"BLEAH!!! is a word that "does". It creates volume between the palate and the lip. It produces a sound with meaning. In Lucia Marcucci's same-titled visual poem, this gesture-sound removes itself from the pronunciation of the body and spreads onto the page, interrupting the perceptual expectation of its hearing to be said, seen, and read instead. It is a comment that becomes an art piece.

Study it together. This invitation is answered by the collaboration between choreographer and dancer Annamaria Ajmone and musician Laura Agnusdei, who are working together for the first time.

Lucia Marcucci's imagery acts as an ice-breaking argument, triggering dialogue, initiating an encounter. It's a point of departure that shapes a process of research, of work that then goes its own way.

BLEAH!!! returns to bodies and their objects. It disarticulates the typical performative roles of dancer and musician and designs a landscape to be created together, with the common channel of breath and objects. Ajmone and Agnusdei plan a script that disregards and redistributes the authorial functions. Dance plays and music dances; sound choreographs space, while movement accompanies it, reshapes it, and multiplies it. Volume and gestures of the saxophone and the body, of breaths and drums create unique acoustic areas of encounter and relationship, that vary in architecture and temperature, evoking poetry and emotion.

One zone alone stands free and still, like a room. In the center, a console lets vinyl spin and bodies sit close together, activating and recombining a set of known sounds and familiar worlds. It is a place apart where one can meet and stay to comment on the rest of the work or the world."

Text by Giada Cipollone.

Co-production L'Altra associazione, We-Start Centro di Produzione Piemonte Orientale, Bolzano Danza | Tanz Bozen, OperaEstate Festival as part of the BoNo project.
Supported by Triennale di Milano and Fondazione Haydn Bolzano and Trento.
In collaboration with Ar/Ge Kunst.
Associated artist Triennale Milano Teatro 2021-2024.

Media credits

Lucia Marcucci's portrait, Courtesy Frittelli Arte Contemporanea / Lucia Marcucci.

Lucia Marcucci, Come ama, come lavora, 1972, Courtesy Frittelli Arte Contemporanea.

Lucia Marcucci, Culturae, 1977, Courtesy Frittelli Arte Contemporanea.

Lucia Marcucci, Poesia è del poeta, 1990, Courtesy Frittelli Arte Contemporanea.

Lucia Marcucci, Bleah!!!, 1967, Courtesy Frittelli Arte Contemporanea.

Audio from Remeflin 20, a record dedicated to the auscultatory semiology of the lung, G. Landes and R. von La Rosée, 1961.