/Royal Ballets of Flanders
Artifact  | TEATRO REGIO
Forsythe, the formalist choreographer who has been most successful in updating and reshaping the heritage of classical ballet, undermining all theatrical conventions was born in New York in 1949. The relationship between soloists and corps de ballet becomes unpredictable; the light reveals and hides their movements; the choreography uses the dancers’ whole bodies, ignoring the vertical plane that is typical of classical ballet, and introducing an almost blasphemous lack of balance. In four acts, Artifact focuses on three characters: a “woman in a historical costume”, a “man with a megaphone”, and an unnamed “other”. They all move lightly through a large corps de ballet arranged in symmetrical rows. The Royal Ballet of Flanders, founded in 1969, is Belgium’s only classical ballet company, and since 2005 it has put on some of William Forsythe’s most important choreographies. The MITO audience has already had a chance to see Impressing the Czar in 2007.

 /Compagnia Virgilio Sieni
Sonate Bach | CAVALLERIZZA REALE MANEGGIO
The choreographer and dancer Virgilio Sieni is a leading figure of Italian contemporary dance. With Sonate Bach he has created eleven choreographies for the eleven movements that make up the three Sonatas by Johann Sebastian Bach. Each choreography is linked to a significant date of one of the conflicts that have covered different parts of the world with blood since 1994, an imaginary thread that links the stages of a modern Stations of the Cross through the pain of war: Sarajevo, Kigali, Srebrenica, Tel Aviv, Jenin, Baghdad, Istanbul, Beslan, Gaza, Benthala, Kabul. The eleven pieces follow each other like ballads, like epitaphs for the sublimation of the tragedy, achieving a very difficult artistic exploit: dancing fear, pain and death. 

/Compagnia Virgilio Sieni
La natura delle cose | FONDERIE LIMONE MONCALIERI
The nature of things, in other words the need to address the soul and origins of reality, considering dance as a tool of enquiry and as a manifesto for a meditation on the present day: starting from Lucretius’ poem, De rerum natura , Virgilio Sieni has created a performance, building on important collaborations with the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who contributed to the concept of the production and the development of the drama, with the composer Francesco Giomi, who created the original score, and with the singer Nada, who read Lucretius’ text. A performance of overpowering visual beauty, danced to the end of their strength by the dancers, and produced for the first time by a resident Italian company, the Teatro Metastasio Stabile of Toscana.

/Cie MPTA
Ali | FONDERIE LIMONE MONCALIERI
Exploring the limits of the possible. The opportunities rather than the sacrifices, made possible by a physical deficiency. Crutches that undergo a metamorphosis: from the image of negated freedom to a tool for human and artistic redemption. This is Ali , wings to fly, beyond any suffering. On the stage we have the grace of Hedi Thabet, a Belgian-Tunisian juggler and the strength of Mathurin Bolze, the best contemporary circus acrobat, but also a dancer, with François Verret who finds a new perspective for action in this reflection on “limits: bodies reflected on each other, interwoven and separated that explore the anomaly of their look to exorcise imperfection in an entertainment that is surreal, poetic and moving at the same time. Hedi dominates the relationship with his unique talent, he carries Bolze on his back, leaving him on the stage to wonder which is the most banal physicality.

/Cridacompany
C’est pas mort, ça bouge pas | FONDERIE LIMONE MONCALIERI
The French-Catalan company of Cridacompany was created in 2006 by the encounter between Jur Domingo Escofet and Julien Vittecoq, and it creates a transverse, multidisciplinary approach to live performance, embodying in full the best of the atypical international scene. From its first creation, On the edge , Cridacompany has generated projects that blend dance, acrobatics and juggling, in a theatre made of objects and choreographic movement, a mixture of tragedy and comedy, madness and tiny daily delirium, childish mimicry and the gestures of an adult age. C’est pas mort, ça bouge pas emerges from the story of an impossible encounter between people who have lost their way: on the stage are a man and a woman, who are amazed by the actions, language and relationship that are established between them. 

