“Alentejo story” is a brilliant experiment in which Luigi Cinque’s Italian sensibility, along with that of Elena Ledda, Andrea Biondi, Salvatore Bonafede, intertwine with the polyphony of the Portuguese Alentejo. Interpreted by the Ganh_es de Castro Verde and the new flamenco “bailaor andaluzo” of El Choro, the 19-year-old rising star of flamenco who unites tradition with the contemporaneity of dance, the concert also features vocalists Mara Aranda and Efren Lopez from Valencia. Directed by Luigi Cinque, the performance made its first national debut at Villa Pamphili on July 14, 2005. Honorary guests for the show in Rome were musicians Rita Marcotulli and Carlo Rizzo.
(Il corriere della sera, July 18, 2005)

A brief preamble is required for this project. In the last few years, Luigi Cinque has written and organized many concert-events throughout the world. Today, one can consider such an experience a ‘long journey/concert’ between North and South. A long tour, which took place on the cusp of the new millennium and crossed complementary states of history and modes of communication, musical styles, diverse narrative and poetic states, religions, stories of artists encountered along the way, extraordinary men and women with whom he recorded, and maybe the experience of last evident differences before complete globalization came in effect.
The concert-events have always been, for the most part, occasions. Mainly, they have been occasions to encounter local artists. Writing has never denied the possibility of a common narrative on stage, which is made of different styles, languages, forms and intonations. It was Luigi Cinque’s intent to create another language in addition to the modern-day contamination and fusion genres.
Making all of this a reality (which was aided by contributions and goodwill of large international institutions) was a complex process: from finding local artists, putting the wealth of these ideas to the test in laboratories, to holding the actual concerts. During these periods, the artistic encounter was created in its most concrete and real form. This feat could not have been possible without first temporarily abandoning the idea of a particular and specific form, without considering the music created as if ‘traveling through different forms’ instead of seeing concerts as simple artists offering a prepackaged performance.
Of great interest is what happened to the actual texts used, or rather the stories that were sung and recited on stage. It is important to note that when comparing narrative planes we witnessed a phenomenon we called: myth as a trading tool. It means more simply: ‘in this piece we tell a story which belongs to our classical mythology, like for example Ulysses, and once we explain the protagonist’s main characteristics, we asked them if they had similar figures or stories in their cultures. And from here, we discovered that similar mythological characters flourished in these other cultures. After this, we poetically set both versions side by side on stage—analogous characters from different mythologies. And this was how we confronted different narrative forms in music.
The result was highly spectacular, and above all, in line with the preferences of the audience and the market, which has recently acclaimed the international success of cross-over genres.
The countries that ‘crossed over’ were: Senegal, Mali, Kenya, Ethiopia, Zagreb, Morocco, Tunisia, Turkey, Israel and Palestine, Yemen, Pakistan, India, Brazil, Portugal, Greece, Spain and the areas of the Flamenco.
All of the concerts and their socio-anthropologic contexts were filmed and recorded: landscapes, homes, artists and their interviews, tests and practices, encounters with local poets and writers and the preparation of concerts.
The artists that participated in the journeys/concerts are some of the most important jazz and contemporary rock artists in Italy and the world. Nonetheless, the local artists encountered were of great artistic and human interest.

On stage: musicians, writers, poets—all of the actors operating in diverse fragments of modern-day society. The stage thus becomes a container holding a concert-story that is inspired by the Pirandellesque play ‘six, and more, authors in search of a character’. It is a story in which working elements (its better-known rhythms and several important songs) are fused with an electronic structure and a very modern and contemporary instrumental grain.
Makina is a dance, but it is also a hip-hop and ‘industrial’ trip…or the Tarantella dance of the working class of the South.
Makina is jazz…ethno…videoimages…Makina is the poetic word put to the stage.
Makina is the suggestion of the fragments of the working world and its duplicity…Makina is a poetic opera.

And there are those in search of expert young women in foreign languages and modern-day slaves to serve tables meanwhile the upset is already too much meanwhile they are all there ready to change channels to change destiny to change wives and children and their jobs to change ideas to think that in the end all with that fog outside it is better to die inside where it is warm like satiated burping rats. (by Lello Voce, End of the century [and millennium] Rap. Farfalle da combattimento, Bompiani 1999)

Because we are the proletarian of the south, we are the working masses, this enormous mass of workers, we are the one hundred and fifty thousand FIAT workers that built the development of capital and built it for its State. We are the ones who created all of the riches that exist, the ones that receive only the crumbs of those riches. We created all of this wealth, dying from work at FIAT or dying of hunger in the south. And we are the great majority of the proletarian that does not want to work anymore or die for the development of capital and for its State. We cannot take sustaining with these pigs any longer. (Nanni Balestrini, Vogliamo tutto, Feltrinelli 1971)

Therefore, it is not just a re-examination or a re-proposal of the repertoire of the working classes, rather it is a small opera in which rhythmic elements—both the rhythm of rural work, and even more so, the alienation of the factory—are transcribed, re-elaborated and re-addressed. The result is a very danceable type of music, highly original for its rock and jazz infusions and crossovers. It also incorporates recognizable combined electronic sequences in relation to the working class. It features a group comprised of well-known artists from the worlds of jazz, youth rock and popular folk music. The stage is furnished with a screen showing historic images and scenes, which accompany the music—created by one of the most talented visual artists in Italy.
The texts sung are taken from the traditional repertoire of the working classes. They have been re-visited and adapted to the rhythm of the concert. The entire stage design is inspired by the Italian working class, yet in several aspects, it also demonstrates the applicability of the issue in Europe and the world.

