Cosmorama by Nicola Galli with Giulio Petrucci at LAC Cultural Center. Photo © Studio Pagi

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Building on dance & architecture: Lugano Dance Project 2024

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Cosmorama by Nicola Galli with Giulio Petrucci at LAC Cultural Center. Photo © Studio Pagi
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The second edition of Lugano Dance Project brought location, site and architecture into focus

Located in the Italian-speaking Swiss canton of Ticino, Lugano is a city in a symbiotic relationship with nature, opening to the water until the gaze meets the surrounding mountains. From 12–16 June 2024 it hosted the second edition of Lugano Dance Project (LDP), a biennial dance festival aiming to act as an international crossroads of dance and performing arts while maintaining an anchor with the local scene – as evidenced by a collaboration with RESO (Swiss Dance Network) for the opening event featuring emerging Swiss choreographers. The intergenerational curatorial team – Michel Gagnon, Carmelo Rifici and Lorenzo Conti – envisioned this year’s LDP as a place where dance and architecture could dialogue in various ways, predominantly in the form of site-specific and site-adapted performances in iconic buildings in Ticino, but also as interdisciplinary educational processes, and choreographies understood as corporeal architectures in time and space.

Conceived this year as an itinerant festival, almost every performance and workshop sharing was presented in a different location – choreographing our spectatorship in terms of proximity and perambulation. Maria Hassabi’s workshop on the live construction of a human installation – based on the principles of White Out where Hassabi fluidly melts from one position to the other, living every little segment of a slow, liquid process – took place in the garden of the emblematic Villa Heleneum, which currently houses the Bally Foundation. Her workshop harmoniously connected youth and the staticness of the human architecture with the monumentality of the site. Elsewhere, the colonnaded patio of Asilo Ciani, a former kindergarten, framed the outcome of Mark Brew’s atelier exploring mixed abilities, and the industrial site of the former Diantus watch factory in Castel San Pietro hosted the outcome of the workshop Mobile Homes, led by Michele Di Stefano for the students of the Atelier Riccardo Blumer from the Mendrisio Academy of Architecture of the University of Lugano. Mobile Homes was a performance that put in motion a group of aspiring architects and professional dancers, who penetrated the thick immateriality of artificial smoke to emerge as visions of future bodies engaged in building temporal and relational spaces in flow through and with the body. Under the curation of Atelier Blumer, Mobile Homes was preceded by an exhibition of moving machines designed by the architecture students, accompanied by an “album” of artefacts related to the history of the factory, and exposed on its walls.


White Out by Maria Hassabi. Photo © Studio Pagi
White Out by Maria Hassabi. Photo © Studio Pagi

Through this lens, the festival acted as a laboratory of ideas where process, in the form of workshop sharings, was fused with finished products – yet open to evolution, as most of them were works commissioned and co-produced by the festival, where they also premiered. In one such piece – Quiet Light by Cindy Van Acker, winner of the 2023 Swiss Grand Award for Performing Arts – the two dancers (Stephanie Bayle and Daniela Zaghini) are engaged in a calm negotiation of space through a minimal and sculptural – almost architectonic – choreographic composition. The two bodies define and mould the negative space through ephemeral actions in a process that culminates with a sharp division of space, cracked by a strict vertical light. The immaterial architecture of light contrasts with the bare stage, creating a hypnotic experience with no coordinates in space and time, as if to suggest accepting life as it is.

The traces of Bauhaus

Given its theme, it is no surprise the festival featured two performances connected to the Bauhaus, an architectural school that initiated an art movement during the first quarter of the 20th century linked to interdisciplinary thinking and practice. The first performance, Autour du Corps – Omaggio al Bauhaus (Around the Body – A Homage to Bauhaus) by Swiss choreographer Tiziana Arnaboldi, embodies some of the principles of Bauhaus: rationality, exposed process and functional interaction between body and objects. Concentric circles of wood are activated by two female bodies (Marta Ciappina and Eleonora Chiocchini), acting as a technology that instigates a way of moving in space: a continuous and mesmerising spiral (this quality made me imagine the work in museum settings, where the audience can choose the duration of engagement). The mechanics of constructing two long skirts out of these wooden circles is fused with the fluid and evocative poetics of dance within a simple and clear choreographic structure. Assembling and disassembling wearable constructions, emerging out of them, swinging the pelvis back and forth, Ciappina and Chiocchini – sensual and austere, free and mechanical, expressive and detached – both animate these lifeless wooden objects and are animated by them. They bring forth an ode to Bauhaus, one of historical significance that gives an insight into the past while remaining utterly contemporary and vivid.


