Body Visions. Dialogues across dance, filmmaking and decentralised dramaturgy is a two year project focusing on the relationship between dance, film and dramaturgy.
It responds to the need for an interdisciplinary approach in performing arts education, combining different languages and researches. Through investigations on movement and body awareness, the body work is focusing on the use of filming dance as an expressive media.
The aim is to develop innovative ways of questioning the work on the body, movement/action and ‘presence’ – fundamental aspects of all performing arts, through the use of film and dramaturgy. It wishes also to develop methodologies to stimulate innovative practices working in the remote through the digital dimension.

Technical and somatic proposals, compositional studies and creative freedom, practices and theories, historical sense of cultural heritage and innovative drive: we believe that an interdisciplinary and integrated vision of training can best respond to the current performing arts landscape that mixes different arts, techniques and technologies.

The project

The group of Italian students comes from Da.Re. Dance Research – Dynamic Systems for Transmission and Research in Contemporary Performing Arts, a three-year training and research programme funded by the Italian Ministry of Culture and directed by Adriana Borriello. They come from different parts of Italy and have a varied educational background, acquired in Italian private and public dance or theatre schools, academies, programmes, and choreographic high schools.

The Swedish students come from Stockholm University of the Arts, students from bachelor program in Dance, as well as students from Film Master Programme from HDK Valand Film Studies in Gothenburg.

LEADERS

Adriana Borriello

Dancer, choreographer and pedagogue, Adriana Borriello trained at the National Academy of Dance and Maurice Béjart’s Mudra school. Since 1986, when she founded her first company in France, she has been pursuing an articulate independent artistic activity that is divided between choreography, pedagogy and external collaborations. In addition to her dance studies and an in-depth course dedicated to Tai Chi, she participated in the birth of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s Belgian group Rosas, collaborating in the creation and dancing in the company’s show-manifesto, Rosas danst Rosas. As performer and co-author, she collaborated with Pierre Droulers, with whom she created shows such as Midi-Minuit and Palindrome.

She has designed and implemented medium and long-term projects related to training and research, financed by Italian and European public bodies or implemented in collaboration with public and private institutions. In particular:

– in 1998 created and directed in Milan Training Course for Interdisciplinary Contemporary Dancer funded by the EuropeanCommunity, the Lombardy Region and the Ministry of Labour
– in 2012, during the Artistic Direction of the Project/Dance of the Teatro Carlo Gesualdo, activated and co-realized the Technical Compositional Triennium of Accademia Nazionale di Danza, an experimental pilot project in the university, at that time the first and only one in Italy, as well as the first decentralization of an Accademia di Danza course (moreover in southern Italy) and the first public cooperation in the sector (MIUR- Ministry of Education, University and Research- and Teatro Comunale Carlo Gesualdo in Avellino)
– since 2018 has been directing Da.Re. Dance Research, a program funded by the Italian Ministry of Culture born from the experience and related reflections gained in the many collaborations with international institutions dedicated to training.

Francesco Scavetta

Scavetta is the founder and artistic director, together with Gry Kipperberg, of the Norwegian dance company Wee.
Scavetta’s creations have changed in format and aesthetic, yet they have continuously tried to explore what theatre and performance can mean in contemporary life and what kind of dialogues they can open with the audience. The core of the investigations deal with fragility and paradox, epiphany and dream, empathy and surprise, avoiding narrative and physical cliché, and questioning reality and identity with humoristic disbelief.

Scavetta creates performances that can engage and amaze, that evokes empathy and can twist expectations, that can be poetic and unusual, and that we experience as a challenge for ourselves. That surprises us, as much as it talks to us and about us.

Detailed information on the productions: http://www.wee-francescoscavetta.no/

Scavetta has had a long and extensive teaching experience and his method and research has been highly appreciated in Norway and abroad. Since 2005, the teaching project “A Surprised body” has been invited internationally in 42 countries in North and South America, Europe, Africa, Middle and Far East.

In 2012, Scavetta established Vitlycke – Centre for Performing Arts in Tanumshede (Sweden).

Since its establishing, Vitlycke has received grants by local, Regional and National Institutions (Tanums Kommun, Boverket, Västra Götalandsregionen Utvecklingsprojekt support 2015, Västra Götalandsregionen Kulturstrategiskt utvecklingsstöd 2015, Västra Götalandsregionen Kulturstrategiskt utvecklingsstöd 2016-18; 2019-2021; 2022-2024).

After few years of activity, Vitlycke-CPAS was nominated by the Jury of the Performing Arts Awards 2015, in the category: “This Year Innovators – new thoughts on spaces and new spaces for ideas” for its dance initiatives and residency activities, with the following mention: “This year’s Jury think that the work you are doing is extraordinary and wants to point it out, so that more people become aware of the amazing things you do!”

Thierry De Mey

is a composer and filmmaker. An instinctive feel for movement guides his entire work, allowing him to tackle and integrate a variety of disciplines. The premise behind his musical and filmic writing is the desire for rhythm to be experienced in the body or bodies, revealing the musical meaning for the author, performer and audience. He has developed a system of musical writing for movement used in pieces where the visual and choreographic aspects are just as important as the gesture producing the sound, such as in Musique de tables (1987), Silence must be! (2002) and Light Music, which premiered at Lyon’s Musiques en Scène biennial festival in 2004.

A large part of his music production is intended for dance and cinema. He has often been more than a composer for the choreographers Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Wim Vandekeybus and his sister Michèle Anne De Mey, offering his precious collaboration in the invention of “formal strategies” – to use a favourite expression of his. Among his main work let us mention Rosas danst Rosas, Amor constante, April me, Kinok (choreographies by A. T. De Keersmaeker), What the body does not remember, Les porteuses de mauvaises nouvelles, Le poids de la main (choreographies by W. Vandekeybus), Dantons Töd (dir. Bob Wilson), Musique de table, Frisking for percussion, a string quartet, Counter Phrases, etc.

