The chemistry of dance. Altered States – the title of the 17th International Festival of Contemporary Dance (13 – 29 July), is the third chapter that director Wayne McGregor continues to explore this discipline of motion, in dialogue with techno culture and the most advanced scientific thought, and in a perceptional relationship with the audience.
“The artists and art works selected for Biennale Danza 2023 – explains the British choreographer – are movement alchemists. Their work is driven by an insatiable curiosity to explore and experiment both in process and performance; through
improvisation, soma-sensory installation, radical minimalism or with surprising departures of form and context. Fundamentally, they challenge traditional dance orthodoxies and in doing so release us to experience our bodies anew, connecting our external models of the world with our lesser-known internal maps – altering our states of understanding and experience”.
The artist and pioneer of complexity in artistic thought and performance is Simone Forti, the Festival’s Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, “an artist – writes McGregor – who has forever reframed the dialogue between visual art and contemporary dance”.
A retrospective will be dedicated to the work of the Italian-American movement artist, a survey of all her art starting in the 1960s – drawings, holograms, video, photography, notebooks, poetry, performance. The exhibition, which closed on April 2nd at the Museum of Contemporary Arts in Los Angeles, will be shown in
collaboration with the MOCA itself in Venice for Biennale Danza.
The 17th International Festival of Contemporary Dance continues its long-term programme of commissions for new dance aimed at young artists and Italian and foreign companies, of mentoring and training, hospitality, international productions and co-productions, composing a panorama of all new work that can contribute to the development of dance thinking.
The inauguration of the Festival has therefore been entrusted to two young artists: Oona Doherty, two years ago the Silver Lion and now a focus of interest for the many festivals, theatres and institutions in Europe which have co-produced Navy Blue with La Biennale; and Andrea Peña, a native of Colombia now based in Montréal, winner of the international call for a new choreography, Bogota, together with her multidisciplinary company Andrea Peña & Artists. With them, Luna Cenere, born in 1987, who has developed an idea of the body as landscape, as an element of complex architectural compositions in space, winner of the second call for a new choreography addressed to Italian artists for her project Vanishing Place.
The 16 young dancers and 2 choreographers of Biennale College Danza 2023, will be in residence in Venice for three intensive months of training and experience in the field in Venice, which will conclude on the stages of the Festival with an articulated programme of repertory pieces and new creations. On the one hand, the importance of transmitting knowledge from mentor to student and on the other, of stimulating the contemporary talent for invention, providing not only production support, but also the tools, methods and time required for the realisation.
Duo by William Forsythe, a piece from 1997 that dissects and revises the principles of the pas de deux, a must in the contemporary repertory, will be presented in a new production by Riley Watts and Brigel Gjoka, formerly dancers with Forsythe who had produced a new version back in 2015, which will now be extended to involve all the Biennale College dancers. Dance Constructions, the historic
series of performances by Simone Forti, a perfect synthesis of the research into movement that has distinguished the Italian-American artist’s practice since the beginning of her career, will be reconstructed for and with the Biennale College dancers under the mentorship of Sarah Vox Swenson. The performances, which will be repeated several times each day, will be an integral part of the retrospective dedicated to Simone Forti. Xie Xin, considered a key figure in contemporary
choreography as the expression of a fluid and intangible dance, will be commissioned to create a new work with the participants of the College. Finally, the dancers will work together to produce two new original creations conceived by the choreographers selected for the College.
A new work has also been commissioned to Pontus Lidberg. The choreographer, filmmaker and dancer rooted in the classical vocabulary of ballet, which he has successfully brought back into circulation while projecting it towards the future, a brilliant performer of the works of many great choreographers – from Jiří Kylián to Ohad Naharine – and later choreographer for major companies on both sides of the ocean – from the New York City Ballet to the Paris Opera Ballet – will present the
world premiere of On the nature of Rabbits.
The Festival will furthermore feature many international choreographers, some of them renowned, others appearing exclusively for La Biennale, others yet to be discovered on European stages. Coming to Italy for the first time is the Cuban company of the superstar of international ballet Carlos Acosta, and Acosta Danza, which under the title Ajiaco composes choreographies by Sidi-Larbi Cherkaoui,
Javier De Frutos, Michaela Taylor, Alexis Fernandez. Also in Italy for the first time is Botis Seva and his youthful company Far from the Norm, champions of a dance that is grounded in the hip hop culture, pulsating and charged with powerful content.
Another first for Italy is the Australian choreographer Lucy Guerin, who out of her post-modern training in New York developed a personal conceptual approach to choreography. Also coming to Venice will be the French-Algerian
choreographer Rachid Ouramdane, a prominent figure in French dance and now director of one of the major theatres, the Théâtre de Chaillot in Paris. And Michael Keegan-Dolan, the award-winning Irish director and choreographer, author of eccentric works that create a short-circuit between dance, music and theatre.
Finally the Tao Dance Theater of Tao Ye and Duan Ni, the company from Beijing
awarded the Silver Lion, who “have built a unique and evolutionary dance genre that has enraptured with a mesmeric, minimalist force” (McGregor).
A Day of Films featuring our Artists is a day of non-stop video and film projections that expand on-screen the story of the artists invited to the Festival, but also include experimental works, previews and European premieres. Encounters and workshops with the artists participating in the Festival complete the programme.
For more information visit: labiennale.org