16th International Festival of Contemporary Dance: Boundary-less

The programme will feature daily events with soloists and international companies as well as the activities of the Biennale College Danza dedicated to specific training projects that will be included in the Festival’s programme.

Many of the works in the programme have been commissioned or co-commissioned by La Biennale (S. Teshigawara, R. Molina, D. Tortelli), along with Italian and European premieres from iconic dance world leaders to innovative new voices. The diverse disciplines explored by Saburo Teshigawara (Golden Lion) concur to form “artistic ecosystems”, as he reimagines the seminal dance work Petrouchka.

While the mercurial contemporary flamenco dancer Rocío Molina (our Silver Lion) stages a battle between her volcanic body and five live musicians. Guiding us on a journey through the body via the throat is Diego Tortelli (winner of the call for new Italian choreography) with his Fo:NO, a sonic and visceral experiment that brings a beatboxer and three dancers to the stage. Seven top tier choreographers, seven different artistic worlds for the seven capital sins are gathered together on the same stage by Eric Gauthier’s Gauthier Dance Company –with Aszure Barton, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Sharon Eyal, Marco Goecke, Marcos Morau, Hofesh Shechter and Sasha Waltz.

They are very real barriers and boundaries, the ones shattered by Marrugeku, an intercultural company of indigenous and non-indigenous artists, the only one of its kind in Australia, led by choreographer Dalisa Pigram and director Rachel Swain: Straight Talk is a cry for freedom to abolish all forms of violence, oppression and incarceration.

With their shamanic powers, Rudi Cole and Júlia Robert of Humanhood fuse the language of the modern physical body with Eastern mysticism in Infinite, offering a performance that is also meditation. A.I.M by Kyle Abraham, the powerful voice of a political vision of dance that is programmatically committed to be nurtured by Black history and culture, will be in Venice with Requiem: Fire in the Air of the Earth; while the expanded dance of Trajal Harrell, which metabolises Vogue dance, postmodern, butoh, experimentation and pop culture, comes to La Biennale with Maggie the Cat, based on the play by Tennessee Williams, to interrogate the issues of power, gender, rejection and inclusion.

Pushing beyond the limits of real space to make the invisible visible are Tobias Gremmler with the scenographic digital installation Collisions and Blanca Li with dance in V/R in Le bal de Paris, which blurs the boundaries between real and virtual. Indigo Lewin, a bright light in a new generation of radical photographers, who puts the body at the centre of her practice, will unveil her intimate dance portraits, captured during her residency at the Biennale Danza 2021.

The beating heart of the Festival, the participants in the Biennale College, will be the protagonists of two important events: a site-specific work commissioned to Saburo Teshigawara, and a performance that rethinks the Piazza San Marco Event as a tribute to Merce Cunningham who staged it 50 years ago in Venice, with mentors Daniel Squire and Jeannie Steele of the Cunningham Trust. Titled Event, the traveling performance is the outcome of the collaboration between the Biennale College, the Biennale Archives and the Cunningham Trust. The tribute to Cunningham is completed by the art film Craneway Event, the American choreographer’s last experimentation with film, together with the celebrated artist Tacita Dean.

Dance Film Screenings is a non-stop day of video and film screenings of every genre, size and format with documentaries, videoclips, microfilms, everything that is dance on film and in film. The programme will be completed by talks and workshops with the artists at the Festival.