How a five-month season of dance in Rome is finding its niche within the city’s larger dance ecology
We are seated in the magnificent industrial building of Lanificio, an ex-woollen mill in Rome, and my partner in conversation is Valentina Marini, a dynamic dance producer involved in cultural politics, who, among many different and complementary roles, works as general director of Spellbound Contemporary Ballet and as a curator of Orbita, the dance season of Rome that operates under the auspices of the same dance company. Guided by a stream of questions, she begins to unfold the story of Orbita in relation to her professional development as well as to the particularities and contradictions of Rome and Italy in general.
Having toured extensively for the works of Mauro Astolfi, artistic director and choreographer of Spellbound Contemporary Ballet, Marini has travelled in many different countries, such as across the Middle East and the Mediterranean, where the body is perceived in diverse and multiple ways. Her interest in cultural exchange arose organically through these experiences, along with her desire to support artists by giving them the opportunity to share their work with a larger audience – which gradually consolidated her identity as a dance curator.
A decree passed in 2014 by the Italian Ministry of Culture was a milestone for this transition because as Marini explains, it ‘enabled dance companies, including Spellbound Contemporary Ballet, to expand their creative and production activities to showcase other artists’ work as long as there was access to well-equipped performing spaces. Given that Rome did not at that time have any performing arts venues exclusively dedicated to contemporary dance, such as a residency centre or a dance house, Spellbound Contemporary Ballet attempted to fill this gap by raising opportunities not only for Mauro Astolfi but also other artists to present their work’. In this frame, a series of various initiatives finally culminated in the launch of the Orbita dance season in 2022.
In 2023, Orbita opened its doors in January with Michela Lucenti’s Nothing, and presented four different focuses, over two consecutive days each, on the work of Abbondanza/Bertoni and Virgilio Sieni, both pillars of contemporary dance in Italy, as well as the artist-in-residence Bassam Abou Diab (Lebanon), and Poyo Rojo (Argentina), who appeared with Dystopia and their iconic Un Poyo Rojo, a work that has been touring non-stop since 2008. Under the title Diaphanies. Matter and Light, this year’s Orbita paid specific attention to the geopolitics that shape the body, and also featured established and emerging artists from Italy and abroad, including Masoumeh Jalalieh (Iran), Michael Getman (Israel) and Caroline Shaw & Vanessa Goodman (Canada) who conclude the season in May 2023.
Spanning the first five months of the year, Orbita’s constant curatorial priority is to create continuity for dance in the city – hence the idea of a ‘dance season’ instead of a short-lived festival. Indeed, Rome has no shortage of festivals of different sizes, formats, philosophies and forms of directorship (for instance check last year’s edition of Dominio Pubblico, or the forthcoming Futuro Festival and Fuori Programma). But in the absence of a season on contemporary dance – that is, a format that could build a relationship with artists and spectators over a longer period of time – Orbita proposes two kinds of dance programmes in two different locations: Teatro Biblioteca Quarticciolo, a multi-functioning theatre as part of a library on the East periphery of the city; and the more central Teatro Palladium of Roma Tre University, both serving as points of access and attraction for different types of audiences.
Curatorially, Orbita aims to be an open space for hosting diverse choreographic languages and exchanges between different generations of artists, and to serve as an incubator for emerging choreographers. Regarding these goals, Marini observes: ‘Rome loses younger generations of artists, who migrate to other more affordable cities’, – a wave whose beginning she identifies approximately in the early 2000s. Thus, building a programme across different generations of artists is necessary for the evolution of a healthy dance ecology. Also, in a top tourist city with a dense population, where not everyone has the chance to see one-off performances, Marini does not hesitate to re-programme a performance as long as it carries a strong artistic value. ‘I strongly believe’, she says, ‘that contemporary dance works are not consumer products with an expiration date’.
Hence, Orbita likes to embrace works that leave a strong aesthetic impact on the audience but also more contested works that could stimulate debate among spectators or offer a transformative experience; overall, works that would motivate someone to spend the time and the money to come to see a performance. This approach does not necessarily imply making commercial curatorial choices to build a dance programme, but rather cultivating an ethical perspective towards the audience by respecting its means. The stages of Orbita at Teatro Biblioteca Quarticciolo, Teatro Palladium and a third space called Spazio Rossellini, which is part of the local performing arts network ATCL (Associazione Teatreale fra i Comuni Del Lazio), aim to act as sites that promote discussion and stories to share, to stimulate contact with the unfamiliar, and convey messages that help reflect on our contemporaneity.