Since July 2005, Thierry De Mey is artistic director of Charleroi/Danses along with Pierre Droulers, Michele Anne De Mey and Vincent Thirion. In 2006, he realised an installation adapted from Perrault’s tale, Barbe Bleue (Bluebeard), plus a film, One Flat Thing, reproduced based on the choreography by William Forsythe and broadcast by Arte in October. In 2007 he made From Inside for the Charleroi/Danses Biennale, an interactive installation in the form of a triptych. For the 2009 Charleroi/Danses Biennale, he created Equi Voci, a polyptych of dance films accompanied by orchestral music and which includes Prélude à la mer, a film based on one of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s most beautiful choreographies which he shot by the Aral Sea in October 2009. He is currently working on another dance film – La Valse, choreographed by Thomas Hauert and the ZOO dance company – to complete this project.

Maja Hriešik

Born in Novi Sad, ex-Yugoslavia, living in Slovakia from the late 90s, where she completed MA studies in aesthetics, and MA in theatre directing and dramaturgy. She works in the field of dramaturgy in diverse fields (dance, opera, film), oscillates between art and activism, theory and practice, installation work and stage work.
She has worked as an editor-in-chief of dance magazine Salto (2006-2011), curated international theatre festival (2008-2014), hosted a programme on public space and activism on Slovak public radio. As a production dramaturge she has been collaborating with Slovak and Czech choreographers of different generations but also has done dramaturgy for feature and documentary films (Amnestie, Azyl Production 2019, A Happy Man, HBO 2023). She published a book of essays entitled On Corporeal Dramaturgies in Contemporary Dance (2013) and is currently a lecturer at the Dance Faculty in Bratislava (leading courses of dance dramaturgy, history, and aesthetics of dance). She is one of the founding members of PlaST – Contemporary Dance Platform, a community-based project, aiming at creating better conditions and visibility of Slovak contemporary dance and managing a residential space Telocvičňa in Bratislava.
As a curator she has been part of a European research project Micro and Macro Dramaturgies in Dance (alongside Katalin Trencsényi, Guy Cools, Anne-Marije Van Den Bersselaar, Alexis Vassiliou) and collaborates with independent art organisations as well as academic institutions as a mentor and coach in the field of dance dramaturgy (Anghiari Dancehub (IT), Tanec Praha (CZ), Folklab (SK), Academy of Music Arts and Conservatory Duncan Centre (Prague, CZ). She is a part of an informal Central European research group t::here gathered around Tanzquartier Wien and she has initiated or collaborated of several artistic interdisciplinary research projects within Academy where she teaches.

Kerstin Grunditz Brennan
Kersti Grunditz Brennan is a filmmaker and editor with a dance background working in Stockholm. Most recently, she is current with the film Marie Lindqvist: a court dancer’s farewell under her own direction as well as the critically acclaimed Citizen Schein by her, Maud Nycander and Jannike Åhlund. She has also directed the feature documentary CJDG about the artist Carl Johan De Geer, the dance video installation Byta Blick with the Egyptian choreographer Karima Mansour and documentary film as part of dance theater in Javisst ska du liva by Kajsa Giertz. Her multi-award winning documentary about Michael Jackson’s choreographer Vincent Paterson, The Man Behind the Throne, was sold to 15 countries and screened at festivals worldwide.
Kersti Grunditz Brennan has always been interested in strong artists and artistry, in illuminating creation itself as its own driving force, beyond madness and self-destructiveness.

As an editor, she is behind around 30 films and several have been awarded the Guldbagge, the Ikaros prize and the Prix Italia.
Kersti is a lecturer in film editing and in 2017 started a doctoral position in film editing with a focus on movement at Stockholm University of Drama.

Stefano Tomassini

Stefano Tomassini studied theater and dance. He is senior researcher for the ERC Incommon project, directed by Annalisa Sacchi; he has taught at Ca’ Foscari in Venice and at the University of Italian Switzerland, and is a dance consultant for the LuganoInScena programs at the LAC. He was a Fulbright-Schuman Research Scholar (2008-2009), Scholar-in-Residence at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival archive (2010) and Associate Research Scholar at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University (2011 ). From 2013 to 2016 he collaborated on the programs in the Dance sector of the Venice Biennale. Since 2007 he has collaborated with Choreographic Collision, a choreographic laboratory on whose activity he edited a catalog for Marsilio (2011). In 2016 he obtained a study residency at Scenario Pubblico – National Dance Production Center of Catania with a research project on the reconstruction of the dance repertoire. He is part of the international project Commedia dell’Arte in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2017).

He published the critical edition of Prometeo by Salvatore Viganò (Marino Moretti Prize), and the Italian musical and dance librettos around the figure of Adonis (Pacini Fazzi); a monograph on Enzo Cosimi (Zona), the choreosophical writings of Aurel M. Milloss (Olschki) and, with Alessio Fabbro, the lessons of the pioneer of American modern dance Ted Shawn (Gremese). In the area of Italian Studies he has worked on Paolo Beni, Lodovico Dolce, Pomponio Torelli, on the metaphor of theater as a plague in Western literature, on Gian Pietro Lucini and Elio Pagliarani. He edited a collection of Carlo Goldoni’s works for Treccani (Italian Encyclopedia) and, again for Treccani, an essay on the theatrical and musical reception of Ludovico Ariosto’s poem. More recently, he edited the texts for the Hofesh Shechter Project catalog (Silvana) as well as those for Otolithes, a choreographic project by Lorena Dozio (Casagrande).