Biennale Dance
6th International Festival of Contemporary Dance
director Ismael Ivo
The 6th International Festival of Contemporary Dance by the Venice Biennale this year faced the theme of Beauty: with performances, workshops, meetings and a video installation that accompanied the event from 14th to 29th June 2008 in Venice.
With Beauty, the title of the Festival, director Ismael Ivo extended his research on the body, which characterised the preceding editions, and created a new current for exchange between dance and the contemporary world. The main obsession of our times, the myth of a society founded on appearances and the merchandising of the body, beauty is a central aspect of Western art and thinking.
To debate the subject in a day-long symposium opening the Festival (14th June, Corderie dell’Arsenale), not only were dancers and choreographers invited – because the body has always been the favoured vehicle to convey what can today be called beauty – but also scholars, writers and journalists. Alongside choreographers Frédéric Flamand, Stephen Petronio, Michela Lucenti, Ismael Ivo, speakers included Germaine Greer (the controversial writer of The Female Eunuch), David Michalek (artist and photographer), Loredana Lipperini (essayist, writer and internet journalist), and Jeffrey Stewart (professor of Black Studies at the University of California).
The Prague-born Jirí Kylián, the creative spirit of the Nederlands Dans Theater, was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Festival. The awards ceremony took place on 17th June at the Teatro Malibran in Venice.
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