and the orbits of the stars,” the images stun as a single, grandiose dancing wave engulfing the world.

Of course, no dancer in historical Petrarch costume dances up this mountain. Indeed, Kor’sia never even included that historic dancing faun Nijinsky in their 2021 piece “Igra,” even though he was the subject of the piece. They never had any mountain or forest spirits, no Wilis in their very personal interpretation of “Giselle” from 2020. Nevertheless, you would have thought that Petrarch would have made an appearance in “Mont Vertoux.” The Kor’sia company always creates its works from historical material and figures from world history, vividly and full to the brim with references and allusions, without ever betraying dance as a means of expression.

You know it and you notice it immediately: the tandem, the two Italians Mattia Russo and Antonio de Rosa, have a very solid classical background. Both first danced at the Ballet del Teatro alla Scala in Milan and then at the Compañía Nacional de Danza in Spain, before founding the Compañía Kor’sia in Madrid together with Diego Tortelli and Giuseppe Dagostino. Today they are the sole directors along with the dancer Agnés López Río, who also functions as the ensemble’s author.

Petrarch, Nijinksi, Giselle … What do those from times long past say to a person of the present day who is quite busy enough despairing about the contradictions of today’s existence in the face of all the destructive acts, the abuse of freedom, the oppression of war and the disregard for the nature that makes up our planet? These are all topics that interest and preoccupy Kor’sia. So why look to the ancients?

Because they are trying something outrageous in their work. In their quest for the classics, they do not reconstruct them as originals, but rather search through ballet literature and the myths that gave rise to it for hidden messages, clues that are often easily overlooked, which they identified in the little-known ballet “Jeux” by Vaclav Nijinsky, for example. They looked for biographical information and discovered the oppressive conservatism under which the legendary star dancer and his sister Bronislava Nijinska suffered in avant-garde Paris at the beginning of the 20th century, engaged in a kind of game with the bourgeoisie, which was hungry for modernity but deeply backward-looking in reality.

The source of the story of Petrarch and the mountain was also closely scrutinized. In his letter, “The Ascent of Mont Ventoux,” known as it is as a founding document of the Renaissance, Francesco Petrarch spoke of the ascent, conveying the clear idea that simply looking at the mountain and climbing it toward the light would transform all the darkness of the Middle Ages into the opposite.
This letter is the starting point for Kor’sia’s latest piece, “Mont Ventoux,” and in this case, too, the choreography is neither an adaptation nor a retracing of Petrarch’s account of his “Enlightenment.”

Rather, we see a physicality in the dancers here that comes extremely close to the way mountaineers move out of necessity. You can hear Renaissance attitudes in the music, which nevertheless sounds very much like something that was written today. You feel moved by centuries-old emotions written by a visionary who is completely removed from us.

Petrarch sought nothing on the inhospitable summit – no fame, no satisfaction, no high-altitude exhilaration. He climbed the mountain with his brother for pure pleasure, out of pure curiosity … and behold, therein lies the realization: simply to follow his own urges. This thought alone was enough to create a completely new view of man and liberate him as a being with a will of his own, no longer a slave to fate.

This is what Kor’sia is all about – especially in the midst of the climate crisis and the contempt for all ecological reason. It is not that a new human being “has to” be created, but that human beings find their way on their own, through their own emotional realizations. This insight is not even found in Petrarch himself, but rather in his sheer despair upon realizing when writing his famous letter that words were not enough and that the emotional insight that gripped him went far beyond what could be communicated, what could be passed on as knowledge or even as any kind of ethical recommendation for action.
Perhaps the body itself is the means of transporting knowledge. Sensing this, Kor’sia looks to the past not out of nostalgia, but from a desire to continue it. Perhaps that’s just how they learned it, from the tradition of ballet, but they know no nostalgia, they are not learned in the sense of merely passing on what they have once learned. They dig into the works of the deceased in search of possible ideas to help address the problems of today … with Nijinsky, with Giselle …

They always do this as a team. Like a collective. The Madrilenian company is currently working with Valencian dancer and researcher Agnés López Río. She also asks herself: Is the past perhaps a mouthpiece for the future? Hasn’t this always been the task of art? The updating of the past using the knowledge of the present, which points to the future?

Almost all works the company has staged since its founding in 2012 have been inspired by the arts of the past. A sculpture, a choreography, a text – these are often the trigger and starting point for extracting relevant messages. However, they are not what the educational cliché would have you believe. The company is wary of the preconceptions with which the early Romantics turned Petrarch into a longing mountaineer or with which the late Romantics turned Giselle into a child of innocence enchanted by forest spirits. Kor’sia consciously wants to look at the past from today’s perspective, as unpretentiously as possible.

In “Giselle,” the epitome of romantic ballet, they were not concerned with the Wilis, i.e. with ghosts and ghouls, but with how the idea of eternal love led this unhappy peasant girl to go mad and die for love – and for Prince Albrecht, of all people, a rich, spoiled, egomaniacal and vain child who today would be likely to end a long-standing relationship simply by sending a sad emoji on WhatsApp. It is not the multiplication of Giselle, as in other ballets by Swedish choreographer Mats Ek, but the infinite multiplication of Albrecht, the standardized male form whose universe constantly revolves in narrow orbits around his own ego. Am I many? No, I am enough for myself. Completely.