/Valeria Apicella
My flowers | FONDERIE LIMONE MONCALIERI
Valeria Apicella examines her origins and experience in her second work, letting her gaze rest on the point where being and feminism dissolve into matter that is both contemporary and archaic. The bells on the stage, next to women’s bodies, become a way of creating continuity between the exterior universe and inner turmoil, where sound punctuates the changes in life and time. Between a bedroom and a hallway, between the outer being and the inner creature, between the body and the voice, My flowers searches for a ritual space so that the body can return to something primitive and impersonal, almost divine. Valeria Apicella, an elegant, extremely light dancer, combines her experience with that of Ruth Rosenthal, a Jewish singer and author, in this work that is on the border between dance, singing and acting, recreating the borders of rituals that spread into the sacred.
in collaboration with 

/Ambra Senatore
Performance | FONDERIE LIMONE MONCALIERI
The Torinodanza festival introduces Ambra Senatore, a young choreographer and dancer, who recently won the National Equilibrio Prize, in the context of the Roman festival of the same name. There will be two different performances in Turin, the first to mark the creation of My Flowers , the second to coincide with the presence of Carlotta Sagna. Ambra Senatore has been working in Italy and France since 1997, combining her experience as an actress with that as a dancer. She trained with Raffaella Giordano and Carolyn Carlson, and has since collaborated with Giorgio Rossi, Jean Claude Gallotta, Michela Lucenti, Roberto Castello, Marco Baliani and Georges Lavaudant.

 
/Scuola Paolo Grassi e Lucinda Childs
Short Ride in a Fast Machine | CAVALLERIZZA REALE MANEGGIO
Lucinda Childs is the creator of choreutic Minimalism and one of the leaders of American Postmodernism in the 1960s, with Trisha Brown, Twyla Tharpe and Yvonne Rainer. From Dance , created with Philip Glass and Sol Le Witt, to the magnificent choreographies of her Lucinda Childs Dance Company, the artistic sensitivity of the American choreographer has been expressed through an abstract and inspired aesthetic sensitivity, based on even the tiniest variations in rhythm, and an unconventional dance born out of a negation of the rigid coding of classical and modern ballet. For the last four years, Childs has been the Master Teacher at the theatre-dance course at the Paolo Grassi School of Dramatic Art of Milan. With Short Ride in a Fast Machine she has organised and choreographed the improvisations created during the course by the graduating third-year students, after a year of experimentation with ideas and suggestions on Futurism, the genial and irreverent Italian breeding ground of avant-garde talent. So, this “short ride in a fast machine” absorbs Lucinda Childs’ choreographic impetus and an echo of the suggestions that the word future has sparked off in the minds of the young dancers.

/Pierre Rigal
Érection | CAVALLERIZZA REALE MANEGGIO
Pierre Rigal is a guest at the Torinodanza Festival with two of the three choreographies that have consecrated his talent all over the world. A sensorial blow, a box of optical illusions and movements, Érection overrides the limit of the body, by working on perception. A hypnotic cage illuminated by an old projector adjusted live, Érection is a performance of radiant elegance, which regales the spectator with an intense sensation of a solo that is a good illustration of the pleasure in the fusion of elements that seem incompatible at first glance. The choreographer and dancer Pierre Rigal and director Aurlién Bory blend a heterogeneous combination of specialisations on the stage (the former is an athlete and mathematician, the latter a juggler and expert in acoustic physics), thanks to a shared passion for video, optical illusions, high-tech solutions and craftsmanship.

/Pierre Rigal
Press | CAVALLERIZZA REALE MANEGGIO
In 2008, the Gate Theatre of London commissioned Pierre Rigal to create a project, setting as an essential condition the use of a very limited space on stage: the choreographer’s response transformed this limitation into an advantage and gave a sense to the operation that goes well beyond the work itself. Press, which several critics have described as a choreographic challenge worthy of Houdini, is an extraordinary test of bravery and daring. Confined within a minute box, apparently observed by CCTV, a man gradually adapts to the environment, while this slowly becomes even smaller, until it is little larger than a coffin. Press describes the immense solitude and enigmatic banality of modern man, who is able to adapt to the transformation of his habitat without understanding its dreadful importance.

