Pietrangelo Buttafuoco

Dance, music and theatre are languages that manifest themselves in time and in presence, defining themselves in the relationship of the here and now between artist and audience. For Sir Wayne McGregor, dance invites us to reconsider the nature of time; for Caterina Barbieri, music takes us back to the primeval listening from which everything arises; for Willem Dafoe, theatre leads us back to the truth of human encounter. The titles they have chosen – Time Does Not Exist, A Child of Sound and Alter Native – are more than poetic statements, they affirm the here and now and stand as genuine orientations for our being in the world. And the three departments, once again, confirm the dialogue they have established between them, each with its own specific code.

The Programmes presented by the directors, in fact, explore the central dimension of the live artistic experience understood as a necessary medium to renew, time and time again, the perception of reality of those who participate in a performative event.

Time Does Not Exist, the International Festival of Contemporary Dance directed by Wayne McGregor, presents a reflection on time, to celebrate a very special occasion, the 20^th anniversary of the Festival. Inspired by the theories of physicist Carlo Rovelli, McGregor invites us to question the uniform linear conception of time, because as modern physics suggests, it is a relation between events. Therefore dance too, which exists in time, becomes a privileged place in which to explore this complexity.
Through the movement of bodies, the choreographies interrogate the memory of Biennale Danza drawing on the fundamental contribution of the Historical Archive of La Biennale, connecting the temporalities in a dynamic fabric of possible hypotheses, to make of the choreographic gesture a space in which time can bend and reinvent itself.

Sir Wayne McGregor, Caterina Barbieri and Willem Dafoe invite the public to undertake a journey that traverses ritual and research, memory and imagination, childhood and future. Every artistic experience, when it truly happens, always brings us to the same point, to that instant in which we rediscover, in an eternal and fresh first time, a movement, a sound, a gesture.