Even with “Igra,” their Nijinsky ballet, they did not want to reconstruct “Jeux” by the Ballets Russes – that rare Nijinsky choreography, which premiered at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in the midst of Bohemian Paris in 1913, amid a misogynistic and homophobic public who nevertheless knew how to behave as though they were incredibly progressive. Kor’sia wanted to show Nijinsky’s speechlessness in the midst of this bourgeoisie celebrating itself as avant-garde. He was dumbstruck, just like Petrarch, who in his famously eloquent letter always seems to be at a loss for words because he felt this alpine image of a life in deep harmony with nature within him. But dance is not about words at all, on the contrary:

“We lack words, oral discourse, so our works are strongly characterized by the visual, but this is not at all out of a purely aesthetic need,” says Agnés López Río: “In all our creations, elements such as lighting, set, and costumes respond, of course, but they respond to very clear dramaturgical requirements. That’s why our starting point is never the classical idea of beauty. There is another kind of beauty, one that our modern life is very much characterized by: visual attraction, which we do not ignore. So we pay as much attention to form as we do to content.”
Kor’sia impresses with a strict, almost formal beauty just as much as with its strong messages, its visualizations of the desire for the unadulterated (“Nijinsky”), for authenticity (“Giselle”), for oneness (“Mont Ventoux”). This is the secret to Kor’sia’s success.Matthia Russo and Antonio di Rosa as dancersAnd then there is the dance. Kor’sia has a genuine interest in the body as a carrier of ideas and pays a lot of attention to form and the demands of dance technique. After all, both of its founders come from the ballet company at La Scala in Milan. Russo and Rosa met while dancing the works of the academic repertoire for this prestigious Italian company: Ballerinos at the highest level who had a physical understanding of what classical technique meant.
They emigrated to Madrid together and joined Spain’s national dance company during the tenure of José Carlos Martínez, the current director of the Paris Opera Ballet. There, they came into contact with a broader repertoire and choreographers of all kinds, as the Spanish were trying to broaden the horizons of their national ballet, which for twenty years had only danced the works of its former director Nacho Duato.”Yellow Place”Agnes LopezJosé Carlos Martínez supported and encouraged the two dancers’ interest in choreographing themselves. They continued to dance for the national company, but independently developed their duet “Yellow Place” in 2014 – a very yellow piece, very suitable for the street, which was very well received and shown at numerous festivals throughout Spain.”Cul de sac”Their first concrete attempt at a choreography is “Cul de Sac” (Dead End) from 2017. Impressed by an exhibition by the artist Juan Muñoz, the Russo-Rosa tandem found numerous ideas for a choreography in the small, macabre, and enigmatic little men that populate the Spanish artist’s sculptural world. It was already clear to both of them that they did not want to choreograph a dance for the sake of dance, that they were not interested in abstraction or form per se: They wanted to express their concerns and worries about the world. They wanted to address the social issues of the time. And Muñoz’s little gray men whispered these ideas to them.
“Cul de sac” set the sculptures in motion and used them to create a universe inhabited by a community of monochrome beings trapped in a prison room, as if hypnotized by almost impossible movements and trying to achieve freedom as a collective, as a society, even as individuals.“The Lamb,” also from 2017, had something mystical about it. The duo elevated people and their conflicts to an existential level, celebrating the ideal of transcendence, which also implies sacrifice. Above all, they seemed to be asking what separates life and death. What if life is just a dream and death wakes us up? This work seems like a rather rare bird among the other elements of their oeuvre.”The Lamb”María AlperiLack of freedom, alienation and confinement: these axes on which “Cul de sac” moved soon formed the basis for the duo’s preoccupation with the systematic violation of fundamental human rights. The 2019 piece “Human (Fights-Rights-Lights)” also took the work of another artist as its starting point: “HUMAN,” a kind of manifesto in the form of a polyphonic experimental opera by the Italian composer Umberto Ciceri, who linked a selection of Bach’s music with each of the thirty articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Kor’sia staged a boxing match based on this composition.
“We simply had to address the issue of human rights,” said Antonio de Rosa at the time: “We wanted to point out the impossibility of ever achieving a balance between people, we wanted to show the instability in which we live, the lack of harmony in this world. Because it is precisely from this that indifference arises and with it the failure to uphold human rights, especially in this day and age.”An interest in dance has been an important and decisive factor in carving out Kor’sia’s career. Both admire the Ballets Russes, founded by Sergei Diaghilev in 1909, as well as its star dancer Vaslav Nijinsky and his choreographer sister Bronislava Nijinska. This Russian troupe, which never danced in Russia, represents the avant-garde of the 20th century like no other. Based on this dazzling formation of the Monte Carlo-based ballet company, “Igra” was created in 2021 as Kor’sia’s most successful work to date.Kor’siaBefore “Igra,” the ensemble produced two commissioned works that in retrospect seem like sketches, like preliminary rehearsals. One of these, “Somiglianza” (2018), for the Ballet de l’Opéra National de Bordeaux focused on the ballet “L’Après-midi d’un faun” and offered a futuristic vision of Nijinsky’s original, in which the nymphs appeared as synchronized swimmers. This was followed in the same year by “Jeux/Nijinsky” for the now-defunct Ballet de la Comunidad de Madrid Víctor Ullate, a delirious, homoerotic fantasy on “Jeux,” a work by Nijinsky for the Ballets Russes, which premiered in 1915. Halfway between absurdity and humor, this attempt by Kor’sia was more in line with the antilogic of surrealism. There was plenty of room for a game with dozens of small balls, absurdly-dressed tennis players and, of course, a fully-fledged pas de deux.
Despite the liberties they took, these two short pieces were still modern adaptations of classics –quite a common practice in dance. However, this approach was at odds with Kor’sia’s own philosophy of avoiding contemporary adaptations of classical pieces where possible, instead seeking out the atomic core of these classics and splitting it, so to speak.
In this respect, “Igra” is the production that in some ways best sums up Kor’sia’s concerns and interests. It is about the Nijinsky siblings, a microcosm within the Ballets Russes, who repeatedly try in vain to reconcile their own wishes with the interests of the company. “Our way of working means that we are inspired by the past in order to speak about the present,” says Mattia Russo with conviction.
“Igra”In “Igra,” the audience sees the scene through a black, transparent veil to create distance. This is not only a physical distance, but also a temporal one, somewhat reminiscent of the grain and sepia of old photographs and films from the beginning of the last century. The lighting also contributes greatly to the overall effect, flickering off repeatedly like a long film cut and thereby also giving the impression that we are dealing with found pieces of a lost choreography that can no longer be fully reconstructed. The combination of these elements with a very energetic, synchronized dance creates an idea of beauty in a precisely calculated aesthetic that contrasts the classical with the futuristic, accentuating the distinction with deep red tones.”Jeux”The piece is not a remake of “Jeux,” and even the elements from Bronislava Nijinska’s choreography “Les Noces” are quoted far more than they are reconstructed. It is an autonomous work by Kor’sia, which in some images ventures much further than Diaghilev would ever have dared to push his audience. After all, we are a hundred years on.

