Dance 2022-2023

Four dance events for the Dance 2022-2023 concert series offers dance fans  a thrilling series of dance performances at Teatro Giglio

December 13, 8pm

Mbira tries to take stock of the complex relationship between our culture and that of Africa. Mbira first of all raises a question: how much has Africa contributed to making us who we are? Mbira is the name of a musical instrument from Zimbabwe but also the name of the traditional music that is produced with this instrument. “Bira” is also the name of an important festival of the tradition of the Shona people, the main ethnic group of Zimbabwe, where people sing and dance to the sound of Mbira. Mbira, however, is also the title of a 1981 musical composition around which a controversy arose that well represents the extreme problematic and complex nature of the cultural and moral tangle that characterizes relations between Africa and Europe. In short, Mbira is a word around which a surprising amount of stories, music, dances, parties and reflections on art and culture are intertwined that form the plot of a show that, combining styles and forms, meticulous scores and improvisations, writing and orality, contemplation and play, its inevitable ending is a party.

January 31. 9 pm

 Ballade, the new creation by Mauro Bigonzetti and Enrico Morelli. Ballade is a full-fledged portrait of the Eighties, a decade that has now lost its temporal boundaries to become a symbol of an era, while Elegia di Morelli is set and tells about our current era, a period that brings dizziness and bewilderment as never before, but also the renewed hope of a new beginning.

February 21. 9pm

Lili Elbe Show,  is an intense and evocative ballet created by Simone Repele and Sasha Riva, freely inspired by the life of Lili Elbe, the first transgender in history already protagonist of the famous novel “The Danish Girl” by David Ebershoff and the homonymous film by Tom Hooper. This is the story of the landscape painter Einar Wegener and his wife, the portrait painter Gerda Wegener, a journey of transfiguration and metamorphosis told by an ironic showman / narrator, deus ex machina who, like a sort of puppeteer, rattles off this incredible story today interpreted through the magical lens of dance, after being addressed in a book and in a film. In the show, the two choreographers explore the demon of human dissatisfaction, the need for acceptance that each of us demands from ourselves and that sense of inadequacy that often takes over. Lili Elbe Show is danced to the notes of Johann Sebastian Bach and to Danish folk music by Dan Haugaard and Folkstow. It also includes some forays of minimal sounds created specifically for the show.

March 14, 9pm

Juliet, a true star of dance Eleonora Abbagnato, former étoile of the Paris Opera and director of the Ballet Company of the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma. The show opens with a creation by Sasha Riva and Simone Repele, on the notes of Tchaikovsky, in which a blonde girl absorbed in romantic daydreams, a little Juliet of our days, sees reflected in her image as a young woman with her Romeo. The young woman is Eleonora Abbagnato, the girl is Julia Balzaretti (aged 10, daughter of the étoile); the present and the future merge and merge, together with the past, since in the end it will be the sixteenth-century lovers who will seal their love with death, while a strange guardian angel will mark the time with bicycle rides, taking away, in the end, the little Julia / Giulietta.The central piece of the evening sees a very romantic Eleonora Abbagnato, together with Michele Satriano, in a two step that the brilliant choreographer Uwe Scholz composed in 1988 for his ballet masterpiece Il Rosso e il nero, to the music of the Roméo and Juliette di Berlioz, reassembled by Giovanni Di Palma exceptionally for this occasion. At the end of the evening, among the protagonists, Eleonora Abbagnato, Davide Dato and Vsevolod Maievskyi will dance to the notes of the symphonic dances composed by Leonard Bernstein.