BODY VISIONS

Dialogues across dance, filmmaking and decentralised dramaturgy

BODY VISIONS: Dialogues across dance, filmmaking and decentralised dramaturgy

A project curated by Adriana Borriello Dance Research (Italy) in collaboration with Vitlycke-Centre for Performing Arts Ekonomisk Förening (Sweden) Realized thanks to the support of Erasmus+ Programme

Body Visions: dialogues across dance, filmmaking and decentralised dramaturgy is a performing arts training project that combines different performing languages, training and research, technical and somatic disciplines, compositional studies and creative freedom, practices and theories, historical sense of cultural heritage and innovative drive; it focuses on the relationship between live arts and multimedia/digital directing, and on methodologies to stimulate innovative practices in the remote or digital dimension. We believe that an interdisciplinary and integrated vision of training can best respond to the current performing arts landscape that mixes different arts, techniques and technologies.

The project responds to the need for an interdisciplinary approach in performing arts education, linking dance, music, drama, visual arts and theoretical studies, with an integrated approach to the use of audiovisual and digital arts and technologies. The aim is to develop innovative ways of questioning work on the body, movement/action and ‘presence’ – fundamental aspects of all performing arts.

Among the goals the project intends to realize are:

Research on dance in relation to other live and audiovisual arts and new media in order to contribute to innovating educational and training practices in the field of contemporary performing arts through

sharing between European artist-trainers (choreographers/dancers, playwrights/directors/musicians) and between students from different countries, artistic fields, competences

innovative training experience based on an interdisciplinary approach integrating dance with music, dramaturgy, directing, digital arts, including technological aspects and remote creative methodologies, linking practice and theory, techniques and creativity;

enhancing, diversifying and integrating students’ skills in the performing, audiovisual and digital arts, with a focus on dance filmmaking;

encouraging the use of “methodological practices” of shared online work, familiarising with technological tools such as Microsoft Teams, to reduce travel while respecting eco-sustainability.

The group will involve Italian and Swedish students aged between 18 and 35 who already have a basic training in contemporary dance.

The group of Italian students comes from Da.Re. Dance Research – Dynamic Systems for Transmission and Research in Contemporary Performing Arts, a three-year training and research programme funded by the Italian Ministry of Culture and directed by Adriana Borriello. They come from different parts of Italy and have a varied educational background, acquired in Italian private and public dance or theatre schools, academies, programmes, and choreographic high schools.

The Swedish students come from Stockholm University of the Arts, students from bachelor program in Dance, as well as students from Film Editing Master Programme and students from HDK Valand Film Studies.

PARTNER

Adriana Borriello Dance Research is the last association founded and directed by Adriana Borriello operative within research, production and education projects related to dance and contemporary performing arts and the fields of music, visual, digital and audiovisual arts, cinema. developed in 40 years of international career and collaborations with prestigious institutions in Italy, Europe, China and Americas.

Currently the ongoing projects are:

Teen Motion, research project dedicated to adolescents;

Corpo Antropologico, starting from ethnographic studies and aimed at professional and non-professional performers;

Da.Re. Dance Research – Sistemi dinamici per la trasmissione e la ricerca nelle arti performative contemporanee, three- year course of higher education and research created in 2018 and funded by the Italian Ministry of Culture;

productions and distribution of performances also site-specific;

publications of essays on contemporary dance.

Vitlycke – CPA is an artist led, user-created organisation, founded with the aim of providing an innovative meeting place for creative and research work within the fields of performing and visual arts, music, film and new media. A platform where artists can meet, create and share their works in a calm rural environment in the middle of nature, detached from the rhythm of the city.

It dedicates its programs to:

artistic residencies, within performing arts, literature and visual arts

informal showings and performances, often in collaboration with other networks

after-talks and lectures by artists and researchers

seminars and symposia

concerts and music events

film projections

festivals and other public events (ex. the biennial festival HERE:)

cycles of workshops for professional dancers

master-classes for non-professional participants

performances and workshops for young audiences

The aim is to also encourage participation, sense of community and critical and aware.