It is not only the historical influences of a deceased artist that are unmistakably present in the choreography, however: The contemporary Catalan company La Veronal under the direction of Marcos Morau also sends its regards at times. It was with this company that Mattia Russo and Antonio de Rosa brought out their joint creation “Nippon-Koku” at a time when the two were still dancing in the Compañía Nacional de Danza. At times, however, one is also reminded of the dazzling Greek choreographer Dimitris Papaioannou or the Swede Jefta van Dinther, whose piece “Protagonist” shares at least an astonishing amount of aesthetic similarity, with “Mont Ventoux.””Giselle” by Kor’sia“Giselle” was created in 2020 before “Igra.” Naturally, tackling this emblematic work – the most famous narrative ballet from the Romantic period – proved a real challenge for the choreographer couple, with their classical background. In the program note, Russo and Rosa state: “With this particular vision, which takes pieces from the past and tries to locate them in the present, we are trying to construct a possible imaginary third piece that focuses on the philosopher Paul Valery’s idea: ‘A poem is never finished, only abandoned.’ Our fascination with such works, among which we include our ‘Giselle,’ stems from an understanding of humanity that shares a collective imaginary through mutual discourses and narratives that shape a community or the whole of humanity in the first place. The question of how we can actually find answers, lessons, allegories or solutions to our current problems in these pieces, which we call academic and which have invariably survived the test of time, is what drives us.”
Contrary to all other contemporary adaptations and reinventions of Giselle, Kor’sia above all dispenses with that which is completely familiar to the audience. There are no Wilis, no madness, no plot. What they are concerned with is the concept of love. During the Romanesque period, love came to be seen as something very pure and strong, combined with weakness, lightness and fleetingness. By contrast, Rosa and Russo focus on today’s concept of love as an immediate desire, a game with signs and poses, including the role of social networks and dating apps.Desert in ‘Giselle’The audience is not greeted by a village idyll, as in the original, but by an unusual desert landscape reminiscent of the alien landing site in Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” – a painted panorama by Amber Vandenhoeck in the style of Caspar David Friedrich. A group of young people live here, play, have fun, get bored and never put down their cell phones. There is a certain arrogance to them, a lack of interest in each other. The individual – the ego – predominates, and yet, or precisely because of this, the characters are reminiscent of the little gray men in “Cul de sac,” trapped in this strange place. Nature is only simulated; it is not the sun that shines above them, but a celestial neon ring. There is something strange behind the scene, –you can feel it. The dance begins, and their everyday gestures merge suggestively into soft movements that arrive hard in the present.
What does this have to do with “eternal love”? Well, there are no more girls because the term “girl” is outdated, because it is naive. Was Giselle naive? What is naivety? The fact that someone with the emotional intensity of a peasant girl loves a prince, of all people? What does a prince like Albrecht do? He can afford to be capricious and insensitive, like all men who are interested in little more than themselves.There stands Albrecht, playing the clarinet in front of Giselle, pretty as a picture in front of the curtain. Funereal flowers lie at her feet, her face shines soft as wax. Her head is tilted back, her mouth slightly open. She is not breathing. A white sheet is stretched over her body. A doll, a mannequin – that’s what everyone in the Teatros del Canal in Madrid thinks. The mannequin is Giselle, for sure, because it is the premiere of “Giselle.” The clarinetist, all man, tears the white sheet from the doll’s body. Everyone sees Giselle naked. Giulia Russo’s taut legs clearly show what she is: a dancer blessed with a shallow breathing technique, deathly stiff, cursed by the Wilis. This is the old story that librettist Théophile Gautier and choreographers Jean Coralli and Jules Perrot told in 1841, and which has never been allowed to die since, but has been resurrected again and again.‘Giselle’ in an idyllic green golf courseWhether playing Albrecht, a duke, Hilarion or a gamekeeper: the dancers of Kor’sia can only be recognized by their classic grand jetés. They perform as if they were on a golf course – when they are not misusing the irons for romantic fencing exercises, that is. Sometimes there are eleven dancers, sometimes eight (the choreographers also like to join in with the masses), framed as a dance-loving crowd by strange costumes from fashion label Peech that resemble school uniforms.
Between skateboards and surveillance cameras, which also serve as light sources, they only occasionally quote tiny details from the classical choreography, only to immediately alienate, caricature and dance them away again to the original music by Adolphe Adam.Giselle, second actIn the second act, the Wilis gather around a steaming bowl of light wearing briefs and bras, and from here on, there is definitively no further reference to the classical myth. Of course, it is still about love, about spending oneself, unconditional devotion, obsession – just as the British playwright Sarah Kane, who died in 1999, darkly murmured in her play “Crave” (“Gier,” 1998): “Here I am, once again, here I am, here I am, in the darkness, once again.” This phrase, which is constantly repeated on stage, has since gone viral, interpreted by young Dutch pop-up band Permanent Destruction headed by Naomi Velissariou.”Giselle”Then there is Siri or Alexa, who calls herself Carolina in this piece and gives the company (as Myrtha usually does) instructions for a séance in which all the esoteric healing myths can be found: “… Let your body shine. The more attentive you are to your body, the more your fellow human beings will respect you. The divine is within you. You should have nothing, you should love …”
The result is a seemingly chaotic, but never arbitrary, hidden object picture of the longings of a generation that has grown up with an infinite number of guides, role models, and influences from the digital world. With their heads tilted back, the small army of half-naked Wilis lie on their backs like wounded prey after the hunt, dancing happiness on the floor in unison to the sound of birds and other emblems of world peace until suddenly a classical pas de deux sweeps over them and the troupe convulses like dying fish on dry land.‘Giselle’, FinalePaul RodriguezKor’sia conjures up images of oblivion of the world in people who want to embrace everything, love everything, caress everything. But, like art, it is only a brief, intoxicating séance. Carolina-Alexa-Siri counts them out without restraint: “four, three, two, one, the end.” Kor’sia’s “Giselle” thus suffers the reductionist act; Théophile Gautier’s phantasmagorical and tragic fairy tale runs the risk of encountering an audience that loves its “Giselle,” admires it and now misses it very painfully.
This could also have happened with “Igra,” but as Nijinsky’s ballet “Jeux” is not known to a wide audience, there was less danger that it would. With “Giselle,” however, it was likely that the expectations of the audience and critics would clash so violently with the art that, at best, one could politely allow oneself to say that it was almost impossible to recognize “Giselle” here. And this despite the clear warning the choreographer duo included in the program: “Above all, it is necessary to point out that our ‘Giselle’ does not refer to the libretto of the original piece, as one might initially think, but refers to the figure of a woman as an individual. What we are showing is the ‘story,’ not the ‘narrative’ of the ballet.” This is precisely the problem – that such a title tends to arouse very specific expectations and when these are not fulfilled, it is perceived as a break with the rules of the game. Kor’sia, however, seems to love breaking the rules. Does this also apply to “Mont Ventoux” from 2023, Kor’sia’s ascent to dancing heaven?Kito MuñozThe mountain climbIn other times, climbing mountains was life-threatening and, above all, pointless. Climbing a mountain for pleasure was unimaginable for our ancestors. Climbing a mountain in abruptly changing weather conditions was only considered as a means of escape in the event of real danger – that is, until Petrarch came along and wrote a letter to tell a friend about his ascent of Mont Ventoux in 1336. It was a simple, friendly letter that perhaps speaks of mountaineering for the first time and is revered today as a document that epitomizes the Renaissance, a metaphor for the ascent of the “new man” moving from the darkness of the Middle Ages to the light.“If Dante descends into hell, Petrarch climbs the mountain,” said Agnés López Río at the premiere: “This is of course a metaphor for the ascent to heaven or the descent into hell, but we didn’t want to approach it from a religious point of view. We asked ourselves how the individual came into being, focusing on humanism, the beginning of the anthropocentric construction, which no longer placed God at the center, but nature, as we do today with the climate crisis and the resulting migration crisis, sustainability, and ecology – all issues that are close to our hearts. Reading Petrarch in this way opened an infinite number of doors for us.””Mont Ventoux”Maria AlperiIt is these “infinite doors” that free Kor’sia from the restrictions and constraints of having to reduce the works of the classics to their only seemingly “correct” reading. “Mont Ventoux” is nothing less than a wonderfully enjoyable metaphor for the terrible, accelerated pace of life, a call to slow down, an invitation to include nature in our digitalized lives of pavement and concrete in the same way that we sometimes view it from our windows as a landscape flooded with sun and weather, which we rarely actually perceive despite its imposing power.