Trailer: Autour du Crops by Tiziana Arnaboldi

Released by Greek choreographer Ioannis Mandafounis, the new artistic director of the Dresden Frankfurt Dance Company, is also connected to the Bauhaus, taking place in and around the small but welcoming Teatro San Materno Ascona – the only Bauhaus theatre in Europe, according to Arnaboldi, who is also its director. Released, which was co-produced by the festival, stems from a movement-based improvisation accompanied by spoken associations – hilarious, absurd, unexpected and moving. The highly skilled and daring dancers from the Dresden Frankfurt Dance Company break the formality of their movement training to dive into the flow and momentum of improvisation as if rolling down the side of a hill (literally and metaphorically), giving up any control and trusting their landings to whatever the present might bring. As Mandafounis informed the audience at the introduction to the piece, the dancers represent the community of artists associated with Monte Verità and Bauhaus, who were considered insane due to their unconventional and alternative ideas driven by a utopian vision of living. In this frame, audience members move in any order across predefined ‘stations’, spots dedicated to duets or solos both inside and outside the building, and linger for as long as they wish. In this journey of discoveries, interruptions and continuities, the building of Teatro San Materno and its surrounding acts as a frame and a shell for performative actions, and the association of the work with the historic period of Bauhaus as a motor for the work’s development.


Released by Ioannis Mandafounis with Dresden Frankfurt Dance Company at Teatro San Materno Ascona. Photo © Studio Pagi
Released by Ioannis Mandafounis with Dresden Frankfurt Dance Company at Teatro San Materno Ascona. Photo © Studio Pagi

Site-adapted and site-generic performances

Dressed in cream trousers, open-back blouses and high-heel boots, Italian choreographer Nicola Galli in partnership with Giulio Petrucci scan and frame the interior space with their linearly extended and angular arms. They spirally descend the stairs of LAC Cultural Center for their site-adapted version of Cosmorama, a piece also co-produced by the festival and originally conceived for the Church of Santa Maria degli Angeli on Monte Tamaro. Due to weather conditions, the evocative church location gave way to the imposing interior of LAC in a successful adaptation process that lasted only two days – in comparison to the year-long working process. The persistent sound of sacral and deep percussion defines the pace of the piece and settles its atmosphere, as both performers move attentively, holding the fragility of space. They use their metal sticks to trace and point to architectural details and viewpoints. As they descend from the divine to the earthly, they link their sticks to construct a channel that bridges their bodies with the audience. When held parallel to the earth, this gradually accumulated four-part stick redefines the space, guiding the audience to shift accordingly. When held vertically, it becomes a border that cuts our horizon in two, the right and left, the front and the back: a new landmark to orient in space, a material to trace the piece. Cosmorama, meditative and mediative at its core, corresponds to a ritual that seeks connection with the human, the sensorial and the divine.

Creating a connection between inside and outside, Atmosferologia – Veduta > Lugano by choreographer Michele Di Stefano and sound artist Lorenzo Bianchi Hoesch is an immersive experience, conceived for generic sites with panoramic views, such as the Bastion of Saint Remy in Cagliari or the Terrace of the Laboratori dei Cerchi in Rome, and it is adapted to the requirements of each place. The version of Atmosferologia in Lugano opens our gaze and our attention from what may unfold close to us to the tiny details that might exist at the endpoint of our perspective, where the view of the urban environment merges with Lake Lugano and the surrounding mountains. With a beginning and end that are signalled with the opening and closing of the window curtains of the top floor of the LAC Cultural Center – an idea that echoes the formality of the theatrical experience – we become witnesses to the gradual fulfilment of the goal set by performer Biagio Caravano: to reach from “here” to “there” during the time constraint of approximately 900 seconds. We empathise with the performer, who strives for the impossible in a game between himself and speed, until we find relief as our gaze escapes far away outside the window. Atmosferologia is a choreography conceived for the ears that emphasises the relationalities in a landscape – those carefully choreographed by Di Stefano for an unsuspected audience, those that accidentally occur, and those that we, as audience members further identify through our gaze.


