Acosta Danza - Ajiaco

The Acosta Danza company comes to Italy for the first time for La Biennale. After leaving the Royal Ballet in 2015, following a dazzling career that took him to the heights of international ballet, Carlos Acosta returned to Havana which he had left at a very young age and founded his own company, supported by a foundation and a dance academy. For Acosta, this represents a commitment to the young talents of his country, as well as a tribute to Cuba’s rich culture, to its music and its dancing spirit, the cubanía that nourished his own art and contributed to the limpid and vibrant nature of the classical style shaped under the influence of Alicia Alonso. Leveraging his international experience, today Carlos Acosta is taking Cuban choreography around the world, showcasing dancers with versatile bodies who speak the many languages of dance – classic, contemporary, urban, African, Latino.
Versatility is also the theme of the event conceived by Carlos Acosta for Biennale Danza, which brings together the choreographies of four artists of different generations and styles – Micaela Taylor, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Alexis Fernandez, Javier de Frutos – under the title Ajiaco, the name of a traditional Cuban dish based precisely on a mix of ingredients.

Performance by Micaela Taylor, which premieres in Italy, is a reflection upon the complexity of dance. Born in 1993, Micaela Taylor heads the TL Collective which she founded in 2016. Invited by Carlos Acosta to work with his company, Taylor took on the task with the desire to bring her own specific style, “the mixture of my hip-hop background with the more classical background training that I have, but also to learn from their culture, the way that they move with the Cuban style of dance and to grasp as much as I can”.

Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui takes on L’après midi d’un faune, an archetype of modern ballet since the time of Nijinsky, which has challenged choreographers such as Lifar, Robbins, Amodio, Petit, Kylian, Béjart, Neumeier and Chouinard, who presented a provocative female version of it. The Belgian-Moroccan choreographer, who now leads the Ballet du Grand Théâtre de Genève, has created his own personal Faun which will have its Italian premiere in Venice. Its free and sensual movements intertwine the faun and nymph of the new millennium, whose playful eroticism moves to the notes of a new melody, in an encounter between the hypnotic notes of Claude Debussy and the contemporary Nitin Sawhney. The British composer of Indian origin meets Debussy at the threshold of the Orient, enhancing the melody with Indian raga and the dizzying vocalisations of the traditional diplophonic singing of the Asian steppes.

Alexis Fernandez (Maca) re-imagines Cuba in De punto a cabo, setting the choreography against the background of the Malecón, the famous promenade that unfurls along eight kilometres of Havana’s coastline. Assisted by Yada Ponce, Alexis Fernandez, a native of Santiago de Cuba who was trained in the school of Alicia Alonso, in 17 minutes captures all the contradictions of his country, divided between tradition and modernity, poverty and development. Born in 1975, Fernandez is currently the director of the Spanish company La Macana, which he co-founded with Caterina Varela.

98 Días are the 98 days that the Spanish poet Federico Garcìa Lorca spent in Cuba at the end of the 1920s. “In that sparkling Cuba, Federico felt more at home and back to his roots than he’d ever felt. He was meant to stop over for a week on his way back to Spain from New York. Eventually ninety-eight were the number of days of that visit, in his own words, the happiest days of his life. 98 Días takes that moment in time as a starting point and turns it into an Ode, not only to Lorca, but to all outsiders that search, and unexpectedly find themselves caught in a force that cannot be resisted and where love and goodness may just be illusory”.
Born in Caracas in 1963, Javier De Frutos studied in New York before moving definitively to London, where he is considered one of the most influential artists. He was introduced to the Italian public when he participated in the 2007 Biennale Danza.