The Russo/Rosa tandem cleverly divides the theater space into two spaces with a gigantic glass window through which a mountain can be seen: one side is a flurry of speed and the dizziness of the city and the other is characterized by nature and contemplation. Similarly, the space also accommodates two forms of dance: on the one hand, the virtuoso and precise, on the other, the lyrical, emotional, slow. Here, for the first time, Mattia Russo and Antonio de Rosa articulate a sense of spectacle – of course still circling the idea of the maelstrom of our technological society without respite, without rest, without time for reflection.

At one point in “Mont Ventoux,” dancers in casual street clothes are seen pausing their wild and unbridled march through the space from time to time to take an interest in what is happening on the other side of the glass window. There is obviously a different rhythm over there. The slow-moving people inside also seem to be curious about the commotion outside. They look at each other strangely, they try to touch each other despite the glass that separates them, as if they both desire and reject what is happening on the other side. Kor’sia sets the world in motion at two speeds. As it does so, the ensemble’s view of “Mont Ventoux” appears to be very clear, precise, and relevant. Nothing seems superfluous, everything is coherent. The effective set, once again designed by Amber Vandenhoeck, and the omnipresent yet discreet sound space with its delicate baroque touches by Alejandro Da Rocha give this production an aesthetic that has truly earned the original Kor’sia seal of approval. For the time being, they have reached the pinnacle of their fame.

And then there is the dance. Kor’sia has a genuine interest in the body as a carrier of ideas and pays a lot of attention to form and the demands of dance technique. After all, both of its founders come from the ballet company at La Scala in Milan. Russo and Rosa met while dancing the works of the academic repertoire for this prestigious Italian company: Ballerinos at the highest level who had a physical understanding of what classical technique meant.
They emigrated to Madrid together and joined Spain’s national dance company during the tenure of José Carlos Martínez, the current director of the Paris Opera Ballet. There, they came into contact with a broader repertoire and choreographers of all kinds, as the Spanish were trying to broaden the horizons of their national ballet, which for twenty years had only danced the works of its former director Nacho Duato.

José Carlos Martínez supported and encouraged the two dancers’ interest in choreographing themselves. They continued to dance for the national company, but independently developed their duet “Yellow Place” in 2014 – a very yellow piece, very suitable for the street, which was very well received and shown at numerous festivals throughout Spain.

Their first concrete attempt at a choreography is “Cul de Sac” (Dead End) from 2017. Impressed by an exhibition by the artist Juan Muñoz, the Russo-Rosa tandem found numerous ideas for a choreography in the small, macabre, and enigmatic little men that populate the Spanish artist’s sculptural world. It was already clear to both of them that they did not want to choreograph a dance for the sake of dance, that they were not interested in abstraction or form per se: They wanted to express their concerns and worries about the world. They wanted to address the social issues of the time. And Muñoz’s little gray men whispered these ideas to them.
“Cul de sac” set the sculptures in motion and used them to create a universe inhabited by a community of monochrome beings trapped in a prison room, as if hypnotized by almost impossible movements and trying to achieve freedom as a collective, as a society, even as individuals.

“The Lamb,” also from 2017, had something mystical about it. The duo elevated people and their conflicts to an existential level, celebrating the ideal of transcendence, which also implies sacrifice. Above all, they seemed to be asking what separates life and death. What if life is just a dream and death wakes us up? This work seems like a rather rare bird among the other elements of their oeuvre.

