Dance and electronic music at the time of Lockdown
Corpi Elettrici is a special project by Gender Bender for the year 2020, produced together with the G.B. Martini Conservatory of Bologna. It is an educational and creative process that gave the students of the Conservatory the chance to collaborate with the members of Collettivo MINE, combining the languages of dance and music together. Through the collaboration between performers and musicians, 20 micro-choreographies on video and a live performance were created as part of the 18th edition of the Gender Bender Festival.
Corpi Elettrici was born during the period of social distancing, due to the health emergency caused by Covid-19, which resulted in work difficulties for those who work in the world of live entertainment and culture. For this reason, it was a challenge to imagine and create new ways of teaching and learning, and to collaborate from a distance in order to build creativity networks and acknowledge the value of the artistic work of young professionals.
Performers from the group Collettivo MINE shared three intense months in which they developed their artistic research together with 20 young students from the School of Electronic Music of the G.B. Martini Conservatory of Bologna. The project took place through online meetings that profoundly influenced the artists’ work and activities. In this way, an educational and creative project characterized by the mix of artistic styles and artistic disciplines was born. The results of these sessions are 20 short videos: each of them is the result of a poetic and deep exchange between a dance-maker and a Conservatory student.
You can watch the video dances that were created as part of Corpi Elettrici on YouTube and on the Gender Bender Festival’s social networks (IGTV Instagram and Facebook Playlists).
Giulio Sonno’s feedback and review
DANZAdiSTANZA , Musica e danza nella camera virtuale di Corpi Elettrici (Music and dance in the virtual room of Corpi Elettrici) is the title of the article by Giulio Sonno, playwright and editor-in-chief of Paper Street, who followed the research process and the collaboration between the artists and the students with a critical and thorough glimpse. He tells us what he has seen:
“…The strange art of contagion has gradually developed as part of Corpi Elettrici, an art that, without even trying, was born from and talks about the uncertainty of the pandemic: should we expose ourselves in front of others or stay in our own comfort zone?[…] The lockdown has diminished our dreams and fantasies, exalting the material side of life. However, in order to understand the final results of Corpi Elettrici, we will have to do the opposite: we will have to admire the works from a new perspective, look for the depth they conceal, what cannot be seen but is still there. In this way, the voices coming from household effects, news broadcasts, birds, atmospheric agents and distant planets are transformed into a fog made up of impulses that remind us of the distant echoes of desires, thoughts, ideas and memories. These are fragments of bodies and existences that struggle to show themselves completely. There is something that holds them back, hinders them, delays them and hides them; yet this does not mean that totality does not exist; it has simply been transformed. We cannot look for it here and now, but in a wider time frame, a moment when we are not anxiously looking for certainties, confirmations or truths: a moment of rediscovery[…] The virtual room has not replaced nor can it replace the importance of direct, live experiences, but it has shown us a possibility that until yesterday, whether out of haste or because of money, had never been considered enough: the possibility of allowing ourselves the time of not having the answers and, therefore, the time to listen. The possibility of not hiding behind a mask, a public image or the expectation of results; the possibility of discovering that, after all, the greatest limitation is the one that, consciously or not, we impose on ourselves and those around us. In fact, this determines the true impact of our actions.”
Thanks to the prolific collaboration between Gender Bender and the G.B. Martini Conservatory, whose purpose was to create the micro-choreographies, the project went beyond the creation of these short videos and became a live performance. This is how it entered the official programming of the 18th edition of the Gender Bender Festival. On stage, the performers of Collettivo MINE will feature choreographies that were created especially for them by the students of the courses of Electronic Music and Applied Music at the Conservatory: they will reinterpret these works with new and original creations. A mix of performances with a chorus structure that perfectly represents the company’s motto: working together in search of a common poetics, while valorizing each personality.
Elisa D'Errico
Elisa D'Errico
Elisa D'Errico
Elisa D'Errico
Elisa D'Errico
CREDITS
A project by:
Daniele Del Pozzo and Mauro Meneghelli, Gender Bender’s artistic directors
Daniela Cattivelli and Damiano Meacci, teachers of the School of Electronic Music of Conservatorio G. B. Martini
Outside eye: Giulio Sonno
Editing: Fabio Fiandrini
Press Office: Anahí Dworniczak
Digital strategy: Marco Obino and Valentina Pederiva
Music tracks and composition:
Ladan Abedini, Gioele Billi, Dario Boschi, Biagio Cavallo, Lorenza Ceregini, Alessandro Cherubini, Simone Domizi, Vicky Koushiappa, Marco Melilli, Marco Menditto, Cristian Albani, Maele Allorio, Pier Francesco Amadei, Mitjia Bichon, Salvatore Bovalina, Yuri Casali, Matteo Davoli, Olmo Frabetti, Alireza Farajan Hamed and William Succi.
Coreographies and performances
Collettivo MINE: Francesco Saverio Cavaliere, Siro Guglielmi, Fabio Novembrini, Roberta Racis e Silvia Sisto.
Project Partners
Corpi Elettrici is part of Così Sarà! La città che vogliamo, sponsored by the Municipality of Bologna, created by the Emilia Romagna Teatro Foundation, funded by the European Social Fund of the European Union , as part of the National operational programme “Metropolitan cities” 2014-2020.
Find out more about our special projects
ph Margherita Caprilli
Fuoco Fauno
Fuoco Fauno
Fuoco Fauno is a special project produced in a network between Gender Bender, Fondazione Piemonte dal Vivo / Lavanderia a Vapore, and Teatro Stabile dell'Umbria that explores and restages the figure of the FAUNE in dance, starting with its first appearance in 1912 with Vaclav Nižinsky’s Après-midi d’un faune. Today, the Faun is still an inexhaustible source of images with which we can examine our present: from issues related to identity and gender to the relationship between humans and animals, from our relationship with nature and the environment (which we are urgently called to reinvent) to the possible exchange between a classical repertoire and the experimentation of new artistic languages.
In 2023 the Gender Bender Festival invited the international company Igor x Moreno, Italian choreographer Daniele Ninarello and Dutch/German choreographer Patricia Carolin Mai to Bologna to produce three dance performances. The works were the result of an all-inclusive collaborative creation workshop project with three groups of people from Bologna and the surrounding area of all ages, with and without dance experience.
5 dance artists from 4 countries (Italy, Macao/Taipei, Kuala Lumpur, and Singapore) will work together to address topics related to gender issues through the language of contemporary dance. They will share their work and research, considering all of it as part of their personal background and cultural environment. The project consists of several work sessions across the different countries in which the dance artists will share their opinions and experiences. The project’s first stop will take place in Bologna as part of the 20th edition of the Gender Bender Festival.
Performing Gender strongly believes that gender, sexuality and LGBTQ+ identities can be explored through the language of dance, also thanks to the engagement of local communities. The second edition of the European project involved 225 people from their respective local communities in a comprehensive training process in the field of artistic production, that aims at putting the spotlight on the marginal voices of their communities. We wanted to highlight issues such as inequality, ethnicity, class, disability, environment and economy, with an intersectional perspective.
Teatro Arcobaleno is a network project that has been using the languages of the performing arts to teach about diversity since 2014. Each year, this project offers workshops, theater and dance performances to children, teenagers, teachers, families, college students, educators, and social workers. Teatro Arcobaleno wants to make a contribution to building a society that is richer and more welcoming in human, social and cultural terms; a society in which diversity, particularly the one related to gender identities and sexual orientation, is recognized as an important value for everyone.