Simulacro, by Marcos Morau, performed in Parco di Tor Tre Teste by La Veronal and Spellbound Contemporary Ballet as part of Fuori Programma Festival 2021, directed by Valentina Marini
It’s a challenging aim, especially in the case of Teatro Biblioteca Quarticciolo, which has a third of the audience capacity of Teatro Palladium, and is located in a socially critical area still considered one of the ‘peripheries’ of Rome, even though it is in the early stages of gentrification. Dedicated to experimental works, the theatre presented among other artists Luna Cenere’s Shoes On and artist-in-residence Michele di Stefano shared his current creative process earlier in the year.
Marini observes that there is a trend towards a new form of ‘colonialism’ of the peripheries and that ‘people distant from the spirit of a specific community bring art as a medium to resolve social issues without actually being able to make any positive change’. Since 2020, she and the co-directors of Teatro Biblioteca Quarticciolo, Giorgio Andriani and Antonino Pirillo, have tried to come to the community of Quarticciolo, for whom ‘art is positioned in the “periphery” of its interests’ as Marini explains. Making a strong effort to attract people not accustomed to performing arts, they often curate performances for outdoor spaces such as open courtyards, squares or parks – as for instance with M.A.D. (Museo Antropologico del Danzatore, 2020) by Michela Lucenti which was adapted to the park of Tor Tre Teste. During these site-specific performances, local residents sometimes join the spectators out of curiosity. As Marini states, ‘working in one of the peripheries of Rome entails the double difficulty of attracting the locals and motivating people from other areas to travel to a neighbourhood not considered “mainstream”.’
A further issue is having to use a transport system that is often inadequate (as a newcomer in Rome, it took me around three hours on a Sunday afternoon to arrive there due to transport issues, and I missed a performance that I was longing to see). Yet at times, such obstacles turn into a rewarding experience, especially when the audience manages to discover a new way of approaching the world through an artist’s point of view. Take, for instance, the non-Eurocentric approaches of Iranian choreographer Masoumeh Jalalieh or Michael Getman from Israel during a double-bill on the theme of borders. In Songs & Borders, six everyday Israeli women perform Getman’s ethnographic-based research into the religious, cultural and historical borders that separate different kibbutzim, and in B-Or Der, Jalalieh’s concealed identity under a large elastic fabric is evocative of not only the repression of women’s rights in Iran but also the subjectivity of mental and ideological constraints that define freedom and confinement.
Beyond the outdoor activities, and in an attempt to further increase audience development, the Orbita dance season also features meetings with artists facilitated by journalists and critics from the online performing arts portal Teatro e Critica, a guide to performance analysis supported by Roma Tre University, and a forthcoming online publication, curated by Dalila D’Amico, presenting interviews with the invited choreographers. A call for works accessible for people with disabilities, the Supernova dance festival for young audiences, and an under construction collaboration with Zètema company for curating dance performances in museum spaces, compose the full mosaic of the collateral events of Orbita.
Networking for institutional collaboration and support – notably the collaboration with Equilibrio Festival to create this year’s focus on Virgilio Sieni – aims to avoid overlapping dance events across the city and to build a coordinated dance programme. Also, in a production system that consists at a national level of two CRIDs (Centri di Rilevante Interesse Nazionale per la Danza), the sole CCN (Centro Coreografico Nazionale) of Fondazione Nazionale della Danza/Aterballeto and a bunch of CPDs (Centri Nazionale di Produzione Danza) and production companies, Spellbound Contemporary Ballet as a recently accredited National Production Center for Dance has an ultimate mission that feeds the goals of the Orbita dance season: to nurture diverse creative processes by offering artist residencies, to orbit across the universe of dance to discover the unknown, and to build new constellations between dancing cultures and artists. Negotiation across the different parts of the performing arts chain is constant in every aspect of this process, as is the desire to sustain it. ●