LEADERS

Adriana Borriello

Dancer, choreographer and pedagogue, Adriana Borriello trained at the National Academy of Dance and Maurice Béjart’s Mudra school. Since 1986, when she founded her first company in France, she has been pursuing an articulate independent artistic activity that is divided between choreography, pedagogy and external collaborations. In addition to her dance studies and an in-depth course dedicated to Tai Chi, she participated in the birth of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s Belgian group Rosas, collaborating in the creation and dancing in the company’s show-manifesto, Rosas danst Rosas. As performer and co-author, she collaborated with Pierre Droulers, with whom she created shows such as Midi-Minuit and Palindrome.

She has designed and implemented medium and long-term projects related to training and research, financed by Italian and European public bodies or implemented in collaboration with public and private institutions. In particular:

– in 1998 created and directed in Milan Training Course for Interdisciplinary Contemporary Dancer funded by the EuropeanCommunity, the Lombardy Region and the Ministry of Labour
– in 2012, during the Artistic Direction of the Project/Dance of the Teatro Carlo Gesualdo, activated and co-realized the Technical Compositional Triennium of Accademia Nazionale di Danza, an experimental pilot project in the university, at that time the first and only one in Italy, as well as the first decentralization of an Accademia di Danza course (moreover in southern Italy) and the first public cooperation in the sector (MIUR- Ministry of Education, University and Research- and Teatro Comunale Carlo Gesualdo in Avellino)
– since 2018 has been directing Da.Re. Dance Research, a program funded by the Italian Ministry of Culture born from the experience and related reflections gained in the many collaborations with international institutions dedicated to training.

Francesco Scavetta

Scavetta is the founder and artistic director, together with Gry Kipperberg, of the Norwegian dance company Wee.

Scavetta’s creations have changed in format and aesthetic, yet they have continuously tried to explore what theatre and performance can mean in contemporary life and what kind of dialogues they can open with the audience. The core of the investigations deal with fragility and paradox, epiphany and dream, empathy and surprise, avoiding narrative and physical cliché, and questioning reality and identity with humoristic disbelief.

Scavetta creates performances that can engage and amaze, that evokes empathy and can twist expectations, that can be poetic and unusual, and that we experience as a challenge for ourselves. That surprises us, as much as it talks to us and about us.

Detailed information on the productions: http://www.wee-francescoscavetta.no/

Scavetta has had a long and extensive teaching experience and his method and research has been highly appreciated in Norway and abroad. Since 2005, the teaching project “A Surprised body” has been invited internationally in 42 countries in North and South America, Europe, Africa, Middle and Far East.

In 2012, Scavetta established Vitlycke – Centre for Performing Arts in Tanumshede (Sweden).

Since its establishing, Vitlycke has received grants by local, Regional and National Institutions (Tanums Kommune, Boverket, Västra Gotelands Regionen Utvecklingsprojekt support 2015, Västra Gotelands Regionen Kulturstrategiskt utvecklingsstöd 2015, Västra Gotelands Regionen Kulturstrategiskt utvecklingsstöd 2016-18; 2019-2021; 2022-2024).

After few years of activity, Vitlycke-CPAS was nominated by the Jury of the Performing Arts Awards 2015, in the category: “This Year Innovators – new thoughts on spaces and new spaces for ideas” for its dance initiatives and residency activities, with the following mention: “This year’s Jury think that the work you are doing is extraordinary and wants to point it out, so that more people become aware of the amazing things you do!”

Thierry De Mey

is a composer and filmmaker. An instinctive feel for movement guides his entire work, allowing him to tackle and integrate a variety of disciplines. The premise behind his musical and filmic writing is the desire for rhythm to be experienced in the body or bodies, revealing the musical meaning for the author, performer and audience. He has developed a system of musical writing for movement used in pieces where the visual and choreographic aspects are just as important as the gesture producing the sound, such as in Musique de tables (1987), Silence must be! (2002) and Light Music, which premiered at Lyon’s Musiques en Scène biennial festival in 2004.
A large part of his music production is intended for dance and cinema. He has often been more than a composer for the choreographers Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Wim Vandekeybus and his sister Michèle Anne De Mey, offering his precious collaboration in the invention of “formal strategies” – to use a favourite expression of his. Among his main work let us mention Rosas danst Rosas, Amor constante, April me, Kinok (choreographies by A. T. De Keersmaeker), What the body does not remember, Les porteuses de mauvaises nouvelles, Le poids de la main (choreographies by W. Vandekeybus), Dantons Töd (dir. Bob Wilson), Musique de table, Frisking for percussion, a string quartet, Counter Phrases, etc.

