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
Chiara Bersani
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.
