L’Animale

Chiara Bersani (Milan)

22 – 23 Jun

Old Bailey (The Central Criminal Court of England and Wales) Grand Hall

IMPORTANT: Airport style security is in place at the venue, audiences will need to bring photo ID to enter.

Please note: If you buy your ticket less than 24 hours before the event, you will not receive the pre-show email. If this is the case, please click here for further information about your visit.

Accessibility

  • Venue is completely wheelchair accessible. If you wish to book a wheelchair ticket and/or have access companions, please contact booking@liffestival.com.
  • Access companions are entitled to a complimentary ticket
  • There are multiple lifts available onsite for wheelchair users

Event Information: 

  • Performances are at 2pm and 4:30pm on Saturday 22 and Sunday 23 June 
  • There will be no cloakroom facilities at the venue
  • Sales will close 1 hour before the performance. There will be no tickets available at the door.
A site-specific movement and vocal performance pushing the boundaries of dance.

The animal is motionless. The animal is a house. The animal is a memorial to the fallen. Is the animal fallen? No. The animal was under the table when everything fell.

Set against the historic backdrop of The Old Bailey, Italy’s Chiara Bersani revisits The Dying Swan (a ballet originally choreographed by Michel Fokine for Anna Pavlova in 1905), with her work, L’Animale.

She invites audiences in to observe and study the animal and enter into its world. To contemplate what it means to be a human and to find peace in a restless world.

Through evocative vocals and soundscape, Bersani creates a performance that is unique and unrepeatable each time, guided by the audience. What remains is a ghostly, poetic demonstration in one of the City’s most iconic buildings.

Chiara Bersani is one of the world’s leading stage artists and an influential figure in Italian performance. With a reputation of pushing the boundaries of dance, Bersani uses her body to draw on the universal themes of loneliness and mortality.

"The performer on a platform choreographs a dance of farewells, in the construction of an impossible monument which, in narrating loneliness, spans through the feeling of loss. Solitude becomes a choreography full of worlds and possibilities of a thinning line between the visible and the invisible, of an interaction between human and non-human."
— Nero Magazine (Rome)

Artist

Credits

Creation / Action Chiara Bersani 
Scene & Lights Valeria Foti 
with the collaboration of Richard Gargiulo and Sergio Seghettini 
Vocal Dramaturgy Francesca Della Monica 
Support to the dramaturgy Giulia Traversi
Support of creation Marco D’Agostin / Elena Giannotti 
Support of the process Federica Della Pozza 

BSL Interpreter Jacqui Beckford


L’Animale is a co-production with Azienda Speciale Palaexpo – Mattatoio | Progetto Prender- si Cura, Swans never die a project by Lavanderia a Vapore – Centro di Residenza per la Danza (Piemonte dal Vivo – Circuito Multidisciplinare dello Spettacolo, Coorpi, Didee Arti e Comunicazioni, Mosaico Danza, Zerogrammi); Operaestate Festival Veneto e Centro per la Scena Contemporanea CSC Bassano del Grappa; Triennale Milano Teatro; Fondazione Teatro Grande di Brescia; Festival Bolzano Danza – Fondazione Haydn; Gender Bender Festival; “Memory in Motion. Re-Membering Dance History (Mnemedance)” – Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia; DAMS – Università degli Studi di Torino with the support of Centrale Fies, Dro, Fabbrica Europa (Firenze, ITA) 

Image Credit ©  Rebecca Lena
Video Credit: courtesy of Centrale Fies

Presented as part of LIFT the City, supported by the City of London Corporation. Also supported by the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and The Italian Cultural Institute.

Supported by

Where

Old Bailey (Central Criminal Court of England and Wales)

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