A dancer in Hell.

Two can get into Hell for the price of one this week. And once the pair has paid and gained entry, they’ll see a motley crew of beings in sheer black shifts on a stage: lip synching to songs by Sting and Marilyn Manson, writhing on the ground, energized by strobe lights, getting naked, getting into each other’s clothes. The music melds from electronic to compositions by Bizet and Beethoven. This stark yet rich vision is the creation of Emio Greco/PC, an Amsterdam based troupe on a North American tour with their new hour-and-45-minute work. A piece called Hell.

Of course, The Inferno of Italian author Dante Alighieri supported the development of the piece, says Greco, but, he added, “We thought that hell is such a charged word with so many connotations. Everybody has an idea of hell. At the very end, it’s so charged it doesn’t really mean anything anymore. It’s so full, it’s really empty. So it’s the place where creativity can happen again.”

Greco’s creativity springs from a poor farming village in the South of Italy, where he began dance training at 19. He had dreamed of being a dancer since the age of 6. By the time he was 21 he was in Cannes, France, where he trained with Rosella Hightower and encountered “brilliant dancers. The school was organized in a very dynamic way, very open-minded.” He eventually moved to Paris then Belgium. After he met Dutch theater director Pieter Scholten in 1995, Greco moved to Amsterdam. The duo presented its first choreography a year later: Greco danced a solo called “Bianco.” Ten-plus years and several collaborations later, they now have a company of dancers subsidized by the Netherlands government. Greco explains that groups must reapply every four years. How much money an arts group gets depends on “the size of the company, ambition of the project, the money that you need to realize certain projects. Every company gets a different amount of money. For us it’s not really enough. More than half of the money the company needs has been generated basically by touring. …” So much the better for us. Still, he says the government aid is “a very strong and stable help that allows us to think of our future. …”

Hell deals with the present. “We really placed it between abstraction and narration.” An abstract journey. “We want to really let come out some daily life, even banal daily life through the physicality, through the body but it’s reabsorbed into the dynamic,” he explained. “The reference to the contemporary world and the pain in which we are was being considered without being represented as such. …It’s a reference to some realistic world but never really full representation [of it].”

But Hell on earth is not merely physical. “Hell exists because judgment exists,” said Greco. “We judge ourselves; we judge others.”

So, is there any way out, to salvation?

“I think so,” he answered, “because at then end, our hell is not a moralistic place. It’s a journey. Often from the journey … you can always exit, step out. There’s an exit sign. We don’t judge anybody. .... There is hope.”

Miami Light Project presents Emio Greco/PC’s Hell at 8 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday at the Colony Theatre, 1040 Lincoln Road, Miami Beach. Tickets are $28. Two-for-one tickets are available through this Friday by using the code “HELL89” at the Ticketmaster Web site. Call Miami Light Project at 305- 576-4350 or visit www.miamilightproject.com.

 

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