This Premiere was a great opportunity ... a Cinderella far from the stereotype, of fairytale enchantment, a woman who lives the moment with surprise, audacity and disillusionment. As if to say ... we can be our Fairy Godmothers ourselves. In the Naturalis Labor Company all and all very good! The direction / choreography approach that Luciano Padovani has given is truly surprising. Effect costumes, impalpable satins in the sparkling swirl of dances and in the intertwining of seduction and those mining lights, which almost revive the protagonist and her "Disney mice" in an underground key. Essential and transformative scenographies fit perfectly to enhance the multitude and speed of situations in space and feelings. The ash always present ... impalpable but inexorable element / memento, which brings back after the intoxicating ecstasy of the dance to the humble reality ... A disenchanted Cinderella….
Maria Chiara De Neri

"... In this creation, the architect and choreographer from Vicenza put a lot of his own, between talent and vision, faithful to his own rigor, which blossomed coherently in every corner of the stage within a high projection, imaginary and mysterious, of work ... “
Ermanno Romanelli / Dance news

"Padovani chooses for this piece above all a fluid contemporary language, physical and powerful, but accurate"
Silvia Poletti / Danza&Danza

The new 2019/2020 Dance Season of the Verdi Theater in Pisa, chosen by the artistic director Silvano Patacca in collaboration with the Toscana Spettacolo Onlus Foundation, was inaugurated by the Vicenza-based company Naturalis Labor by Luciano Padovani, which staged a national premiere Cenere Cinderella, last Saturday 9 November. However, Padovani's Cinderella is anything but Disney and far from the famous tale of the Brothers Grimm. Everything is gray, dark and ashy. Women are at the mercy of the men who inhabit a Dickensian mining suburb, such as Hard Times - For This Times' famous Coketown. The smoke envelops and hangs over a carpet of ash above which new Cinderella, with long pastel dresses, join in a whirlwind dance with their princes-miners. However, love is aggressive and oppressive. The charm of the first meeting, the illusions of a happy ending are immediately disregarded. An unhealthy attraction that transforms the courtship ritual into a succession of escapes and kidnappings, alternating with softer and more harmonious gestures almost of abandonment to the other, which show a strong technique of the dancers and a skilful control of the body. The dancers face each other in an intense, rhythmic and primordial dance. And immediately the memories of the numerous victims of femicides take shape who still today, unfortunately, occupy the first pages of crime news. Until the quintet of women, compact and in perfect synchrony, allies and rebels. A sequence of great visual impact that has as its inspirational model the dramatic choreography Le Sacre du printemps by Pina Baush, where the violent and impetuous sacrificial rite takes place on an expanse of earth. The shoes are thrown from every part of the scene over which, the unfortunate Cinderella, try to put on the "crystal slipper" avidly coveted, but without success. Limping and covered with ash, they then try to find their balance. And this is where, once again, the strength of women emerges. Without losing hope, they fall and get up in a continuous and cyclical flow interrupted by a liberating gesture: a dancer finally takes off her shoes. Only in this way can women finally be reborn from their ashes as legendary phoenixes. There are no blue fairies to erase this violence or to turn mice into haughty horses and pumpkins into splendid carriages. We are helpless voyeurs of these unhealthy loves. We are complicit spectators of a great force, Resilience '.
Marta Sbranti / Uninfonews.it