Tomasz Oleksy (POL), 2006

Lucelia Blanco (VEN), 2006

Foto Marco Togni

SPEED ROCK

The wonders of speed

Alessandro Togni

“We affirm that, to the world’s splendour, there has been added a new beauty: the beauty of speed”. With this 4th
enunciation, written in Paris in 1909, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti concretised the Futurist Manifesto’s lust for transformation.
A new perception of the world as wonder at the future ignites and, traversing workshops, bursts out across new horizons. To observe among glittering explosions of light, delight in an unexpected movement, glimpse something in rotation/revolution/evolution, lean over a precipice that drops into space with a breathtaking lurch, to check the passage of time, to annul the force of gravity!
The new sport called Speed Rock, still in its infancy, succeeds in cancelling the space which separate the content of art and  the noble logic of Olympia.
Speed Rock as an experimental synthesis in dance: dancers upon a real/unreal wall, intent on losing weight by thought; levitating by gestures, intuition and force; evoking the tenuous spirit of plastic verticality.
Speed Rock, which preserves reminders and features of a brilliant epoch like that of Futurism. “Singular forms in the continuity of space”, (Umberto Boccioni – 1913) linger in the interaction of bodies inside space, a locus followed by masses moving in horizontal lines.
Speed Rock, which in straining to conquer the heights, shakes the substances of matter following paths by now orthogonal to the past.
Everything takes place in “speed time” at the gigantic Enel Dam of Bissina in Valle di Daone (Trentino), a place traversed by technology that expresses itself in the extreme fullness of nature.
The “great wall” which, 50 years after its conception, becomes the “temple of speed”, the place where emotions break out and quiver before fading away in a few short seconds.
The synthesis of rhythm and strength of Evgeny Vaytsekhovsky, the feline elegance of Tatiana Ruyga, the elastic harmony of Valentina Yurina, the explosive gesture of Tomasz Oleksy, the perfection of Sergey Sinitsyn: the chosen ones, the interpreters of the “marvel of speed”.
And infancy, so precious, reappears to the mind: any wall, however low, was enough to discover at once a fast track to the highest point. Who knows what it is…
Perhaps the will to overcome things, perhaps that desire pushing us to find the limit in order to see if it can be exceeded, perhaps that mysterious consciousness possessed by Man…Or perhaps it is only Speed Rock.

Libor Hroza (CZE), 2006