Danse Macabre! by Jacopo Jenna. © Roberto De Biasio

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‘Get Back to Dance’ – necessity or nostalgia?

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Danse Macabre! by Jacopo Jenna. © Roberto De Biasio

Ariadne Mikou

05 March 2025

The 2024 New Italian Dance Platform offered both an outlook and a critique – as does our writer

Before the selection process for the upcoming NID—New Italian Dance Platform in Civitanova Marche in autumn 2025, it is worth reflecting on its previous edition, shaped by a selection of works by Italian-based applicants. Continuing as a nomadic platform but turning from biennial to annual, the 8th edition of NID took place in Vicenza last October (09–12/10/2024), under the auspices of the Italian Ministry of Culture, the region of Veneto, and the city of Vicenza. Organised by R.T.O (Raggruppamento Temporaneo Operatori) and the outcome of a collective curation by prominent Italian programmers Marco Betti, Franco Bolletta, Luisa Cuttini, Roberto De Lellis, Flavia Vecchiarelli, Pier Giacomo Cirella and Paolo Brancalion, NID 2024 came together under the title ‘Get Back to Dance’ for a total of fourteen works that necessarily only partially represent the Italian dance scene.

The wording seems to be both a motto and a critique of NID 2023 (reviewed here), which had focused on a fluid understanding of the relationship between space, body and movement, and also embraced less ‘dancey’ pieces, distant from the common association of dance with movement. Yet, ‘Get Back to Dance’, besides promising to promote dance as such and get it back to its track as a physical practice, also suggests the motion of ‘going back’, returning to times when dance was recognisable as such, nostalgically assuming that then was better than now. In the best case scenario, this approach seeks a discursive relation with the past – as with Jacopo Jenna’s Danse Macabre!, a piece inspired by the iconography of death in Western art. Connecting scenic and screen performance in an attempt to bridge the live and the recorded, the corporeal and the spectral, Jenna extended his current practice in combining digital and live performance while leaving open the imaginative potential of written (and projected) words.

Le Sacre du Printemps by Dewey Dell. © Roberto De Biasio

It is perhaps also not by chance that NID 2024 featured several works in dialogue with the Western dance repertory: Salvo Lombardo’s Sport (reviewed here), a piece aiming to ‘re-mediate’ Luigi Manzotti’s Sport (1897) in its most simple and abstract form, and Le Sacre du Printemps by Dewey Dell (Teodora, Agata and Demetrio Castellucci and Vito Matera). Dewey Dell’s exuberant set design and costumes, assimilating nature and insects and embedded into movement, offered a symbolic but also a monumental choreographic approach that is rarely seen in the independent Italian dance scene. In a similar line but towards zoomorphism deprived of such monumental scenery, the figure of the moose inspired Fabrizio Favale’s Alce, a work lacking dramaturgical coherence, even though Favale’s choreographic practice is usually positively surprising. The mythic figure of the Satyr (half animal, half human in the Roman mythology) was embodied in the homonymous duet by Virgilio Sieni, Satiri, a piece of choreographic formality accompanied by live cello and the crystalline voice of Naomi Berrill.

In the solo Il mondo altrove: una storia notturna, Nicola Galli created a character-based work, emerging from the combination of somatic, choreographic and arts-and-crafts practices for the construction of a mask for a mystic creature. Performed at the Basilica Palladiana, a 16th-century building that was destroyed during the WWII and rebuilt right afterwards, the piece corresponded and contrasted with the materiality and geometry of the rectangular bricked-wall monument, while its process proposed an interdisciplinary practice rooted in physicality and craft that aimed to reflect the inner self. Another magnificent site of unquestionable architectural and cultural value – the 16th-century Teatro Olimpico, listed in the UNESCO World Heritage – opened for a double-bill of Francesco Marilungo’s Stuporosa and Enrico Morelli’s Elegia, performed by the technically strong MM Contemporary Dance Company. Stuporosa was a moving reenactment of the Mediterranean tradition of the prefiche, the women engaged in the physical performativity of funerary lamentation and ritual weeping to help cope with loss (reviewed here) while Elegia offered an introduction to contemporary ballet, a dance genre also represented in Sasha Riva and Simone Repele’s Sinking. Combining John Neumeier’s neoclassical style with facial expressions and corporeal storytelling, Sinking resulted in strong imagery about inevitable separation and loss.