Since July 2005, Thierry De Mey is artistic director of Charleroi/Danses along with Pierre Droulers, Michele Anne De Mey and Vincent Thirion.
In 2006, he realised an installation adapted from Perrault’s tale, Barbe Bleue (Bluebeard), plus a film, One Flat Thing, reproduced based on the choreography by William Forsythe and broadcast by Arte in October. In 2007 he made From Inside for the Charleroi/Danses Biennale, an interactive installation in the form of a triptych. For the 2009 Charleroi/Danses Biennale, he created Equi Voci, a polyptych of dance films accompanied by orchestral music and which includes Prélude à la mer, a film based on one of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s most beautiful choreographies which he shot by the Aral Sea in October 2009. He is currently working on another dance film – La Valse, choreographed by Thomas Hauert and the ZOO dance company – to complete this project.

Kerstin Grunditz Brennan

Kersti Grunditz Brennan is a filmmaker and editor with a dance background working in Stockholm. Most recently, she is current with the film Marie Lindqvist: a court dancer’s farewell under her own direction as well as the critically acclaimed Citizen Schein by her, Maud Nycander and Jannike Åhlund. She has also directed the feature documentary CJDG about the artist Carl Johan De Geer, the dance video installation Byta Blick with the Egyptian choreographer Karima Mansour and documentary film as part of dance theater in Javisst ska du liva by Kajsa Giertz. Her multi-award winning documentary about Michael Jackson’s choreographer Vincent Paterson, The Man Behind the Throne, was sold to 15 countries and screened at festivals worldwide.
Kersti Grunditz Brennan has always been interested in strong artists and artistry, in illuminating creation itself as its own driving force, beyond madness and self-destructiveness.
As an editor, she is behind around 30 films and several have been awarded the Guldbagge, the Ikaros prize and the Prix Italia.
Kersti is a lecturer in film editing and in 2017 started a doctoral position in film editing with a focus on movement at Stockholm University of Drama.

Stefano Tomassini

Stefano Tomassini studied theater and dance. He is senior researcher for the ERC Incommon project, directed by Annalisa Sacchi; he has taught at Ca’ Foscari in Venice and at the University of Italian Switzerland, and is a dance consultant for the LuganoInScena programs at the LAC. He was a Fulbright-Schuman Research Scholar (2008-2009), Scholar-in-Residence at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival archive (2010) and Associate Research Scholar at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University (2011 ). From 2013 to 2016 he collaborated on the programs in the Dance sector of the Venice Biennale. Since 2007 he has collaborated with Choreographic Collision, a choreographic laboratory on whose activity he edited a catalog for Marsilio (2011). In 2016 he obtained a study residency at Scenario Pubblico – National Dance Production Center of Catania with a research project on the reconstruction of the dance repertoire. He is part of the international project Commedia dell’Arte in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2017).
He published the critical edition of Prometeo by Salvatore Viganò (Marino Moretti Prize), and the Italian musical and dance librettos around the figure of Adonis (Pacini Fazzi); a monograph on Enzo Cosimi (Zona), the choreosophical writings of Aurel M. Milloss (Olschki) and, with Alessio Fabbro, the lessons of the pioneer of American modern dance Ted Shawn (Gremese). In the area of Italian Studies he has worked on Paolo Beni, Lodovico Dolce, Pomponio Torelli, on the metaphor of theater as a plague in Western literature, on Gian Pietro Lucini and Elio Pagliarani. He edited a collection of Carlo Goldoni’s works for Treccani (Italian Encyclopedia) and, again for Treccani, an essay on the theatrical and musical reception of Ludovico Ariosto’s poem. More recently, he edited the texts for the Hofesh Shechter Project catalog (Silvana) as well as those for Otolithes, a choreographic project by Lorena Dozio (Casagrande).