I N T E R P L A Y /24
Festival Internazionale di Danza Contemporanea
23 May > 16 June / TURIN
artistic direction Natalìa Casorati
Curated by Associazione Culturale Mosaico Danza
FESTIVAL INTERPLAY/24 contemporary dance and performing art
From May 23rd to June 16th, 2024, the INTERPLAY FESTIVAL hosts 25 companies, in long and short formats for 7 NATIONAL PREMIERES, inhabiting 4 theaters and 4 multidisciplinary spaces, which due to their characteristics are cultural reference points for the city.
The Festival’s programming was born from valuable scouting of the contemporary scene, but also thanks to the construction of numerous international collaborations: 15 are the italian dance companies, with established realities and young proposals to lay eyes on for the first time, joined by 10 international companies, including 1 non-European.
INTERPLAY aims to be a space for dialogue between national and international creativity, recognizing how Culture carries messages of beauty and peace, giving space to a multiplicity of artistic voices.
The FESTIVAL reconfirms itself as a NECESSARY INSTRUMENT to represent the complexity of the present with its contradictions and weaknesses and our responsibility lies in creating crossroads, opportunities for visibility, in order to encourage the growth of artists by supporting their artistic research and their experiential growth, precisely in these years when there are more and more economic-social contradictions. The section of outdoor programming, increases cultural offer directed to citizens, even in suburban areas.
3 are the THEMATIC TALKS after the performances, among operators, artists and the audience: therefore on May 28th, after the show FEMINA, we will host a public talk based on the theme of the figure of women in contemporary society.
On June 8th the Department of AGRICULTURAL SCIENCES of the University of Torino will be involved after the performance PARADISO [giardino], by Gruppo Nanou, to raise public awareness on environmental sustainability.
On June 4th, there will be a professionalization workshop on communication, addressed to dancers and choreographers, with the expert in International Cultural Management: KATHERINA VASILIADIS.
4 are the MACRO-THEMES identified, under which to collect the poetics of the hosted shows:
BODY IDENTITY and DIVERSITY > Investigating the boundary between our self and the outside world; POLITICAL BODY > the artistic practice in order to promote political and social change; ECOLOGY > environmental sustainability; MULTIDISCIPLINARY > contamination of multiple artistic languages, from video to live music and visual arts.
BODY IDENTITY and DIVERSITY
Getting to know the other: between identity pluralities, gender identities, sexual orientations and inclusion, creativity in dance questions one of the most topical issues.
Compagnia ABBONDANZA/BERTONI (Casa del Teatro Ragazzi e Giovani, May 28th), recognized as one of the most interesting artistic realities on the Italian scene, returns to the festival with its latest creation FEMINA (2023), the second episode of the three-year project “Io è un altro,” on the strength of its nomination in the “Miglior spettacolo di danza” category of the UBU Award. It is not a comfortable proposal, that of Abbondanza/Bertoni, it does not seek unconditional approval and applause from the audience; it is a dance that asks questions without giving answers, that stirs and shakes without offering support, indelibly scratching certainties and preconceptions to transport in a journey that will inevitably have an uncertain outcome.
In the same semantic universe moves AKIRA YOSHIDA, whose choreographic language ranges from break dance to contemporary dance and who, because of his versatility, is one of the regular performers in the shows of the well-known Belgian company Peeping Tom. For the first time in Italy at INTERPLAY he presents OROIMEN (Officine Caos, May 30th), an intimate journey into a man’s memory through memories, youth, love, life and death.
The eclectic German company FRANTICS (Casa del Teatro Ragazzi e Giovani, June 4th), links different disciplines such as break dance and contemporary dance to a theoretical and philosophical approach with a mission to inspire and transform people and communities. Frantics is on the program with ORDINARY PEOPLE starring Marco Di Nardo E Juan Tirado. LA MEDIDA QUE NOS HA DE DIVIDIR (Casa del Teatro Ragazzi e Giovani, June 4th) is the title of the Spanish company QABALUM: a pure duet, celebrating affection and the desire to be together. The two bodies lie, measure each other, intertwine, caress, and pierce each other, creating a choreographic script about the passage of time and human drives.
Also the French LEÏLA KA searches for the Identity of the Body. A choreographer of brilliant path, she brings to the festival PODE SER (Casa del Teatro Ragazzi e Giovani, June 4th), a powerful solo, where she stages the limits, aspirations, but also the dismay of being in the world and being only oneself.
The Spanish duo formed by HELENA CANAS and OLGA LLADÓ in KOSHAS (Casa del Teatro Ragazzi e Giovani, May 28th) reflects on the different contexts in which the physical body and the emotional body influence each other. Bonds, manipulation, awakening and consciousness are the aspects explored in this work, through the union and not the separation of mind and body.