Il mondo altrove: una storia notturna by and with Nicola Galli. © Roberto De Biasio

To counterbalance repertory, zoomorphism, ritualism and the evolution of cultural and ballet traditions – the basic axes of the above works – the programme also opened to pieces disconnected from anything referring strictly to the past. That’s All Folks! by Fritz Company (Damiano Ottavio Bigi and Alessandra Paoletti) combined visual and physical poetry and subtle humour, leaving plenty of room for personal interpretations of its evocative and atmospheric scenes (reviewed here). Taking inspiration from the zugzwang chess move, Elisabetta and Gennaro Lauro’s duet unfolded through disconnected pauses that gradually accelerated. Being compelled to make a move under the risk of ‘losing’ – as happens in chess – Zugzwang was a fragile and honest duet based on a simple choreographic structure that gradually became more and more physical, capturing us in a suspension of time. With the self-evident title Femina, Antonella Bertoni and Michele Abbondanza, pillars of the Italian dance scene, explored what it means to be a contemporary woman. Conceived as a female quartet behaving like mechanical dolls programmed to fulfil the multi-tasking life of the contemporary woman, the piece did not avoid some stereotypical representations of cis-femininity. Abstracting and re-contextualising an athletic language in Samia, Adriano Bolognino paid tribute to the lost Somali athlete Samia Yusuf Omar by choreographing six female dancers searching for their freedom of identity. Last but not least, Roberto Tedesco’s Decisione consapevole (Conscious Decision) emerged from a decision-making process as part of a choreographic structure, performed with fluidity, energetic vibrations and muscular contractions. Though engaging and tender, it seemed trapped in an endless production of movement material without necessarily leading to a concrete point.

Femina by Antonella Bertoni and Michele Abbondanza. © Roberto De Biasio

In this heterogeneous artistic mosaic, the Open Studios section was undoubtedly one of the highlights of NID 2024. Six unfinished works – by Lucia Guarino and Ilenia Romano, Elisa Sbaragli, Simone Zambelli, Emanuele Rosa and Maria Focaraccio, Ezio Schiavulli and Chiara Frigo – were pitched to professional producers, curators and programmers, who could see the works in progress and listen to the artists’ ideas – part of a well-coordinated and rehearsed curatorial machine. A printed leaflet featuring a self-portrait of each artist along with detailed requirements for each pitched work, proved equally helpful for eventual future and international co-productions. Two additional elements that seem to have worked well were Veneto Windows, an oral and interactive narrative format among the various information desks occupied by Veneto dance companies that shed light on the local dance ecosystem, and the valorisation of local architectural heritage, such as Teatro Olimpico and the Basilica Palladiana.

However, what gradually becomes more clear as I grow more familiar with NID, is that it is not necessarily a place to promote experimentation. Although I have difficulty imagining the majority of the selected works touring abroad in the most prestigious dance and performing arts festivals, I do see their potential to attract a variety of audiences – not necessarily the ones that already follow contemporary dance and performance, but those who might feel intimidated by its incomprehensibility. In this respect, the committee curated a balanced programme which, for the first time in the short history of NID, was also tested by a non-professional audience: the residents of Vicenza.

The upcoming NID under the title ‘Dance, Singular Plural’ is approaching, emphasising dance as a solo or collective manifestation of movement as a central aspect of the programme. On this occasion as well as its future iterations, NID should address international tendencies and question, in every selection process, how the works could be perceived as part of the international performing arts landscape instead of prioritising a specific image framed as ‘Italian’. How could this label, included in the acronym of NID, expand to embrace artists with more fluid manifestations of Italian identity? Furthermore, how is the ‘new’ – also proclaimed in its name – understood in the selection processes? Chronological newness is not always the same as being contemporary, relevant or urgent in each present time; a new work, regardless of whether it gets back to dance or examines the past, may also not belong to its time and appear as irrelevant to our multilayered present – as were some cases of last year’s NID—New Italian Dance Platform. ●

9–12 October 2024, Vicenza, Italy

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