Sieni
Virgilio Sieni
Virgilio Sieni, is an Italian dancer and choreographer. After studying ballet and contemporary dance in Amsterdam, New York e Tokyo, in 1983 he started his own dance company, Parco Butterfly, renamed Compagnia Virgilio Sieni 1992. The company has gained international renown as one of Europe’s best. It cooperates with Europe’s leading theaters and festivals, and in addition to designing dance performances it conducts a program of research, study and dissemination of contemporary choreography. Sieni has authored choreographies for Italy’s best theaters, including La natura delle cose (2008), and Tristes Tropiques (2010), inspired by Claude Lévi-Strauss. Since 2003, Sieni has headed CANGO-Cantieri Goldonetta, a space in Florence for body practices and for research on the languages of contemporary art. In 2007, he founded the Academy of gesture art. His project Diario fisico di un viaggio was staged in Santiago, Chile in 2011.
A new dance performance created and interpreted by Virgilio Sieni on music by S. Sciarrino, J.S. Bach, K. Saariaho and G. Kancheli, performed live by flutist G. Pretto and cellist C. Pasceri. Two musicians of class and an extraordinary interpreter of dance, which is a musical instrument in its own right as it expresses a sort of visual music, a unique combination of dance, mime, acting that established a fascinating, compelling dialogue with acoustic music. But dance is also being with the body and its ever-changing figures. By dancing, humans pour their memory and their inner world into experience: one could say that they echo each other and lend dance a dimension which propagates in time. A collection of faces and persons, and the intertwining of their experience, form the structure of this new piece of work by Virgilio Sieni.
Virgilio Sieni, is an Italian dancer and choreographer. After studying ballet and contemporary dance in Amsterdam, New York e Tokyo, in 1983 he started his own dance company, Parco Butterfly, renamed Compagnia Virgilio Sieni 1992. The company has gained international renown as one of Europe’s best. It cooperates with Europe’s leading theaters and festivals, and in addition to designing dance performances it conducts a program of research, study and dissemination of contemporary choreography. Sieni has authored choreographies for Italy’s best theaters, including La natura delle cose (2008), and Tristes Tropiques (2010), inspired by Claude Lévi-Strauss. Since 2003, Sieni has headed CANGO-Cantieri Goldonetta, a space in Florence for body practices and for research on the languages of contemporary art. In 2007, he founded the Academy of gesture art. His project Diario fisico di un viaggio was staged in Santiago, Chile in 2011.
For a long time it has been thought that dances belonging to other cultures, especially those called ‘primitive,’ were always the same, whereas ballet and Euro-American dance represented the summit of this art. The anthropology of dance was born in the 1960s with the goal of exposing the ethnocentrism inherent in such assumptions. Then gradually, thanks to its fruitful exchanges with other disciplines, the anthropology of dance generated more complex theories, for instance of the relationship between dance and power, on gender representations, on the role of artists marginalized by official history. In addition to studying all dance phenomena, the anthropology of dance has been and still is a source of inspiration for dancers and choreographers alike. This event will feature an on-stage cultural dialogue between anthropologist who specializes in dance studies and one of Europe’s leading dancers and choreographers.
Cristiana Natali teaches Cultural Anthropology at Milan University and holds her workshops and classes in Anthropology of dance and performance at the Universities of Bologna and Milan. She has conducted her on-field research in Sri Lanka, where she dealt with the role of dance in Tamil identity building processes. Her publications include: Sabbia sugli dèi. Pratiche commemorative tra le Tigri Tamil (il Segnalibro 2004); Percorsi di antropologia della danza (Libreria Cortina 2009); Contesti etnografici dell’Asia meridionale (CUEM 2010).
Virgilio Sieni, is an Italian dancer and choreographer. After studying ballet and contemporary dance in Amsterdam, New York e Tokyo, in 1983 he started his own dance company, Parco Butterfly, renamed Compagnia Virgilio Sieni 1992. The company has gained international renown as one of Europe’s best. It cooperates with Europe’s leading theaters and festivals, and in addition to designing dance performances it conducts a program of research, study and dissemination of contemporary choreography. Sieni has authored choreographies for Italy’s best theaters, including La natura delle cose (2008), and Tristes Tropiques (2010), inspired by Claude Lévi-Strauss. Since 2003, Sieni has headed CANGO-Cantieri Goldonetta, a space in Florence for body practices and for research on the languages of contemporary art. In 2007, he founded the Academy of gesture art. His project Diario fisico di un viaggio was staged in Santiago, Chile in 2011.