MAURO BIGONZETTI: Italy's New Maestro of Dance.

Choreographer Mauro Bigonzetti, who has restored Aterballetto to its prominence in Italian dance, premieres the second part of his Dante trilogy, Comoedia, this month.

When thirty-eight-year-old choreographer Mauro Bigonzetti in 1997 became artistic director of Aterballetto, Italy's most renowned independent ballet troupe, the occasion was a triumphant homecoming. He had left the company in 1993 an outstanding dancer whose gift for choreography had attracted considerable attention. When he returned, he was one of Italy's leading choreographers. The changes he has made at Aterballetto since then have been welcome and long overdue. His sixteen captivating dancers are now a high-spirited ensemble, thanks to Bigonzetti's special capacity for making everyone feel a fundamental part of his creative process.

Aterballetto had revolutionized the Italian dancescape in the 1980s, when ballet was dominated by companies affiliated with opera houses. Directed by choreographer Amedeo Amodio, the independent company became the model for a permanent ballet troupe, technically bold and artistically diverse, with an impressive repertory of works by Alvin Ailey, Kenneth MacMillan, Glen Tetley, William Forsythe, and Lucinda Childs. By the 1990s, however, Amodio's increasingly eclectic choreography predominated, at the expense of audience interest and dancer involvement; and Balletto di Toscana had taken the lead in encouraging choreographers--Bigonzetti among them--and changing the direction of Italian dance.

Most of Toscana's dancemakers came from avant-garde backgrounds. Bigonzetti was the first with professional classical ballet schooling. Trained at the Rome Opera Ballet School, he had danced there in Roland Petit's creations and in patched-up productions of the classics before leaving for Aterballetto in 1982. Bigonzetti put his artistic sensibility and technical command into every ballet he performed. He was not only a bold dancer but also a moving interpreter, outstanding in demi-caractere roles. His Chinese Magician in Leonide Massine's Parade remains unforgettable. He excelled in those pieces in which he could display his dazzling stamina--Balanchine, Forsythe, Ailey, Tetley and Hans van Manen. Bigonzetti, by absorbing into his sinewy body their energies and dynamics, is credited with setting a new Italian way of performing ballet.

The failings of Amodio's artistic leadership, however, soon took their toll. "Dancing began to bore me," Bigonzetti says. "I thought that it had exhausted all of its possibilities for me as a dancer. But I felt that I had to do something else, and that something became a compulsion to choreograph."

His opportunity to experiment as a dancemaker came in 1990 during a choreographic workshop at the Danza Primavera Festival in Grassina, a small town near Florence. His Sei in movimento, a concert piece set to one of Bach's suites for unaccompanied cello, was created for companions from Aterballetto--the title is a pun on "six in motion" and "you are in motion"--and pays a sentimental debt to neoclassical and postclassical ballet masters, especially van Manen and Forsythe. The assurance he displayed, especially in working out the enchainements, revealed a young man who knew ballet well and could express that knowledge in his own poetic idiom.

The ballet made such a strong impression that former ballerina Elisabetta Terabust, then director of Rome Opera Ballet, asked him to mount it for her company. Balletto di Toscana then commissioned Turnpike (1992), also set to Bach and conceived as a hymn to speed and energy; its vigorous athletic style and its sudden changes of moods revealed a moving lyrical inspiration that touched the spectators' souls. (John Neumeier, after watching a touching piece that Bigonzetti created for Balletto di Toscana soloist Eugenio Scigliano, declared such emotional response as typical of Bigonzetti's effect on an audience.) Turnpike, a great success, showed that it was possible to create an Italian neoclassical ballet with a contemporary touch. Here was an Italian choreographer who could explore the infinite challenges the ancient danse d'ecole steadily launches.

In Balletto di Toscana Bigonzetti found the ideal environment to work, without any pressure and with a complete creative freedom. Its wonderful dancers had the stamina and technique to meet his demands, and Bigonzetti knew how to test and extend their strengths with new challenges. His first full-evening ballet with the company, Mediterranea (1993), was an abstract, imaginary journey through the Mediterranean world, inspired by a wide range of music and dominated by a powerful, space-devouring tension. A great success, Mediterranea soon became the troupe's calling card (U.S. audiences saw it last spring during the company's first American tour).

In recent creations Bigonzetti's abstract language has become both more expressive and neoclassical as the dancers intensely expressed anxiety and sorrow in bursts, contractions, and vibrations. Bodies were linked to the ground in sculptural poses; Mediterranea possessed an energy with dynamic implosions that were like stifled cries. His shorter works for Balletto di Toscana also marked this important passage from light movement to darker moods. The most outstanding of these dances, Pression, translates Helmut Lachenmann's restless music into an ambiguous pas de quatre for a grotesque male duo and two Olympian women.

Bigonzetti's progress has been little short of overwhelming, and what makes his success particularly exciting is that it has contributed to a growing worldwide respect for the dance of Italy. No other Italian choreographer---classical or modern--has attracted such attention and acclaim. Within four years, he skillfully acquired a vocabulary capable of expressing intimate emotions. Commissions came from the most important Italian opera houses, as well as from international ballet companies and superstars. Invitations arrived from artistic directors Derek Deane (English National Ballet), Nanette Glushak (Toulouse Ballet du Capitole), Reid Anderson (Stuttgart Ballet), Richard Cragun (Berlin Opera Ballet), and Roland Petit (Ballet National de Marseille), as well as from Julio Bocca (Ballet Argentino).

In the La Scala production of Beni Montresor's Witches of Venice, set to music by Philip Glass, he was playful (Carla Fracci's cameo is a jewel of irony). In Voyeur, The Miraculous Mandarin, and Don Giovanni, he freely explored different forms of sensuousness ("which is not just about sex," he explains, "but about the five senses, the way our bodies, our skin can feel the outside world's spurs"). For his part, Bigonzetti sees these experiences as invaluable opportunities to grow: "Working with all these wonderful dancers, with an artist of such an intelligence and modesty as Julio Bocca, or finding a mutual understanding as I had with Margaret Illmann and Robert Tewsley, are thrilling moments in art and life."

After Amodio's dismissal, the backers of Aterballetto decided that Bigonzetti was the one to restore the company. His past ties and his blossoming talent as a choreographer made his position similar to those of other artists who have changed and developed European contemporary ballet for years. Inspired by the experiences of Kylian, Neumeier, and Forsythe, Bigonzetti accepted.

Last year, his first year on the job, he produced six ballets; the archaic and explosive Persephassa and the highly theatrical Furia Corporis signal new advances, and Comoedia, a trilogy inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy, indicates an expanding ambition (the second part will be premiered this month). He also revived Forsythe's Steptext, created for Aterballetto, and, while commissioning Kylian and Angelin Preljocaj to create for upcoming seasons, he has encouraged some of his dancers to choreograph. Bigonzetti brushes aside praise for these past achievements.

"It is just a start," he says--the start of a new life for him, for Aterballetto, its sixteen dancers, and for a vigorous, passionate, bold style of Italian dance.

Silvia Poletti is an Italian Correspondent for Dance Magazine.