Finally, GIOVANNI INSAUDO, choreographer and founder of the dance collective “I Vespri” supported in partnership with the Palcoscenico Danza festival in Turin and winner in 2023 of the Award TWAIN_direzioni altre. In the creation I’VE SEEN THAT FACE BEFORE (Teatro Astra, June 5th) he analyzes the concept of beginnings and endings, the metaphor of life.
POLITICAL BODY
A body is political when it takes on messages and revolutions in a society that demands its ethical and practical control. Here it is the Chinese choreographer XINGXING GONG, winner of the 1st MASDANZA Jury Prize and Special ACORAN Award 2022, with SHADE (Lavanderia a Vapore, June 8th), which features the seductive, award-winning dancer Tian Chen in a solo inspired by the works of the Irish painter Francis Bacon. Through the combination of body, sight, sound, object and space, the performance explores a new bodily expression in search of an inner drama shared on both a physical and psychological level. At the same time, it focuses on the connection between the work and the audience in order for a spiritual and visual resonance between the two. Political bodies are also what the Spanish company ERTZA brings to the stage (Barriera di Milano, May 25th). In MARGINALIA, the Spanish dancer Pilar Andres and Mozambique’s excellent dancer Deissane Machava perform small danced scenes of life fragments of forgotten people or those on the margins of society. Stories we see in everyday life, but of which we hardly stop to think about their protagonists: women and men who face long, exhausting and sometimes traumatic migration journeys to Europe and find themselves on the other side of the world, away from their families, conducting essential domestic work without being noticed.
And again from Spain comes to INTERPLAY the signature duo of COLECTIVO GLOVO, a Galician-Portuguese company co-directed by choreographers and dancers Hugo Pereira and Esther Latorre. They bring to the festival the performance MAPA (Imbarchino del Valentino, June 1), a work inspired by the world of refugees and borders.
We move to Eastern Europe with Polish choreographer MACIEJ KUZMINSKI and his magnificent dancer Daria Koval, in RESISTANCE MOVEMENT (Teatro Astra, June 5th). Always convinced that art and dance can be a vehicle for peace, INTERPLAY programs this performance not to forget the many conflicts that hurt human beings on earth. With powerful movement and a fragile voice, she tells us about her country and the war: in fact, the 27-year-old dancer Daria Koval comes from the city of Dnipro in eastern Ukraine and when the war started she thought she would never dance again, but now instead she makes us witness this conflict. The performance won 1st Prize and Special ACORAN Award at MASDANZA 2023, Best Performance and Audience Award at SoloCoreografico, 1st Prize and Audience Award at Gdansk Solo Festival.
VITTORIO PAGANI, class of 2000, with A SOLO IN THE SPOTLIGHTS (Teatro Astra, June 5th) dives into the meandering world of performance, in which a soloist questions his place on stage. Richard Dyer’s stardom, the Beat Generation revolution, the austere look of post-punk and British humor come together in this testimony hidden in plain sight: traversing moments of obedience, subversion and rebellion against stage space and unsustainable creative processes, his dance aims to propose new solutions.
With as many reflections on the body, the Festival presents two female choreographers whose artistic paths stand out on the national scene for the consistency of their artistic research. LUNA CENERE, on the strength of a path that since 2017 has seen her rewarded and supported in Italy and around the world, with SHOES ON (Lavanderia a Vapore, June 8th), proposes at INTERPLAY an archive of gestures and movements that from the most ancestral forms evolves to postures proper to athletics or dance. Only two pairs of shoes dress the performers’ bodies, becoming an additional subject of the scene. CHIARA AMEGLIO presents LINGUA (Lavanderia a Vapore, June 11th) a performance that explodes intimacy, closeness, empathy, language and invites the audience to deposit their own signs, that is, to write their own traces on the performer’s body, which becomes a canvas, a cave, an instrument of translation of unspeakable words, an echo of collective micro-movements, a bearer of a single and comune identity.
MULTIDISCIPLINARY
Contemporary research dance constantly dialogues with other artistic languages, from theater to visual arts, from photography to music, giving rise to shows and performances capable of touching unprecedented chords.
The INTERPLAY playbill cannot miss JACOPO JENNA who, after the success of Alcune coreografie (presented as well at Interplay/22), opens the 24th edition of the festival with DANSE MACABRE! (Casa del Teatro Ragazzi e Giovani, May 23th). His research through the dialogue between dance, choreography and video generates different performative contexts: figures mirror and double themselves, penetrate their own image and become not only performers but also embodiments of movement on stage. Contributing to the creation are musician Bienoise / Alberto Ricca and video maker Roberto Fassone.