Lack of freedom, alienation and confinement: these axes on which “Cul de sac” moved soon formed the basis for the duo’s preoccupation with the systematic violation of fundamental human rights. The 2019 piece “Human (Fights-Rights-Lights)” also took the work of another artist as its starting point: “HUMAN,” a kind of manifesto in the form of a polyphonic experimental opera by the Italian composer Umberto Ciceri, who linked a selection of Bach’s music with each of the thirty articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Kor’sia staged a boxing match based on this composition.
“We simply had to address the issue of human rights,” said Antonio de Rosa at the time: “We wanted to point out the impossibility of ever achieving a balance between people, we wanted to show the instability in which we live, the lack of harmony in this world. Because it is precisely from this that indifference arises and with it the failure to uphold human rights, especially in this day and age.”

An interest in dance has been an important and decisive factor in carving out Kor’sia’s career. Both admire the Ballets Russes, founded by Sergei Diaghilev in 1909, as well as its star dancer Vaslav Nijinsky and his choreographer sister Bronislava Nijinska. This Russian troupe, which never danced in Russia, represents the avant-garde of the 20th century like no other. Based on this dazzling formation of the Monte Carlo-based ballet company, “Igra” was created in 2021 as Kor’sia’s most successful work to date.

Before “Igra,” the ensemble produced two commissioned works that in retrospect seem like sketches, like preliminary rehearsals. One of these, “Somiglianza” (2018), for the Ballet de l’Opéra National de Bordeaux focused on the ballet “L’Après-midi d’un faun” and offered a futuristic vision of Nijinsky’s original, in which the nymphs appeared as synchronized swimmers. This was followed in the same year by “Jeux/Nijinsky” for the now-defunct Ballet de la Comunidad de Madrid Víctor Ullate, a delirious, homoerotic fantasy on “Jeux,” a work by Nijinsky for the Ballets Russes, which premiered in 1915. Halfway between absurdity and humor, this attempt by Kor’sia was more in line with the antilogic of surrealism. There was plenty of room for a game with dozens of small balls, absurdly-dressed tennis players and, of course, a fully-fledged pas de deux.
Despite the liberties they took, these two short pieces were still modern adaptations of classics –quite a common practice in dance. However, this approach was at odds with Kor’sia’s own philosophy of avoiding contemporary adaptations of classical pieces where possible, instead seeking out the atomic core of these classics and splitting it, so to speak.
In this respect, “Igra” is the production that in some ways best sums up Kor’sia’s concerns and interests. It is about the Nijinsky siblings, a microcosm within the Ballets Russes, who repeatedly try in vain to reconcile their own wishes with the interests of the company. “Our way of working means that we are inspired by the past in order to speak about the present,” says Mattia Russo with conviction.
“Igra”In “Igra,” the audience sees the scene through a black, transparent veil to create distance. This is not only a physical distance, but also a temporal one, somewhat reminiscent of the grain and sepia of old photographs and films from the beginning of the last century. The lighting also contributes greatly to the overall effect, flickering off repeatedly like a long film cut and thereby also giving the impression that we are dealing with found pieces of a lost choreography that can no longer be fully reconstructed. The combination of these elements with a very energetic, synchronized dance creates an idea of beauty in a precisely calculated aesthetic that contrasts the classical with the futuristic, accentuating the distinction with deep red tones.”Jeux”The piece is not a remake of “Jeux,” and even the elements from Bronislava Nijinska’s choreography “Les Noces” are quoted far more than they are reconstructed. It is an autonomous work by Kor’sia, which in some images ventures much further than Diaghilev would ever have dared to push his audience. After all, we are a hundred years on.

