Biennale College Teatro: Elia Pangaro wins the call for site-specific performance

The dancer, performer and choreographer Elia Pangaro is the winner of the international call that Biennale College Teatro dedicates to site-specific performance, conceived for the outdoors, where Venetian daily life takes place. Selected by the Directors Stefano Ricci and Gianni Forte among the 90 applicants from 21 different countries, Elia Pangaro will develop and elaborate the performance Bolide | Deus ex machina which he will present at the 52^nd International Theatre Festival (15-30 June).

With Bolide | Deus ex machina the Directors Stefano Ricci and Gianni Forte reward the critical gaze of Elia Pangaro, a performer raised in the urban and hip hop culture. As the Directors write in their motivation: “What is the fate of the bolidi, the racing cars that hurtle forward at high speed with their powerful engines, if not that of the other bolidi, the shooting stars that burn as they careen through earth’s atmosphere? Pending combustion, with his creation Elia Pangaro suggests alternative itineraries that have unlimited limits of safety, binding and vital. As he weaves his performance assembled with the grammars of urban dance, contemporary art and philosophical speculation, the artist seems to whisper into our ears that we still have our own moment, that we can silence our telephone, turn off our alarms and notifications: listen closely to what is happening outside of us, knowing that it concerns us more deeply than anything else. An interval to recover possession of our own pace, to return unto ourselves, to leave the drainage canal in which we are treadmilling in place”.

Elia Pangaro at Biennale Teatro will be performing with Russian artist Polina Sonis and will premiere Bolide | Deus ex machina on Sunday June 23rd (with repeat performances through June 30th).

Born in 1997, Elia Pangaro trained as a dancer, completing the three-year specialisation curriculum in urban techniques at the Nation of Human Arts (NOHA) school in 2015 under the mentorship of Omid Ighani and Marisa Ragazzo. Between 2016 and 2019 he continued his training at the InNprogress Atelier (INA) in Perugia and in 2021 completed the intensive Proficiency in Advanced Dance and Healing Arts (PADHA) course focused on dance and practices of healing with art. Since 2014 he has been a member of the urban dance company InNprogress Collective (INC) directed by Afshin Varjavandi. In 2019, he was a founding member of the multidisciplinary art project Darlingbuds, for which he created même|brain, Membrane and Amoebas, the latter in collaboration with Alexander De Vries. His works have been presented in Thailand, Mexico, Germany, Italy. He won the Best Dancer award at the Corpo Mobile Festival in Rome (2023).