Igor and Moreno: Idiot-Syncrasy at The Place

Igor and Moreno, Idiot-Syncrasy, The Place, October 9

Moreno Solinas and Igor Urzelai in Idiot-Syncrasy (photo: Alicia Clarke)

The packed house for this one night reprise of Idiot-Syncrasy at The Place (who originally commissioned it) and the fervour with which it was received is an indication of its revered status. Created in 2015, Idiot-Syncrasy is the triumph of an idea (changing the world) over form (jumping), and yet the form is so completely seeped in the idea that it becomes its rich evocation. It’s also hard to imagine anyone other than its choreographers, Igor Urzelai and Moreno Solinas, performing this work as quite independently of their stage presence its geography, sentiment and generosity are rooted in their biographies. Urzelai is from San Sebastian in the Basque Country and Solinas is from Sardinia, both autonomous regions with a defiant sense of cultural and political identity. At the beginning of Idiot-Syncrasy Urzelai and Solinas stand side by side in silence on Kaspersophie’s expansive white stage dressed in jeans, windjackets and sneakers, communicating a sense of self-assurance and composure as they slowly and deliberately scope the audience. And then, almost imperceptibly they begin to sing a cappella extracts of Procurade e moderare, a nineteenth century Sardinian revolutionary song — recently adopted as the Sardinian national anthem — with a text by Francesco Ignazio Mannu aimed at the ruling House of Savoy. At first we hear only the fine harmonies of the two voices, but the spirit of the song is enshrined in it and as the voices gain strength and Urzelai and Solinas add a heel-bouncing emphasis it transforms into a revolutionary march with all its pride and defiance.

This is where idea and form first meet; the bounce becomes a jump and the jump becomes the iteration of a single choreographic idiom — somewhere between a hop and a jump — with multiple variations. The rhythmic constancy of the idiom becomes an affirmation of resilience while its patterns and incidents are occasions for personal narratives and humour. When the two continue jumping as they strip off their outer layers Urzelai is meticulous in the way he piles his clothing while Solinas discards his like a rebellious child. There are seemingly inconsequential exits that presage more purposeful re-entrances with a change of coloured t-shirts, for example, or a bounding delivery of a generous shot of heart-warming Patxaran to the entire audience. Throughout Idiot-Syncrasy the personal and the political cavort and overlap as if Urzelai and Solinas are reminding us that even the most mundane social actions have cumulative consequences.

It took some decades after Mannu’s Procurade e moderare before the Savoyards left Sardinia, and there is a long section of Idiot-Syncrasy that borrows from the folk traditions of Sardinia and the Basque Country accompanied by Alberto Ruiz Soler’s deep, rumbling drone that leaves behind the more personable interventions of the two performers and focuses, through discursive patterns of jumping, skating and turning, on the effort and grind of generations in both regions to achieve and maintain their goal of political autonomy. The realm of the metaphorical allows time for the audience to feel that effort and to participate in it without any overt indications of politicization or propaganda. This is the beauty of dance as a medium because the message is embodied rather than rhetorical and in adopting a vocabulary that is so guileless Urzelai and Solinas imbue what at first appears naive with the power of an epic history of camaraderie, generosity, and conviction as the four bottles of Patxaran continue to make their autonomous rounds of the audience.

Gradually Seth Rook Williams’ lighting indicates the diminishing of the epic scale as we return once again to the personal, to the individual orbits of these two charismatic idealists and their relationship to one other. The jumping calms to turning patterns and even a phrase of ballroom, with the two drawing closer until Solinas lifts Urzelai on to his back and they begin to sing a cappella again, not nationalist hymns but a brief medley of love songs in Italian, Spanish and Euskara. Both men are exhausted but continue to turn slowly, and we can hear in their vocal traces the emotion and determination of the journey they have made and will continue to make.