Like a precise clockwork, Bolero (1928), is still today one of the reasons why the lucky score seems to be strongly linked to an evocation of sensuality.
Michele Merola creates a new version of Bolero, after a deep and long study with this obsessive and repetitive music, trying to fully understand its identity, reasons and functions until he gets the main interpretation: at the end of his studies path, the choreographer inspiration focus on the inexhaustible range of human relations, especially the ones related to couple relationship, in which we often note the mutual and irreconcilable distance between men and women, "the invisible wall" dividing their existence. So, as shades of dance are different as choreography declines the variety of moods that make our existence so "spicy". All human feelings are present in this choreography and Bolero score highlights them from the allusive opening drumbeats to the final orchestra "explosion". Dance conveys to a sort of abstract "bitter tale", allegory of the pain for living and misunderstandings between humans. That's how Bolero become a metaphor of our life always half away between conflict and dialogue, seduction and disappointment, surprise and bewilderment.


La metà dell’ombra stages five entities, physics and spirituals at the same time. The feeling to be part of a ritual, something arcane, a journey into the depth of our soul.

“In Michele Merola dance there is always a time where the human tension and the truth about feelings get exalted: dance brings out the aching sense of life. His dance goes straight to heart, shaped as knife, without intermissions, and breaks our self-confidence. La metà dell’ombra is the last leg of this path. Conceived in 2010, it is structured on human male bodies and can be considered as a journey to explore the mystery of the sacred in us. The choreography moves in a continuous tension between the sense of expiation, expressed with lacerating, self-punitive gestures, and the hope of redemption, and the liberation of the body. There is a constant movement between atonement, punishment, hope and freedom. They are mixed feelings, opposed themselves, drawn in a collective ritual ending. Each frame we see and each choral dance performed exalt the human presence. By those choices the choreographer gains a new dance language that conquered us with strength and evocation”.
Ermanno Romanelli - Dance News