The mingling of dance, music and art also transpires from the performance I’LL DO, I’LL DO, I’LL DO by DEWEY DELL (Officine Caos, May 30th), a dance and performing arts company active since 2006, composed of Teodora Castellucci, Agata Castellucci, Vito Matera and musician Demetrio Castellucci. I’ll do, I’ll do, I’ll do is a solo that draws inspiration from ancient rites related to the fertility of the Earth: behind the image of the demonic, anthropophagic, magical and violent sabbath, one glimpses the distorted echo of an ecstatic cult dominated by a mysterious nocturnal goddess. The company was the winner of the Danza&Danza 2023 Award as best Italian production.
The site-specific performance PERDIZIONE (MAO Museo d’Arte Orientale, June 7th) by STEFANIA TANSINI, winner of the Premio UBU 2022 as best performer under 35, with live music by Claudio Tortorici also posits the body as an element of passage in listening to what the moment, the place, the sound offers.
More contaminations between different artistic languages in the performance of the young company YOY PERFORMING ARTS founded in 2021 by Emma Zani and Roberto Doveri (dancers and choreographers) and Timoteo Carbone (composer), with a view to uniting dance, music and contemporary art in the search for new forms of expression. With the work INESORABILMENTEUNAVIA (Lavanderia a Vapore, June 11th), which is inspired by the video-opera Il Bisonte (1998) by Bizhan Bassiri and Stefano Taglietti, they investigate the relentless movement of nature that constantly regenerates itself, transforming pure energy into form and vice versa, without ever ceasing its course.
Choreographer CAMILLA MONGA will present the new female duet PASSAGE (Lavanderia a Vapore, June 11th), staged with talented performer Chiara Montalbani accompanied by musician, sound designer and composer Federica Furlani.
Also in this edition, INTERPLAY brings dance to the streets of Barriera di MIlano with an itinerant performance. It will be the young dancer and choreographer SARA SGUOTTI who will create the multidisciplinary itinerant performance: DEDICA #1.2.3 (Barriera di Milano, May 25th), with live music created in collaboration with a female musical duo active in the multi-ethnic neighborhood.
ECOLOGY
Also at the center of the artists’ attention is the theme of the environment and its preservation as well as attention to man and his traditions.
ADRIANO BOLOGNINO‘s new creation COME NEVE (Casa del Teatro Ragazzi e Giovani, May 23rd), starts from the inspiration of embroideries made with crochet. The two performers with their bodies execute a weave, a conscious interweaving of movements inspired by precious handmade embroidery, generating the shapes of the costumes they wear, handmade by experts in the art of crocheting in the Campania tradition.
For unconventional spaces, NICOLA GALLI‘s POP performance (Imbarchino del Valentino, June 1st), is aimed at a very young audience. Twelve years later, the author offers a new version of his debut performance “O | proiezione dell’architettura ossea“, renewed in name and intent. On a square platform covered with bubble wrap, the dancer moves by bending and extending his body joints to draw figures and geometries, inviting the audience to interact with the material and space of the performance. As does MICHELE SCAPPA with THERE IS A PLANET (JUNE 1st, Imbarchino del Valentino), which takes its inspiration from Ettore Sottsass’s photography exhibition at Triennale Milano (2017-18), from which it derives its eponymous title.
Finally, the Gruppo Nanou, formed in 2004 by Marco Valerio Amico, Rhuena Bracci e Roberto Rettura with sound imagery by Bruno Dorella, returns to the festival after many years. With the project PARADISO [Giardino] (Lavanderia a Vapore, June 8), a finalist for the Premio UBU 2022, they propose an in-depth look at the format of the theatrical ritual, its fruition and how the choreographic object is used to inhabit and rewrite a place, for this occasion outdoors, in a garden.
The festival implements its programming with THREE THEMATIC TALKS open to the public, dancers and choreographers in the area. Moments of encounter that will see the participation of experts in dialogue with the choreographers gone on stage, to reflect on the issues discussed. On May 28th at the end of the performance FEMINA, choreographers Michele Abbondanza and Antonella Bertoni will be the protagonists of a meeting to discuss how the rules governing stereotypes identify an eternal submission to the male-gaze (“male gaze”) of the female gender. On June 8th, the Department of Agricultural and Forestry Sciences of the University of Turin will be involved after the performance PARADISO by Gruppo Nanou to raise environmental awareness starting with a walk through Parco della Certosa. Coming from abroad instead will be International Cultural Management expert Katherina Vasiliadis who will hold a workshop on June 4th to provide instruments for choreographers and companies to communicate their work in a unique and effective way on the international scene.
To support the training of dancers, a MASTERCLASS with independent Chinese choreographer XINGXING GONG will be held on June 6th at NOD – Nuova Officine della Danza. Through the combination of body, sight, sound, object and space, the formal research will explore various body expressions starting from listening to inner feelings, shared with physical ones.
Natalia Casorati