OE co-production

a co-production We-Start, Centro di Produzione Piemonte Orientale, Bolzano Danza | Tanz Bozen, operaestate Festival and FDE Festival Danza Estate Bergamo in collaboration with Bergamo Jazz Festival
as part of the Bono! project
Music by Antonio Raia
Danza Luna Cenere
management Domenico Garofalo

Mercurio, is a performance born from the encounter between the choreographer and performer Luna Cenere with the composer, improviser and saxophonist Antonio Raia. Mercury, both as a chemical element and, as a mythological figure, embodies a remarkable duality and versatility. As a metal it is unique in its liquid state at room temperature, thus manifesting a peculiar combination of fluidity and cohesion. In fact, as messenger of the gods in Roman mythology, Mercury acts as a link between the divine and the human, uniting different worlds, symbolizing the duality between heaven and earth, between male and female, between light and darkness. The Mercury performance thus becomes a powerful metaphor for the harmonization of contrasting elements, representing a balance between duality seemingly irreconcilable becoming a fascinating symbol of connection and conciliation. The action is continuously transformed into a celebration of transformation, of the obliquity of sense and the daring experiment shows that the strength of the music lies as well as in the absence of sounds as in the cracks of melodies made emerge from the shadows and that the dance can shine even when deprived of predictable movements.

Bono! is a project coordinated by Enrico Bettinello and a "board" of artistic directors of performing arts festivals to support a production that comes from the encounter between music and choreography. The project partners, to date, are BolzanoDanza, and NU Festival of novarajazz, Operaestate Festival Veneto in Bassano del Grappa and DanzaEstate Festival in Bergamo. Bassano del Grappa and Novara will also provide residence spaces for the realization of the project. The proposal, as happened in previous editions, is to bring two artists of different extractions to collaborate together on projects and processes around an imaginary, a common practice or a similar approach to performance. This invitation is answered by the collaboration between choreographer and dancer Luna Cenere and saxophonist and composer Antonio Raia, who work together for the first time. Raia is a musician who is not easy to label in a specific genre and who loves the relationships between music and other arts. Ash after an authorial journey and arriving, as choreographer, to debut at the Venice Biennale, returns to act as a performer of his own choreography, with the musical suggestions of Raia.

Concept and choreography: Giorgia Lolli
With: Sophie Claire Annen and Giorgia Lolli
Sound design: Sebastian Kurtén
Developed in the context of Nuovo Forno del Pane Outdoor Edition, residence project curated by MAMbo - Museo di Arte Moderna di Bologna.
Project winner of the call DNA Coregrafici 2023, promoted by Romaeuropa Festival, Triennale Milano Teatro, Gender Bender International Festival, Operaestate Festival Veneto, L'arboreto - Teatro Dimora, Centro Nazionale di Produzione della Danza Virgilio Sieni
Project winner of the Boarding Pass Plus Dance 2023 residency in Dom Utopii (Krakow), awarded by Santarcangelo Festival
Partner: Padova Festival Internazionale La Sfera Danza
Production: Anghiari Dance Hub, Nexus Factory

Eat me stems from reflections on the portrayal of female bodies in visual arts, the consumption of images in mainstream media and the sexualization of women. Starting from a fascination for the Italian expression mangiare con gli occhi (literally: "eating with the eyes", to desire, to crave), the project questions the way the body is observed, investigating the dynamics and politics of the gaze through the relationship between spectator and performer.
​The choreographic score is built starting from an everyday aesthetic, which uses the cleanliness of the gesture - doubled - and its composition, to trace a millimetric lack of randomness. The tensions, generated by the forced point of view and by the horizontal perspective, find an erotic outcome: soft shapes and weights on the floor, the curves of the two dancers stand out like dunes in a flow of postures. Images that are blatantly frontal but hidden, force us into a forced partial perspective.

Giorgia Lolli (1996) is an Italian dance artist, currently based in Finland for her MA studies in Choreography at Helsinki Uniarts. Her practice intertwines dramaturgical-choreographic research and community processes. She is currently researching the ties between feminisms and choreographic composition, moved by the politics of gaze in performance framings and the sexualized experiences of her female body.

