Dance Music Theatre for the Biennale Days

26, 27, 28 August. Three days of dance, music and theatre with the young artists of the Biennale College, featuring choreographic installations, DJ sets and guided improvisations in the name of a dialogue between the arts.
These are the Biennale Days, which the directors of the live performing arts – Marie Chouinard, Ivan Fedele, Antonio Latella – have conceived to open the events of the Biennale di Venezia, which will continue non-stop through October 25^th.

The Biennale Days, which invite the city’s public to the outdoor garden spaces of the Giardini della Biennale, will take place according to the following schedule:

26 August – In Praise of Forgetting by Antonio Latella (Theatre) 11 am > 8 pm 

Opening the Biennale Days is the theatre: on stage Antonio Latella and seven actors ranging across various age groups – Giovanni Franzoni, Caterina Carpio, Emiliano Masala, Alessandro Bandini, Giulia Mazzarino, Mariasilvia Greco, Barbara Mattavelli –will create an improvisation in direct contact with the audience.  Conceived as one act with no beginning and no end, from morning through sunset, the open space of theatrical improvisation will be guided by Latella primarily in a theatrical game with an underlying common theme that consists in material inspired by the theme of censorship, which informs the entire Biennale Teatro 2020. Poetry and fragments of plays will become the primary sources of inspiration in which the actors will immerse themselves as they develop their ideas.

This is an opportunity for spectators to watch the process of artistic creation take shape under the banner of the relationship between master and student that Latella, a teacher by vocation, always places at the centre of his experimentation. It is from the verses by Brecht, that lend specific meaning to this relationship, that the title for the entire day is borrowed:
What a good thing forgetfulness is! / Otherwise how could / a son take leave of the mother who nursed him? / Who gave him the strength of his members / and holds him back to put him to the test? / Or how could a student abandon the master / who gave him his knowledge? / When the knowledge is given / the student must go on his way… / The weakness of memory / is the source of human strength. (B. Brecht)

27 and 28 August – In Museum by Marie Chouinard (Dance) 5 pm > 7:30 pm

Almost a manifesto of Marie Chouinard’s shamanistic art, In Museum is a participative performance originally created and performed by the Canadian choreographer, who then transferred it to other dancers. In this next chapter, the protagonists of today’s In Museum will be the 12 young dancers selected for the Biennale College, all between the ages of 18 and 25, who since July 20^th have plunged into Chouinard’s creative universe under the guidance of Valeria Galluccio, who has been a member of the choreographer’s eponymous company for ten years.

There will be 6 different “performing locations” for 6 simultaneous solos which the public may attend moving freely through the open spaces of the Giardini della Biennale.

In the performance, one spectator at a time is invited to enter a designated space and to discretely share a hope or a wish with the dancer. Each exchange leads to a personalized response, a free dance of dazzling spontaneity that evokes the power to make the wish come true. In Museum will develop through this progressive exchange between the artist and the spectator/visitor. Between one encounter and the other the dancer takes her own time to focus so that she can give form to the invisible. The performance is reminiscent of the oracle of Delphi, the Pythia, who rendered her prophecies in a trance and in a language of which only the priests in the temple understood the alphabet. Her divinations remain a mystery, but the inscription at the entrance to the temple has lost none of its truth: “Know thyself and you will know the universe and the gods”.

The protagonists of this adaptation for the outdoor spaces of the Giardini are: Styliana Apostolou, Magda Argyridou, Giulia Cannas, Sandy Ceesay, Gaia De Martino, Toni Flego, Silvia Galletti, Thalia Livingstone, Alice Ortona Coles, Elisa Ruffato, Damiano Scavo, Luca Tomasoni.

27 and 28 August – Aural Exciters by Ivan Fedele (Music) 9 pm > midnight

The conclusion of these evenings will be all about music with a DJ set organized by the young men and women selected for the workshops for young DJs, who under the guidance of Cristiano Spiller and Guglielmo Bottin explored mixing techniques, the functions of the mixer, experimented with manipulating sound, but also studied the history and structure of club music. At the conclusion of the workshop, it will be up to them: Giovanni Coppola, Klaudio Leon Mati and Giulio Villano will put themselves to the test and perform a DJ set specifically tailored to the context of the Giardini.  Sound en plein air, both the most recent productions, and others rediscovered in the past of dance culture, by means of that slow manual practice known as diggin’: the search for little known albums, musical objects unearthed by digging through archives, markets, small specialized record stores, private collections

The new DJs have been named the Aural Exciters. This is a term that derives from pioneering technologies used to edit recordings, but which in this case refers to the job and the pleasure of discovering new aural, auditory and musical stimuli: because it is manipulation, human craftsmanship alone that can bring on that shift or inspiration that transforms the soundscape that accompanies and invades our lives into musical thinking, lifting it out of randomness, habit, routine.

Admission to the Biennale Days is free of charge with booking required.

The activities of La Biennale di Venezia will continue on August 29^th with the inauguration, in the Central Pavilion of the Giardini, of the exhibition The Disquieted Muses. When La Biennale Meets History (open through December 8^th).

This will be followed by:

• The 77^th Venice International Film Festival from 2 to 12 September
• The 48^th International Theatre Festival from 14 to 25 September
• The 64^th International Festival of Contemporary Music from 25 September to 4 October
• The 14^th International Festival of Contemporary Dance from 13 to 25 October