The activities of the Dance Section of la Biennale di Venezia will kick off on May 2, to conclude on June 28, 29 and 30 with three consecutive days that will see, from morning till night, in two different areas of Venice - San Marco and the Arsenale - the public presentation of short choreographies, all of them new, the result of the different training and creation programs that are the subject of the Biennale College Danza.

 

“We started in 1999 with a Dance Academy directed by Carolyn Carlson, interrupted in 2003”, said the President Paolo Baratta. “In 2008 Ismael Ivo took up Carlson’s module and developed an opening to the city and the public with his Open Doors, evolving into what today has to become Biennale College Danza. An activity in which young people work and practice with maestros in order to create completed projects, as the completeness of the result is just as important. “An essential feature of Biennale College”, said Paolo Baratta, “is to help those who have talent make the transition from the initial learning stage to creation, measuring, thanks to the presence of the maestros and above all against themselves, their own abilities, their creativity and their character.”

Biennale College, which is of interest to all sections of the Venice Biennale - cinema, art, architecture, performing arts - becomes the central moment around which the activities of the Dance section are defined for the three-year period of 2013-2014-2015. Through Biennale College the foundations are being laid for a new relationship between creativity and the festival, planned for 2014, but also for a dialogue with the other arts starting from the Biennale’s own performing arts sections.

 

Abitare il mondo (Living in the World) - Transmission and Practices is the title of the three-year program of the new director Virgilio Sieni, marked, as stated by the choreographer “by the meaning of transmission, putting dance in the centre of an intense dialogue, which aims to open research on body language to the questions of the contemporary world. We will continually make use of training, opening the field to the creation of places where the dancers and choreographers will meet maestros, scholars, artists, philosophers, and will be invited to engage in new experiences with the elderly, women and men, children, the blind and entire communities. A three year period that,  from time to time, will open itself to the public through cycles of viewings and performances according to a system of juxtaposing the arts. The three-year project includes the 9th International Festival, conceived as a complex system of dialogues between the cultures of the world; the Festival will offer cycles of experiences and performances presented as diptychs and polyphonies: adjacent spaces that will host the dialogue between contemporary dance and the other arts, anthropology and philosophy.”

Sieni’s new project for the Dance section, titled Abitare il mondo, for 2013 includes a series of training and creation courses on the language of contemporary dance ending in short performances - individual fragments or in the form of a diptych - open to the public in the last three days of June. Every day, from morning until night, one area of the city of Venice - or polis - will have the starring role, populated with the results of the Biennale College Danza. Each area, with its campi, campielli, courtyards and cloisters, palace halls, theaters and arsenals, will become an articulated system of places, set in relation to the creation process, but also traversed by the public in a pathway that leads from the intimacy of the closed spaces to the choral nature of the open ones, and vice versa. More than 20 spaces will be involved in the polis of San Marco and the Arsenale: from Ca’ Giustinian, the seat of the Biennale, the Conservatorio Benedetto Marcello, Teatro La Fenice, and Ateneo Veneto, to Campo San Vidal, Campo Pisani, Campo S. Stefano; from the Teatro Piccolo Arsenale, Teatro alle Tese and Tese dei Soppalchi to Calle del Forno, Fondamenta della lana, Riva dei 7 Martiri, the Giardini, etc.

 

Of the seven programs or practices - understood as periods of study and creation regarding the language of contemporary dance - which will constitute Abitare il mondo for 2013, four have already been developed by Sieni. Titled Prima danza, Invenzioni, Agorà, Trasmissione, (First dance, Inventions, Agora, Transmission), each will be assigned to roughly 20 choreographers and dancers aged 18 to 30-35 years, but also to small groups, selected through international calls for applications.

The calls for applications will be published on the Biennale’s website – www.labiennale.org – around the middle of March.

To these a very special fifth program is added, titled Vita Nova and designed for young people aged 10 to 15 years. Abitare il mondo, in fact, considers the different ages of the dancer and underpins the concept of transmission: that which occurs naturally from teacher to pupil, between generations, between one phase of the dancer’s life and the next, between professionals and non-professionals, and between different disciplines.

The study periods are characterized by work with masters of international choreography and dance, but also by meetings with scholars, artists and philosophers, according to a criterion of analogy with dance practices. It is a wide arc, at whose centre is dance, in a constant relationship with the other arts.

In this dialogue, music plays a central role: some of the choreographical practices, in fact, will have live music, or a live performance of a classical and contemporary repertoire, or will involve the creation of a musical piece occurring simultaneously with the creation of the choreography or even music in an improvisation between musician and dancer.

The remaining programs, still under development, will help enrich the moments of study and the choreographic results offered to the public during the three days in June.

 

As for the cycle of Abitare il mondo, Prima Danza  will develop some choreography projects, to be worked on until their performance, chosen from among the proposals of young choreographers/performers and choreographers with their own group. The program will take place in two stages: from May 2-15 and from June 17-30.

Invenzioni  will instead see young dancers working with one of three choreographers proposed by Sieni. During the period from June 10-30 each choreographer will develop, through the dancers and with the dancers, a show.

Agorà  will be a program led by three choreographers proposed by Sieni, who will work on “the adjacency of bodies and listening to others in relation to the sites chosen for the final demonstration open to the public.”

Finally Trasmissione  will engage five young choreographers/dancers in two compositional programs involving, through a method dear to Sieni, who will coordinate the project, the involvement of non-professionals: to the dancers there will thus be added kids, and mothers with their children.

With the unique Vita Nova program, the hope is to create a contemporary dance repertoire aimed at the very young, extending the project to the national level via the Regional governments, starting this year from Veneto, Tuscany, and Puglia.

 

Characterised as a project open to the community, Abitare il mondo will allow the stranger and the inhabitant, who traverse the areas of the city, to share a common ritual, putting them in close proximity to the sense of the dance.

 

Final stage with the presentation of the performances: 28, 29, 30 June 2013

Each day will involve a part of the city, through a layout of spaces: