13/11/2023 - Daniele Luchetti opens up a virtual dialogue with illustrious ballet dancer Carla Fracci, who passed away in 2021, also widening his focus to the performing arts

Carla Fracci and her father Luigi Fracci in Codice Carla

Carolyn Carlson, who emphasised the difference between contemporary and classical dance, acknowledges its shared identity and says: “Carla worked with stories but she herself was authentic. As well as being a legend, she was also a wonderful, normal person”. The man gathering together accounts of Carla Fracci is Daniele Luchetti, the director behind the documentary film Codice Carla, which will only be screening in Italian cinemas on 13, 14 and 15 November, via Nexo Digital, and is dedicated to the great choreographer. Having passed away on 27 May 2021, she was one of the leading figures in the international world of dance, with her grace and tenacity helping her to win over theatres, marquees, churches and town squares. Almost everything has already been said about Fracci, and it can’t have been easy for the director of Our Life [+see also:
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That’s why artists working in the same field as Carla Fracci – Alessandra Ferri, Roberto Bolle, Eleonora Abbagnato – also appear in this documentary, alongside others whose work is diametrically opposed to classical dance, such as performers Marina Abramovic and Chiara Bersani, actor Jeremy Irons, and jazz musician Enrico Rava, who share their own personal experiences. Using archive footage, old TV interviews with Carla Fracci and other, ad-hoc interviews, Luchetti opens up a virtual dialogue with the distinguished dancer, dividing the story into chapters: in “The Body”, Bolle explains how Carla worked with determination “to turn her limitations into strengths”, and Alessandra Ferri speaks about how the pain of strained limbs disappears the moment you start to dance. In the second part, Carolyn Carlson speaks of the Jungian daimon and talent as gifts as well as “duties”. And she talks about the ego, “which steps aside when I improvise movements. I’m working for the art form itself. We disappear because we represent all of humanity”.  Carla Fracci shied away from stardom and shared her art with humility. She brought dance to factories and prisons. “The audience needs to have this abstract figure who dances, but I’m a woman who has problems, like any other”. But what did set her apart, however, was her rigour. Accused of “spreading her too thin”, in an old interview her theatre director husband Beppe Menegatti replied: “Carla is one of the 5 or 6 great stars of international ballet, she has a message to convey to the audience, and this message can only be put across through constant performances”.

For Marina Abramovic, popularity “is a collateral effect”. It’s not the objective of art. She remembers that in the Seventies, she had an audience of 10 people. What do audiences look for? According to Bersani: “A desire to see something that you can’t see elsewhere. Dance indulges in abstractionism and great physicality, too, both of which are so radical it’s hard to imagine finding them in another language”. Abramovic quotes Martha Graham: everywhere a ballerina dances is sacred ground, even if, in Marina’s eyes, “the audience and the performer create a unique work of art”. One of the most intriguing and unsettling choices made in the documentary is Thom Yorke’s role as music supervisor, and the music itself, put forward by Atoms For Peace and edited by Yorke and Sam Petts-Davies.

Codice Carla is produced by Anele and Luce Cinecittà together with RAI Cinema.

(Translated from Italian)