Coproduction OE - National Premiere

by and with Francesca Santamaria
sound Ramingo
technical direction Giovanni Di Capua
text collaboration Domenico Volontè
styling Elena Luca
costume design Adriano Popolo Rubbio
co-production CodedUomo, Operaestate Festival Veneto
with the support of Carrozzerie N.o.t., ATCL Lazio
as part of the residency τέχνη - téchne 2024, Lavanderia a Vapore
part of the selected works of the Vetrina della giovane danza d’autoreeXtra 2023 by Network Anticorpi XL

The Greek word for body appears in Homer only to refer to the corpse. It is this corpse, therefore, or rather, it is the corpse and the mirror that teach us (who have, that is, taught the Greeks and now the children) that we have a body […]. M. Foucault

HOW TO SURVIVE IN THE CASE OF PERMANENT DAMAGE is a choreographic X-ray. A report that reveals a non-utopian body, the functioning of an imperfect machine, the gears of a corruptible organism. It is an exploration of a textual and sonic archive, linked to injuries and debilitations, that investigates the theme of physical and emotional pain post-trauma. In an aseptic “operating” room and over sounds stemming from the reversal of The Dying Swan, a movement sequence and the body of a dancer are vivisected.
What lies hidden within a “performing” body?
Does it make sense to survive?
To what extent?
At what cost?

Francesca Santamaria is a dancer and author active in the performing arts. After completing her dance education at Balletto di Roma, she continues her formation between Milan and the Venice Biennale. From 2019 she dances, among others, for Roberto Zappalà, Moritz Ostrushnjak, Amos Ben-Tal, Manfredi Perego, Alexandra Pirici. In 2021 she creates and interprets SHIFTING TOOLS, a Screendance work presented and awarded at national and international festivals. Since 2022 she’s part of Incubator for Future Choreographers – CIMD.
In 2023 she is co-author and soloist performer of Tutte le Immagini Scompariranno co-created with Company Fannibanni’s and RMX, a full length piece realized with Pietro Angelini and Vittorio Pagani. Since 2024 she is an Associate Artist with CodedUomo and in the same year she debuts with COME SOPRAVVIVERE IN CASO DI DANNI PERMANENTI, selected for the Showcase of the Young Author’s Dance 2023(IT). Alongside her authorial path, she interacts with academic research: she graduates from the Sapienza University of Rome in Performing Arts with a thesis on the dramaturgy of dance and since 2021 she participates in several projects with the ASAC of the Venice Biennale. 

choreography Marina Donatone
performance Ilaria Quaglia
lighting design advice Gianni Staropoli Ivano Salamida
light Cosimo Ferrigolo
organization Monica Maffei
amministration Laura Marinelli Elena Campanile Silvia Parlani
photos and video Laura Accardo
production Ass. Cult. CodedUomo
co-production Azienda Speciale Palaexpo - Mattatoio Roma | Progetto Prender-si cura
supported by Teatro India - Teatro di Roma, Lavanderia a Vapore techné 2021, C.U.R.A. Centro Umbro Residenze Artistiche, Live Arts Cultures, Santarcangelo Festival

lower is an exercise of inclination, a surrender to the vertical posture to other possible gravities.
lower is a research that tries to trace a space for action within a mobile and non-predetermined system, in which movement is produced from the environment and the forces that pass through it.
lower is a body that leans out from its center and lets itself fall, carving a gesture somewhere in the balance between doing and not doing, between pressing and brushing, and that keeps going down, lower, where one can still dance, and then find itself, look back and smile at being already elsewhere.

Marina Donatone, dancer and choreographer, was born in Rome in 1993 and trained at the Budapest Contemporary Dance Academy. As a dancer she has worked in Italy and abroad with artists and choreographers including Virgilio Sieni, Jacopo Miliani and Csaba Molnár. In her work she see for a body in becoming that gives itself to the choreographic system as an active matter, that works and is worked from the relationships in which it is included, bringing with it its own irreducible composition. As an author she has been supported by realities including Mattatoio Roma, Lavanderia a Vapore, Santarcangelo Festival, Teatro India - Teatro di Roma, Sín Arts Culture Centre Budapest, Short Theatre. Since 2020 she has been curating training projects and leading movement workshops for children at Mattatoio in Rome.

Ilaria Quaglia was born in Turin in 1990 and trained as a dancer in Italy and abroad. She collaborates with Yasmine Hugonnet, Luna Cenere, kinetic collective, Raffaella Giordano and Mario Martone, Masbedo, Ariella Vidach/aiep, Gabriella Maiorino. With Superbudda she organised the event Masbedo peforming Night, the live performance Retroazione within The Others Art Fair, the short film Die Brücke later became installation presented at Artissima Fair. In 2017 she founded with Francesca Antonino and Laura Chieffo the Munerude Collective creating the projects GRANITO and Rotten#1.

Foto di Laura Accardo