L’Animale by Chiara Bersani

The Old Bailey, London
June 22, 2024

As if to obey the prestigious context, the audience sit tense in The Old Bailey. The Royal Courts of Justice as a venue for dance instils awe, respect and a pin drop silence.

Chiara Bersani’s L’Animale, a new take on Michel Fokine’s The Dying Swan, is one of three dance pieces at LIFT 2024, a theatre festival distinguished by its inspired use of non-traditional venues.

Italian Bersani has made herself an irreplaceable figure in Italy and beyond, as an author, performer, and activist; though those titles do little to reflect the genuine span and depth of her work. In the field of theatrical research, Bersani explores the political body and its relationship to society, particularly one that systematically excludes those who are, by normative standards, different. And now, amidst the elegant expanse of The Old Bailey’s grand hall, Bersani lies atop an octangle metal platform, awaiting our complete attention. 

L’Animale is a work of subtle developments. Minute movements have great effect, should you make the effort to notice them, to appreciate their value to the whole.

Facing away from us, Bersani’s breathe grows. With each exhale, she rocks as if to muster the strength to rise. A soundscape forms from her vocals, and the near distant, earthly rumbles that may well be underground trains. Her voice is all at once a lament, whimper, and song, haunting and singular in the echo chamber of a space. The regular rumbling emphasises Bersani’s isolation in its signification of time passing, all the while she remains on her island, both right before us and so far away.

With clawed fingers, Bersani reaches behind her torso, one arm held rigid and angular, moving in barely perceptible increments. Far removed from the soft feathery wings of a Pavlova-like swan, Bersani is a tender, unadorned image of a suffering animal. Her only decoration is a dress of purple sequins, in which she evokes both a slain beast and a glittering beacon.

The audience are intimate observers of her form and the life it implies. One that is ending and not without suffering. Once adjusted to the slow pace of movement, one discovers a richness conjured from so little, the considered and yet organic way in which Bersani slides from the platform, grounds her feet and inches her way around its structure, while sending her piercing cries outward, louder now, harsher to witness.

The Old Bailey in its mighty, unflinching grandeur is witness, as are we, to Bersani’s profound loneliness. Such sparing movement and the slow stretch of time leaves space to ponder; what kind of life has this animal lived? Are they lost, and if so, do they now return home? Evident too is the striking contrast between the grand space, and Bersani’s minimalist approach, of which we are drip fed.

The Old Bailey’s very walls provoke thought on fairness and liberty, power and justice. It cannot go unnoticed that Bersani is herself an activist for the accessibility of disabled artists in the performing arts scene. Between these walls, L’Animale prompts us to consider whether the animal here has indeed been protected, whether justice prevails.

Bersani eventually disappears from sight. It is a disappearance, but not a forgetting, for her presence echoes through that hall, and in one’s mind, for a while yet.