LINE UP:
LUIGI CINQUE clarinet/sax/live electronics RAIZ vocals SALVATORE BONAFEDE piano MAURIZIO GIAMMARCO sax ANTONELLO SALIS accordian LUCILLA GALEAZZI vocals ANDREA BIONDI vibraphone NANNI BALESTRINI poet LELLO VOCE poet ALDO NOVE poet ELISA BIAGINI poet GIACOMO VERDE video-maker MARCANTONIO video-maker.

Thinking with images
And not due to cause and effect.
A thought which presumes […] that ideas and objects,
Even the most diverse, are associated with a common rhythm […]
That the world thus forms a semiconscious totality,
Linguistically inexpressible,
But characteristic of a symbolic experience […]
And that such a totality has inexpressible sense in a logical formula
But in a rhythm that confuses and recasts
(Marius Schneider)

Appunti per un Aiace Africano: a composition put to the stage, sonorous fusions and movements that define the poetic aspect of the multiethnic city-metropolis. Italian and Senegalese artists and dancers perform, not in the viewpoint of a popular, ethnic and world music project, but instead with the vision of a score—Campione n.3—a virtual fusion of sounds and landscapes that comprise the global village. An achievable Babel of fragments; a continuously suspended, uninterrupted text pronounced in many languages—from Italian, French, Portuguese to Ancient Greek, Wolof and Sanskrit—used mainly in a rhythmic and metric sense, like a singsong.
The mixed sounds and musical textures that are used in fuse traditionally acoustic instruments with electronic elements. The architectural structure of the music is very contemporary: it involves a double plane, the use of archaic and traditional material to create a sense of the continual presence of an already worn-out ‘past’ future.
Dance is an element of spectacularity, ‘separated’ from its usual, non-dialogical context; dance is the unity between gesture and sound. Dancers intervene as if they were a bona fide chorus of percussions: ‘sonorous bodies’ whose hands, feet, heads, chests become producers of sounds. Here dance sounds to its own beat. Dancers are distant, mute figures who close onto themselves by way of sound. The ancient tragedies are the detonators of contemporary ‘stories’—the anti-hero, the maladjusted, the loss of quality, but also the encounter-clash between logos and mania—and together they become a recuperation of some of the most spontaneous popular elements of stories put to music. The Aiace of Sophocles is like the paradoxal ‘libretto’ of a post-metropolitan opera and an evocation of the hyper-technological Macchina Celibe, intended for a contemporary tradition of the ancient tragedy. (Luigi Cinque)

Why OFF MED?
Off Med=different artistic and productive personalities united by the same aim to plan, organize and produce a ‘dramaturgy of the arts’ that has as its main goal the Mediterranean, in its meaning of….
Transversal=modernity
Disorder=network of liberal and necessary expression

Off Med is a high-tech production centre, aware that all art forms cannot refuse to acknowledge new technologies. Off Med aims to utilize these new technologies as a magnifying glass (like macro) in order to point out, identify and compose projects on the Mediterranean culture.
Off Med refers to (and at the same time wants to be a reference point for) the most important cultural laboratories, artistic associations, and individual artists from southern Europe, Zagreb and the Middle East. It aims to collaborate on thematic and organizational compositions that relate to the Mediterranean because of the belief that without a solid interconnection between the different creative and organizational processes (even those that seem far) real artistic and creative growth is not possible.
Off Med designs and produces events in music, theatre, video, dance, art exhibitions and installations and events on the new ‘spectacularity’ trends. It aims to thoroughly analyze the relationships between the arts with respect to their ability to generate images/memory through cinema, video, albums, visual art and CD Roms. Off Med is a contemporary art project. (Luigi Cinque)

Mediterraneo
Land-water from the mountains, volcanoes, islands: from the countryside, ancient cities and large fluvial basins.
A place unified by temperature: that the breath of wind from the Sahara heats and dries in the summer; that the Atlantic floods the grey rainwater in the winter, sea water surrounded by the large rings of land that are enclosed by it; the costal fragments of Europe, of Africa, of Asia: lands that resonate never ending histories.
Places of places: the land of Demetra and Prosperina.
The sea of Hercules, who fixed the western confines by raising the columns.
The sea of Olympus.
The mouth of the river Stige, the port of Caronte.
But also the sea of the Hittities, the Egyptians, the Etruscans and the Fenici.
The route of the Odyssey.
The land-sea of the Turks, of Muhammad, of Christ.
Of the Lombard’s, of the court of Federico of Sicily, of the roaming Jews.
Our sea: the sea of the travels of Man.
Only within her confines were ships safe from attack: an emptiness unleashed by the ocean. And thus a sea of intense travels, lands of merchants.
But also the land of shepherds: nomads and crooks, taking the sheep from one pasture to another, through the mountains.
And coasts of swamps and deltas of great rivers, covered with sand among the canes. Reclaimed and abandoned lands. Fisherman of salt and fresh waters. Wretched and poor land, under which there is rock, stripped from the mountains for millennia by rural workers, cultivations on walls that crumble.
And the arrival, from far away, of rice, tomatoes, hot peppers, potatoes, corn, apricots, pears and melons.
Land of the city and tenacious villages. Of millennial ports.
Land of cathedrals.
Caravans from the Orient, filled with perfumes and spices.
A sea crossed by migrations, by re-foundations. Land of colonies and homelands.
A place of memory and death: from the battle of Lepanto, of Azio, of Malta, Zama, Prevesa, Sarajevo.
A sea spoken in an endless number of different languages.
That prays and sacrifices to Gods they do not know.
(Franca Rovigatti)