It is not only the historical influences of a deceased artist that are unmistakably present in the choreography, however: The contemporary Catalan company La Veronal under the direction of Marcos Morau also sends its regards at times. It was with this company that Mattia Russo and Antonio de Rosa brought out their joint creation “Nippon-Koku” at a time when the two were still dancing in the Compañía Nacional de Danza. At times, however, one is also reminded of the dazzling Greek choreographer Dimitris Papaioannou or the Swede Jefta van Dinther, whose piece “Protagonist” shares at least an astonishing amount of aesthetic similarity, with “Mont Ventoux.””Giselle” by Kor’sia“Giselle” was created in 2020 before “Igra.” Naturally, tackling this emblematic work – the most famous narrative ballet from the Romantic period – proved a real challenge for the choreographer couple, with their classical background. In the program note, Russo and Rosa state: “With this particular vision, which takes pieces from the past and tries to locate them in the present, we are trying to construct a possible imaginary third piece that focuses on the philosopher Paul Valery’s idea: ‘A poem is never finished, only abandoned.’ Our fascination with such works, among which we include our ‘Giselle,’ stems from an understanding of humanity that shares a collective imaginary through mutual discourses and narratives that shape a community or the whole of humanity in the first place. The question of how we can actually find answers, lessons, allegories or solutions to our current problems in these pieces, which we call academic and which have invariably survived the test of time, is what drives us.”
Contrary to all other contemporary adaptations and reinventions of Giselle, Kor’sia above all dispenses with that which is completely familiar to the audience. There are no Wilis, no madness, no plot. What they are concerned with is the concept of love. During the Romanesque period, love came to be seen as something very pure and strong, combined with weakness, lightness and fleetingness. By contrast, Rosa and Russo focus on today’s concept of love as an immediate desire, a game with signs and poses, including the role of social networks and dating apps.Desert in ‘Giselle’The audience is not greeted by a village idyll, as in the original, but by an unusual desert landscape reminiscent of the alien landing site in Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” – a painted panorama by Amber Vandenhoeck in the style of Caspar David Friedrich. A group of young people live here, play, have fun, get bored and never put down their cell phones. There is a certain arrogance to them, a lack of interest in each other. The individual – the ego – predominates, and yet, or precisely because of this, the characters are reminiscent of the little gray men in “Cul de sac,” trapped in this strange place. Nature is only simulated; it is not the sun that shines above them, but a celestial neon ring. There is something strange behind the scene, –you can feel it. The dance begins, and their everyday gestures merge suggestively into soft movements that arrive hard in the present.
What does this have to do with “eternal love”? Well, there are no more girls because the term “girl” is outdated, because it is naive. Was Giselle naive? What is naivety? The fact that someone with the emotional intensity of a peasant girl loves a prince, of all people? What does a prince like Albrecht do? He can afford to be capricious and insensitive, like all men who are interested in little more than themselves.There stands Albrecht, playing the clarinet in front of Giselle, pretty as a picture in front of the curtain. Funereal flowers lie at her feet, her face shines soft as wax. Her head is tilted back, her mouth slightly open. She is not breathing. A white sheet is stretched over her body. A doll, a mannequin – that’s what everyone in the Teatros del Canal in Madrid thinks. The mannequin is Giselle, for sure, because it is the premiere of “Giselle.” The clarinetist, all man, tears the white sheet from the doll’s body. Everyone sees Giselle naked. Giulia Russo’s taut legs clearly show what she is: a dancer blessed with a shallow breathing technique, deathly stiff, cursed by the Wilis. This is the old story that librettist Théophile Gautier and choreographers Jean Coralli and Jules Perrot told in 1841, and which has never been allowed to die since, but has been resurrected again and again.‘Giselle’ in an idyllic green golf courseWhether playing Albrecht, a duke, Hilarion or a gamekeeper: the dancers of Kor’sia can only be recognized by their classic grand jetés. They perform as if they were on a golf course – when they are not misusing the irons for romantic fencing exercises, that is. Sometimes there are eleven dancers, sometimes eight (the choreographers also like to join in with the masses), framed as a dance-loving crowd by strange costumes from fashion label Peech that resemble school uniforms.
Between skateboards and surveillance cameras, which also serve as light sources, they only occasionally quote tiny details from the classical choreography, only to immediately alienate, caricature and dance them away again to the original music by Adolphe Adam.Giselle, second actIn the second act, the Wilis gather around a steaming bowl of light wearing briefs and bras, and from here on, there is definitively no further reference to the classical myth. Of course, it is still about love, about spending oneself, unconditional devotion, obsession – just as the British playwright Sarah Kane, who died in 1999, darkly murmured in her play “Crave” (“Gier,” 1998): “Here I am, once again, here I am, here I am, in the darkness, once again.” This phrase, which is constantly repeated on stage, has since gone viral, interpreted by young Dutch pop-up band Permanent Destruction headed by Naomi Velissariou.”Giselle”Then there is Siri or Alexa, who calls herself Carolina in this piece and gives the company (as Myrtha usually does) instructions for a séance in which all the esoteric healing myths can be found: “… Let your body shine. The more attentive you are to your body, the more your fellow human beings will respect you. The divine is within you. You should have nothing, you should love …”
The result is a seemingly chaotic, but never arbitrary, hidden object picture of the longings of a generation that has grown up with an infinite number of guides, role models, and influences from the digital world. With their heads tilted back, the small army of half-naked Wilis lie on their backs like wounded prey after the hunt, dancing happiness on the floor in unison to the sound of birds and other emblems of world peace until suddenly a classical pas de deux sweeps over them and the troupe convulses like dying fish on dry land.‘Giselle’, FinalePaul RodriguezKor’sia conjures up images of oblivion of the world in people who want to embrace everything, love everything, caress everything. But, like art, it is only a brief, intoxicating séance. Carolina-Alexa-Siri counts them out without restraint: “four, three, two, one, the end.” Kor’sia’s “Giselle” thus suffers the reductionist act; Théophile Gautier’s phantasmagorical and tragic fairy tale runs the risk of encountering an audience that loves its “Giselle,” admires it and now misses it very painfully.
This could also have happened with “Igra,” but as Nijinsky’s ballet “Jeux” is not known to a wide audience, there was less danger that it would. With “Giselle,” however, it was likely that the expectations of the audience and critics would clash so violently with the art that, at best, one could politely allow oneself to say that it was almost impossible to recognize “Giselle” here. And this despite the clear warning the choreographer duo included in the program: “Above all, it is necessary to point out that our ‘Giselle’ does not refer to the libretto of the original piece, as one might initially think, but refers to the figure of a woman as an individual. What we are showing is the ‘story,’ not the ‘narrative’ of the ballet.” This is precisely the problem – that such a title tends to arouse very specific expectations and when these are not fulfilled, it is perceived as a break with the rules of the game. Kor’sia, however, seems to love breaking the rules. Does this also apply to “Mont Ventoux” from 2023, Kor’sia’s ascent to dancing heaven?Kito MuñozThe mountain climbIn other times, climbing mountains was life-threatening and, above all, pointless. Climbing a mountain for pleasure was unimaginable for our ancestors. Climbing a mountain in abruptly changing weather conditions was only considered as a means of escape in the event of real danger – that is, until Petrarch came along and wrote a letter to tell a friend about his ascent of Mont Ventoux in 1336. It was a simple, friendly letter that perhaps speaks of mountaineering for the first time and is revered today as a document that epitomizes the Renaissance, a metaphor for the ascent of the “new man” moving from the darkness of the Middle Ages to the light.“If Dante descends into hell, Petrarch climbs the mountain,” said Agnés López Río at the premiere: “This is of course a metaphor for the ascent to heaven or the descent into hell, but we didn’t want to approach it from a religious point of view. We asked ourselves how the individual came into being, focusing on humanism, the beginning of the anthropocentric construction, which no longer placed God at the center, but nature, as we do today with the climate crisis and the resulting migration crisis, sustainability, and ecology – all issues that are close to our hearts. Reading Petrarch in this way opened an infinite number of doors for us.””Mont Ventoux”Maria AlperiIt is these “infinite doors” that free Kor’sia from the restrictions and constraints of having to reduce the works of the classics to their only seemingly “correct” reading. “Mont Ventoux” is nothing less than a wonderfully enjoyable metaphor for the terrible, accelerated pace of life, a call to slow down, an invitation to include nature in our digitalized lives of pavement and concrete in the same way that we sometimes view it from our windows as a landscape flooded with sun and weather, which we rarely actually perceive despite its imposing power.

