Milan, 29th April 2008

The 6th International Festival of Contemporary Dance by the Biennale di Venezia will this year talk about beauty: with performances, workshops, meetings and a video-installation accompanying the event, planned from 14th to 29th June in Venice.
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With Beauty, the title of the Festival, director Ismael Ivo extends his research on the body, which characterised the preceding editions, and creates 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), we have invited not only dancers and choreographers –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, there will be Germaine Greer (the controversial writer of The female eunuch), David Michalek (artist and photographer), Loredana Lipperini (essayist, writer and internet journalist), Jeffrey Stewart (professor of “Black Studies” at the University of California).

There are 46 “moving portraits” in Slow Dancing by David Michalek, to celebrate the beauty and magic of dance, inaugurating the Festival on 14th June  at the Corderie dell’Arsenale: 46 brief choreographic sequences, interpreted by an equal number of dancers and choreographers, expanded to infinity and projected simultaneously on three maxi-screens. These will be visible for the qhole period of the festival.

Declining the theme of beauty according to different styles and thoughts will be the many other international companies invited to the Festival: the chameleon-like dancers of the Ballet de Marseille of Frédéric Flamand, which in Métamorphoses give form to the fantastic hybrid creatures of Ovid’s text, assisted by the designs of Humberto and Fernando Campana from Brazil (14/15/16 June, Teatro alle Tese); the powerful dynamism of the Bonachela Dance Company guided by Rafael Bonachela himself, who in Square Map of Q4 creates a short-circuit between human and digital (14/15 June, Teatro Piccolo Arsenale); the formal rigour and radical gestures of the company of Stephen Petronio who, with a team of artists at the border between avant-garde and pop, comprising designer Ben Cho and musicians Antony Hegarty (Antony and the Johnsons), Lou Reed, Rufus Wainwrirght and Nico Muhly, presents the triptych entitled Beauty and the Brut, Bloom and This is the Story of a Girl in a World (15 and 17 June, Teatro Malibran); the dancer-actors of the Balletto Civile headed by Michela Lucenti, presented an original creation integrating word, song and movement, with Creatura, a piece arising from a commission from the Biennale di Venezia on the theme of beauty (16/17 June, Teatro alle Vergini); the splendid Afro-American dancer, Francesca Harper, one of the finest in Forsythe’s Ballett Frankfurt and today leader of a group of artists with whom she ranges from dance to conceptual art and music, for the first time invited to the Biennale with a new piece, inspired by the Festival’s theme, The Fragile Stone Theory 2K8 / Interactive Feast (19/20 June, Teatro Piccolo Arsenale). Plus: Angelin Preljocaj, one of the leading figures in French and international choreography, together with his company, brings a diptych focusing on the pairing of dance and music - Eldorado (Sonntags Abschied), arising from a piece by Karlheinz Stockhausen, and the historic Larmes Blanches (20/21 June, Teatro Malibran);