Landless by Christos Papadopoulos with Georgios Kotsifakis. Photo © Studio Pagi
Landless by Christos Papadopoulos with Georgios Kotsifakis. Photo © Studio Pagi

Corporeal Architectures for the stage

Landless is the latest choreographic creation by Greek choreographer Christos Papadopoulos, a solo performed and co-devised by Georgios Kotsifakis and produced by the festival, using the essential triadic materiality of choreography: body, sound and light. In an outcome closely woven together with sound designer Jeph Vanger and light designer Eliza Alexandropoulou, Landless maintains the high precision of micro-movements, a familiar trait in Papadopoulos’ works, yet enters into the unfamiliar territory of abandoning control. Kotsifakis’ captivating performance is intensified through a gradual entrance into what might approach levels of trance, reaching a paradoxical state of liberation and decrease of consciousness within a precise, hyper-fragmented movement repertory which, when coordinated with the musical beat, makes the body seem in a continuous gun attack. At the climax, the bare space framing Kotsifakis’ body is redefined through his own body that becomes a generator of space and architecture through light radiation: holding a torch – the only light source on and off the stage, including the switched off light signs from all the exits – Kotsifakis frames his own silhouette, disembodying it into a cryptically moving form. The increasingly intense and immersive experience constructed by Papadopoulos and his team received an outstanding ovation, making the audience also wait outside the theatre to congratulate them once more.

Symphony of hearts, by Canadian Afro-descendent choreographer Rhodnie Desir, was one of the most anticipated co-productions of the festival, so expectations were high. A live symphony orchestra is indeed a rarity in contemporary dance. An additional unusual element of the piece, often achieved in dance performances mediated through the screen, was the use of a large flat mirror, placed above the stage as part of the set design by Olivier Landreville, that offered a simultaneous top view of the dancers and their formations. The penetrating aurality of the live orchestra, the epicness of the music composition and the spectacle of the set design were employed as part of a work that is inspired by a scientific exploration of the functioning of the heart and the translation of medical data – that Desir collected throughout her creative process – into a schematic and rhythmic choreographic material representing the heart pulsating: opening and closing of the body, muscle contractions, various group formations, accelerations and decelerations, accompanied by the use of props (mainly sticks).


Symphony of Hearts by Rhodnie Desir. Photo © Studio Pagi
Symphony of Hearts by Rhodnie Desir. Photo © Studio Pagi

Desir calls the work a choreographic-documentary, ‘a process that starts with an encounter and ends with a choreographic creation’ – which I understand to mean that it starts with interviews and data collection and results in an aesthetic choreographic work. In transfiguring oral testimonies into movement, who was interviewed or what was said is rendered invisible, giving space to a narrative and universal representation of the movement of a heart – often followed and exemplified by video projections of the heart pulsating. What left me perplexed in Symphony of hearts was the purely aesthetic outcome of the work, which I felt departed from the goals of documentary choreography rooted in social and political activism and investigation (at least, as practised in a European context). In translating data into choreographic material, the work lost the factual and raw component of the documentary process to allow for a very ambitious work with questionable impact.

The constituent parts of Lugano Dance Project 2024 were woven together to reveal the variety of the latest artistic expressions – mainly from Italy, Greece, Switzerland and Canada – that are in dialogue with our present, and provoke healthy and necessary debates around ideas that will definitely linger in time. Surrounded by emblematic architectural sites and followed and supported by a growing community of architects interested in performing arts, the festival has the potential to make a difference at an international level to the curation of interdisciplinary creation that valorises architectural heritage. As the festival grows, building on this strong and successful second edition, I expect to see the continuation of support for site-specific works, and for works exploring a close relation between sites and the communities that inhabit them. This is a sustainable practice with the potential to link us to both history and nature, offering embodied ways of learning about place, memory and cohabitation. But engaging architects in this artistic environment has further benefits for the discipline of architecture and eventually for us and the evolution of living, as dance and thinking through the body have the power to influence the architecture of the future towards forms and spaces that are more friendly, sensitive and accessible to the needs of the body. ●


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11–16 June 2024, Lugano, Switzerland
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www.luganolac.ch/en/lac/rassegne/lugano-dance-project/ldp-2024/home
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