The Russo/Rosa tandem cleverly divides the theater space into two spaces with a gigantic glass window through which a mountain can be seen: one side is a flurry of speed and the dizziness of the city and the other is characterized by nature and contemplation. Similarly, the space also accommodates two forms of dance: on the one hand, the virtuoso and precise, on the other, the lyrical, emotional, slow. Here, for the first time, Mattia Russo and Antonio de Rosa articulate a sense of spectacle – of course still circling the idea of the maelstrom of our technological society without respite, without rest, without time for reflection.

At one point in “Mont Ventoux,” dancers in casual street clothes are seen pausing their wild and unbridled march through the space from time to time to take an interest in what is happening on the other side of the glass window. There is obviously a different rhythm over there. The slow-moving people inside also seem to be curious about the commotion outside. They look at each other strangely, they try to touch each other despite the glass that separates them, as if they both desire and reject what is happening on the other side. Kor’sia sets the world in motion at two speeds. As it does so, the ensemble’s view of “Mont Ventoux” appears to be very clear, precise, and relevant. Nothing seems superfluous, everything is coherent. The effective set, once again designed by Amber Vandenhoeck, and the omnipresent yet discreet sound space with its delicate baroque touches by Alejandro Da Rocha give this production an aesthetic that has truly earned the original Kor’sia seal of approval. For the time being, they have reached the pinnacle of their fame.

In “Igra,” the audience sees the scene through a black, transparent veil to create distance. This is not only a physical distance, but also a temporal one, somewhat reminiscent of the grain and sepia of old photographs and films from the beginning of the last century. The lighting also contributes greatly to the overall effect, flickering off repeatedly like a long film cut and thereby also giving the impression that we are dealing with found pieces of a lost choreography that can no longer be fully reconstructed. The combination of these elements with a very energetic, synchronized dance creates an idea of beauty in a precisely calculated aesthetic that contrasts the classical with the futuristic, accentuating the distinction with deep red tones.

The piece is not a remake of “Jeux,” and even the elements from Bronislava Nijinska’s choreography “Les Noces” are quoted far more than they are reconstructed. It is an autonomous work by Kor’sia, which in some images ventures much further than Diaghilev would ever have dared to push his audience. After all, we are a hundred years on.

It is not only the historical influences of a deceased artist that are unmistakably present in the choreography, however: The contemporary Catalan company La Veronal under the direction of Marcos Morau also sends its regards at times. It was with this company that Mattia Russo and Antonio de Rosa brought out their joint creation “Nippon-Koku” at a time when the two were still dancing in the Compañía Nacional de Danza. At times, however, one is also reminded of the dazzling Greek choreographer Dimitris Papaioannou or the Swede Jefta van Dinther, whose piece “Protagonist” shares at least an astonishing amount of aesthetic similarity, with “Mont Ventoux.”

“Giselle” was created in 2020 before “Igra.” Naturally, tackling this emblematic work – the most famous narrative ballet from the Romantic period – proved a real challenge for the choreographer couple, with their classical background. In the program note, Russo and Rosa state: “With this particular vision, which takes pieces from the past and tries to locate them in the present, we are trying to construct a possible imaginary third piece that focuses on the philosopher Paul Valery’s idea: ‘A poem is never finished, only abandoned.’ Our fascination with such works, among which we include our ‘Giselle,’ stems from an understanding of humanity that shares a collective imaginary through mutual discourses and narratives that shape a community or the whole of humanity in the first place. The question of how we can actually find answers, lessons, allegories or solutions to our current problems in these pieces, which we call academic and which have invariably survived the test of time, is what drives us.”
Contrary to all other contemporary adaptations and reinventions of Giselle, Kor’sia above all dispenses with that which is completely familiar to the audience. There are no Wilis, no madness, no plot. What they are concerned with is the concept of love. During the Romanesque period, love came to be seen as something very pure and strong, combined with weakness, lightness and fleetingness. By contrast, Rosa and Russo focus on today’s concept of love as an immediate desire, a game with signs and poses, including the role of social networks and dating apps.

The audience is not greeted by a village idyll, as in the original, but by an unusual desert landscape reminiscent of the alien landing site in Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” – a painted panorama by Amber Vandenhoeck in the style of Caspar David Friedrich. A group of young people live here, play, have fun, get bored and never put down their cell phones. There is a certain arrogance to them, a lack of interest in each other. The individual – the ego – predominates, and yet, or precisely because of this, the characters are reminiscent of the little gray men in “Cul de sac,” trapped in this strange place. Nature is only simulated; it is not the sun that shines above them, but a celestial neon ring. There is something strange behind the scene, –you can feel it. The dance begins, and their everyday gestures merge suggestively into soft movements that arrive hard in the present.
What does this have to do with “eternal love”? Well, there are no more girls because the term “girl” is outdated, because it is naive. Was Giselle naive? What is naivety? The fact that someone with the emotional intensity of a peasant girl loves a prince, of all people? What does a prince like Albrecht do? He can afford to be capricious and insensitive, like all men who are interested in little more than themselves.

There stands Albrecht, playing the clarinet in front of Giselle, pretty as a picture in front of the curtain. Funereal flowers lie at her feet, her face shines soft as wax. Her head is tilted back, her mouth slightly open. She is not breathing. A white sheet is stretched over her body. A doll, a mannequin – that’s what everyone in the Teatros del Canal in Madrid thinks. The mannequin is Giselle, for sure, because it is the premiere of “Giselle.” The clarinetist, all man, tears the white sheet from the doll’s body. Everyone sees Giselle naked. Giulia Russo’s taut legs clearly show what she is: a dancer blessed with a shallow breathing technique, deathly stiff, cursed by the Wilis. This is the old story that librettist Théophile Gautier and choreographers Jean Coralli and Jules Perrot told in 1841, and which has never been allowed to die since, but has been resurrected again and again.

