14 June 2008

Entrance to the Corderie - Arsenale

Beauty Symposium

11 a.m. > 1 p.m. (round table)

Beauty Without Organs

Corrupt passions and sentiments redeeming emotion in dance

moderator Stefano Tomassini

Michela Lucenti - Adam’s rib

Frédéric Flamand - The finger of Harpocrates

Stephen Petronio - The sex of the angels

Ismael Ivo - The tears of Judas

3 p.m. > 6 p.m.

The unsayable art: I don’t know what beauty is

moderator Elisa Guzzo Vaccarino

Germaine Greer - Beauty and Youth [PDF, 2.4 MB, Italian text]

Loredana Lipperini - Beauty Farm [PDF, 184 KB]

David Michalek - The Beautiful Beauty of the Dancing Body [PDF,169 KB]

Jeffrey Stewart - Black Beauty: A Short History [PDF, 160 KB]

The 6th International Festival of Contemporary Dance explored the theme of Beauty as it is perceived today, thus expanding on the reflection on the body to which director Ismael Ivo has dedicated the last three editions of the Festival. To assist him, dancers and choreographers have been invited –because the human body has always been the preferred benchmark for what may be called every beauty– to attend a symposium together with scholars, writers and journalists. The symposium took place on June 14th, 2008, at the Arsenale Corderie in Venice as the opening event of the festival.

Alongside artists Frédéric Flamand, Stephen Petronio, Michela Lucenti, and Ismael Ivo, moderated by Stefano Tomassini in a round table, speakers included Germaine Greer – the controversial author of The Female Eunuch (the cult text of historical feminism of the 1970s) and of the more recent The Whole Woman and The Boy, Loredana Lipperini – writer, essayist and Internet journalist (her blog, Lipperatura, scores a huge number of ‘hits’), Jeffrey Stewart, professor in the department of Black Studies at the University of California, and David Michalek – artist photographer and author of multimedia installations, moderated by Elisa Guzzo Vaccarino.