I am an Italian contemporary dancer and freelance choreographer based in Copenhagen, Denmark.
I graduated at Codarts-Rotterdam Dance Academy and worked and lived in Holland, Germany, Switzerland, Italy and Denmark.
May the journey continue.
FULL LENGTH VIDEO https://vimeo.com/209301695/461d1a8512
Dancer Kyle White
Length 14 mintues
The piece without founding is a solo dance piece born from a strong will to choreograph despite the lack of means.
The piece sees a dancer exposed and vulnerable in front of the audience, having the hard task to satisfy the natural audience expectation to be entertained.
Without having access to funding, the performer cannot use the help of any extra elements: lighting, music, costumes, props, video projections…
With the intention to anyway deliver a performance he will count on himself: his body, his voice, his will to create and his love for dancing.
Himself as a mere human being.
The piece wants to inquiry the very close connection between art and money.
The artist is a special figure that has always been seen as somebody with a special talent that, if good enough, will manage to succeed and reach his goals to create art no matter the financial situation.
A myth.
The piece without funding wants to raise questions such as:
how important are the elements of costumes, lighting, and music for the art of choreography?
Can the art of choreography exist if you cannot have access to the other elements?
What is then choreography?
FULL LENGHT VIDEO https://vimeo.com/170773599/67927ac174
Dancer Jernej Bizjak
Lenght 14 minutes
Solo for Real is a journey into a man’s mind and his desperate attempt to find a moment of peace while in his head chaos has exploded.
Traumatic life experiences, sometimes not even recognized as such, could stay in our minds in form of memories that with time can evolve and lead to psychotic disorders.
To create the piece and to define the personality of the main character of Solo for Real I have been researching on the subject of mental illness.
The following information has been my base and my motivation for the creation of the piece.
There are many conditions recognized as mental illness: anxiety disorders, mood disorders, psychotic disorders, eating disorders, addiction disorders, personality disorders, post traumatic stress disorders.
Some of these conditions can affect also healthy individuals for a certain period of time. In fact nearly 50% of adults experience a mental illness at some point in their lives, but only 20% of them gets to receive professional medical help.
Other times symptoms can manifest to healthy individuals without necessary lead to the mental illness. For example it is estimated that about 25% of the population hear voices that others are not able to hear (auditory hallucinations).
For an individual in our modern society is very difficult to admit any of these conditions.
Although in the past 40 years decisive steps forward have been made, those suffering from certain conditions are still labelled as less functional individuals and may be blamed for their illness or viewed as lazy or irresponsible. Mental illness may be seen as less real or less legitimate than physical illness.
All this can leave the individual in a condition of absolute loneliness.
Solo for Real wants to capture this loneliness and the individual effort to push those images and voices in his head away, while to try to relax becomes almost an obsession.
TEASER LINK https://vimeo.com/184232586/aed6758142
‘Besame Mucho' is undoubtedly a duet about love and relationship between two people in its most simple and recognizable form.
A universal concept, maybe artistically devalued in modern days, but which continues to be the motion of almost everyone’s life.
Two people meet. They see each other. They attract each other. They come together in a lip-to-lip contact, ubiquitously recognized as kiss.
Here the piece divides for me personally in two different elements:
PHYSICAL ELEMENT. One challenge developed in this project was to keep the dancers in constant contact between their lips.
This condition creates a strong limitation to movement possibilities. The field of vision is drastically reduced. A broad and glossy view of space is fundamental for a dancer’s balance, to fulfill the full management of movements and even more crucial for the management of partnering work.
The mere act of walking whilst holding the lip-to-lip contact with another person requires constant balance shifts, perfect coordination and sensitivity between the two dancers, to be able to perform on stage with limitations to their vision.
SYMBOLIC ELEMENT. The kiss is an image that universally is an expression of a feeling, and in almost every case is a positive statement.
The kiss between two people has always been the subject of works, poems, portraits and sculptures; it is the most represented and representative image of love, much more than the sexual act itself.
Through the development of the piece the act of kissing will lose its uttermost poetic meaning.
What initially appears as a kiss and will bring with it its most romantic connotation, will be transformed into a mere physical limitation and an obstacle to overcome. Almost a prison.
Starting with harmonious movements, symbolizing the meeting of two people and falling in love, the piece will pass gradually to a phase of suffocation and frustration brought by the restriction and the presence of the other person so close to become nagging.
The piece is today in a work in progress. It is at the moment 12 minutes long and (differently from the teaser that you are able to see here) it is performed by 2 male dancers.
The Swedish composer Per-Henrik Mäenpää, in my opinion composer of extraordinary skills, is at the moment composing the music of the final version of the duet, which will be ready by April the 20th.
You can follow his work here:
http://per-henrik.com/en/
As a work in progress I do not have yet pictures of the piece, therefore I have used as cover image of this project a picture of a previous work.