Roberto Bolle also makes the words dance in a personal dictionary, a zibaldone of thoughts in which he opens his gaze to himself and to life.
An unprecedented way of narrating oneself in which the body and soul live in carefully chosen words, from 'Water', which opens, to 'Volontà', which closes, his new book: 'Words that dance', in the library for Rizzoli.
A journey into beauty, art and humanity, with images in which the greatest Italian dancer, étoile of the Teatro alla Scala since 2004, shows himself in all his beauty in portraits and while dancing.
"The great theaters, the squares, the Rai program 'Danza con me' taught me to speak, first with the body and then with the voice", explains Bolle, who has thus overcome his shyness and returns to Rai1, on 1 January in prime time, with the fourth edition of 'Danza con me' which opens the year with the first guest Vasco Rossi.
In the book we discover that Bolle is lazy, extremely messy, who loves to travel and adores Japan, who enjoys cooking, who believes in human angels like the "many doctors and nurses, who risk their lives to save those of others. ".
We relive the exceptional encounter with Nureyev who was "pure charisma: he went up on stage and everything else disappeared" and the one, at 23, with choreographer William Forsythe "who had completely deconstructed the language of ballet to create an original one . It was a dive into a renewed freedom ".
There are the great masters he was lucky enough to meet and his gratitude to Alessandra Ferri and John Neumeier.
And if there is a place where you cannot lie, Bolle says, "it is the stage that looks inside us, reads us deeply and shows us for who we really are".
A unique autobiography, made from a constellation of words.
In 'Anima' Bolle speaks to us of dance as "air, breath and wind" and says that it is "the art that, more than any other, challenges physics, freeing us from weight and gravity".
In 'Love' he states that it "resembles time".
In 'Danza' he argues that "if music is the voice of the soul, dance is its calligraphy. It is the ink with which the body draws its emotions in space".
In many cases the great dancer dwells on the etymology of the words as in 'Charisma' which derives from the Greek chàrism which means "grace".
"A word full of meanings, whose most important and deepest sense, however, I believe is 'gift'", he says.
And there are also literary quotations such as for 'Beauty': "I think Dostoevsky was right when he made Prince Myshkin say that beauty will save the world", he points out.
Ample space for the great pole of attraction that for Bolle has always been cinema with Fred Astaire and Michael Jackson as points of reference and among the most loved films, those with the great dancers: Two lives and a turning point or The sun at midnight with Mikhail Baryšnikov, Valentino with Rudolf Nureyev, Billy Elliot.
Great importance in the book also in words such as humility and falling where, in the latter case, to make the difference "are the strength of mind and the dignity with which one gets up and resumes one's path".
A particular meaning has for Bolle, 'Balance', because in life "it is one of the qualities that most help us to face adversity" and because dance itself "is essentially balance".
Bolle also wanted to include the Italian word in this atlas because "I am proud of it" and "Scala", "my theater" where he entered for the first time at 12 and where he spent his life as a student, as a member of the corps de ballet, then as principal dancer and, finally, étoile.
He acknowledges that for him social media "has been of great help in bringing a more heterogeneous audience to dance", less niche.
And it looks to the future with confidence because "life always pays us back with the same currency with which we invest in it".
(HANDLE).