Whether playing Albrecht, a duke, Hilarion or a gamekeeper: the dancers of Kor’sia can only be recognized by their classic grand jetés. They perform as if they were on a golf course – when they are not misusing the irons for romantic fencing exercises, that is. Sometimes there are eleven dancers, sometimes eight (the choreographers also like to join in with the masses), framed as a dance-loving crowd by strange costumes from fashion label Peech that resemble school uniforms.

Between skateboards and surveillance cameras, which also serve as light sources, they only occasionally quote tiny details from the classical choreography, only to immediately alienate, caricature and dance them away again to the original music by Adolphe Adam.

In the second act, the Wilis gather around a steaming bowl of light wearing briefs and bras, and from here on, there is definitively no further reference to the classical myth. Of course, it is still about love, about spending oneself, unconditional devotion, obsession – just as the British playwright Sarah Kane, who died in 1999, darkly murmured in her play “Crave” (“Gier,” 1998): “Here I am, once again, here I am, here I am, in the darkness, once again.” This phrase, which is constantly repeated on stage, has since gone viral, interpreted by young Dutch pop-up band Permanent Destruction headed by Naomi Velissariou.

Then there is Siri or Alexa, who calls herself Carolina in this piece and gives the company (as Myrtha usually does) instructions for a séance in which all the esoteric healing myths can be found: “… Let your body shine. The more attentive you are to your body, the more your fellow human beings will respect you. The divine is within you. You should have nothing, you should love …”
The result is a seemingly chaotic, but never arbitrary, hidden object picture of the longings of a generation that has grown up with an infinite number of guides, role models, and influences from the digital world. With their heads tilted back, the small army of half-naked Wilis lie on their backs like wounded prey after the hunt, dancing happiness on the floor in unison to the sound of birds and other emblems of world peace until suddenly a classical pas de deux sweeps over them and the troupe convulses like dying fish on dry land.

Kor’sia conjures up images of oblivion of the world in people who want to embrace everything, love everything, caress everything. But, like art, it is only a brief, intoxicating séance. Carolina-Alexa-Siri counts them out without restraint: “four, three, two, one, the end.” Kor’sia’s “Giselle” thus suffers the reductionist act; Théophile Gautier’s phantasmagorical and tragic fairy tale runs the risk of encountering an audience that loves its “Giselle,” admires it and now misses it very painfully.
This could also have happened with “Igra,” but as Nijinsky’s ballet “Jeux” is not known to a wide audience, there was less danger that it would. With “Giselle,” however, it was likely that the expectations of the audience and critics would clash so violently with the art that, at best, one could politely allow oneself to say that it was almost impossible to recognize “Giselle” here. And this despite the clear warning the choreographer duo included in the program: “Above all, it is necessary to point out that our ‘Giselle’ does not refer to the libretto of the original piece, as one might initially think, but refers to the figure of a woman as an individual. What we are showing is the ‘story,’ not the ‘narrative’ of the ballet.” This is precisely the problem – that such a title tends to arouse very specific expectations and when these are not fulfilled, it is perceived as a break with the rules of the game. Kor’sia, however, seems to love breaking the rules. Does this also apply to “Mont Ventoux” from 2023, Kor’sia’s ascent to dancing heaven?

The mountain climb

In other times, climbing mountains was life-threatening and, above all, pointless. Climbing a mountain for pleasure was unimaginable for our ancestors. Climbing a mountain in abruptly changing weather conditions was only considered as a means of escape in the event of real danger – that is, until Petrarch came along and wrote a letter to tell a friend about his ascent of Mont Ventoux in 1336. It was a simple, friendly letter that perhaps speaks of mountaineering for the first time and is revered today as a document that epitomizes the Renaissance, a metaphor for the ascent of the “new man” moving from the darkness of the Middle Ages to the light.

“If Dante descends into hell, Petrarch climbs the mountain,” said Agnés López Río at the premiere: “This is of course a metaphor for the ascent to heaven or the descent into hell, but we didn’t want to approach it from a religious point of view. We asked ourselves how the individual came into being, focusing on humanism, the beginning of the anthropocentric construction, which no longer placed God at the center, but nature, as we do today with the climate crisis and the resulting migration crisis, sustainability, and ecology – all issues that are close to our hearts. Reading Petrarch in this way opened an infinite number of doors for us.”

It is these “infinite doors” that free Kor’sia from the restrictions and constraints of having to reduce the works of the classics to their only seemingly “correct” reading. “Mont Ventoux” is nothing less than a wonderfully enjoyable metaphor for the terrible, accelerated pace of life, a call to slow down, an invitation to include nature in our digitalized lives of pavement and concrete in the same way that we sometimes view it from our windows as a landscape flooded with sun and weather, which we rarely actually perceive despite its imposing power.

The Russo/Rosa tandem cleverly divides the theater space into two spaces with a gigantic glass window through which a mountain can be seen: one side is a flurry of speed and the dizziness of the city and the other is characterized by nature and contemplation. Similarly, the space also accommodates two forms of dance: on the one hand, the virtuoso and precise, on the other, the lyrical, emotional, slow. Here, for the first time, Mattia Russo and Antonio de Rosa articulate a sense of spectacle – of course still circling the idea of the maelstrom of our technological society without respite, without rest, without time for reflection.

At one point in “Mont Ventoux,” dancers in casual street clothes are seen pausing their wild and unbridled march through the space from time to time to take an interest in what is happening on the other side of the glass window. There is obviously a different rhythm over there. The slow-moving people inside also seem to be curious about the commotion outside. They look at each other strangely, they try to touch each other despite the glass that separates them, as if they both desire and reject what is happening on the other side. Kor’sia sets the world in motion at two speeds. As it does so, the ensemble’s view of “Mont Ventoux” appears to be very clear, precise, and relevant. Nothing seems superfluous, everything is coherent. The effective set, once again designed by Amber Vandenhoeck, and the omnipresent yet discreet sound space with its delicate baroque touches by Alejandro Da Rocha give this production an aesthetic that has truly earned the original Kor’sia seal of approval. For the time being, they have reached the pinnacle of their fame.