Les Ballets C. de la B. and Koen Augustinen
Ashes | FONDERIE LIMONE MONCALIERI
Since 2006, Les Ballets C. de la B., the group created by Alain Platel in 1984, has presented its creations at Torinodanza, choosing the city as a privileged setting for its works. The group’s artistic strategy envisages the involvement of promising artists from different disciplines and backgrounds, invited to take part in the creative process, and the motto of the company “this dance is for the world and the world is everyone’s” puts the artist and his artistic actions at centre stage, a burning glass for the contradictions of society. Ashes describes what people do or do not do to try not to lose what they have achieved. It describes the constant dualism of the life of each one of them, torn between the desire to hold on to things and the difficulty of detaching themselves from them. This choreography is a powerful metaphor that describes something that slips through our fingers, something elusive, and reflects on an infinite capacity for regeneration that each one of us possesses, which brings man closer to the phoenix.

/Caterina Sagna
Sorelline | FONDERIE LIMONE MONCALIERI
Little Women is the most famous of what were once defined as books “for girls”. Today it is still one of the books most read and most loved by young people all over the world, with a formative process that describes the institution of the family and compares it to the outside world, described according to the canons of 19th century middle-class America. And Caterina Spagna’s counterproposal starts from here, reversing the goodness inherent in the text to grasp its true unconventional roots. The stage production is decidedly playful, and Sorelline aims to reveal the dynamics of power that draw on blood ties. A surreal game, which tries consciously in the musical score to touch the cathode limits of sitcoms or reality shows, underlining the stylistic skill of the dancer, who introduced a new approach into choreography, back in the days of La Signora, that of humour and irony.
Spaces for contemporary dance Piedmont-Lazio-Campania interRegionalProject
in collaboration with ETI Ente Teatrale Italiano

/Caterina Sagna
Relazione pubblica | FONDERIE LIMONE MONCALIERI
Irony is the secret ingredient that Caterina Sagna employs to propose a meta-theatrical reflection in her Relazione pubblica: revealing the guilty secrets, habits and commonplaces that belong to the world of the theatre and the embarrassing difference that the audience often perceives between the intentions of the artist, actor or director and what they actually see. Pretending to stage Amori di pietra, Ms Sagna creates a surreal entertainment, which is structured around fiction within fiction, in which she even makes fun of herself, because she is part of the artistic machine. In an interlocking game, which is often decidedly comical, the spectator is faced with a conference-performance that pretends to be a public debate.

/Carlotta Sagna
Ad vitam | FONDERIE LIMONE MONCALIERI
Expressing one’s own impressions, reaching the limits of madness, in places were one totters, Ad vitam, on the edge of the abyss. Carlotta Sagna imagines a play that is intimate, tender, at times even irreverent and provocative, an outstanding solo performance in which each fragment is transformed into an authentic moment of grace and liberation. “I once read,” wrote Carlotta Sagna, “the slogan of an advertisement that went: ‘for people who know how to live’, and I thought… what about the others? Some time later, I came across another definition, ‘People who are incapable of living are mainly psychotic or artists’. But in my opinion, when we say an artist is mad, we are only paying him a compliment. So I decided to put myself in the shoes of someone on the edge of the precipice and of madness, trying to mark the edge, revealing the vulnerability and fragility of the narrow line that separates the ‘normal’ and the ‘pathological’.”

/Emio Greco | PC
Extra Dry | FONDERIE LIMONE MONCALIERI
Emio Greco is one of the most talented stars in international dance. He started from a strict classical discipline, and now proposes a new, revolutionary choreographic language that is both muscular and extreme. Soon after the Emio Greco | PC company was created in Amsterdam, he produced Bianco, the first episode of the trilogy Fra Cervello e Movimento, which continues with Rosso and with the duet Extra Dry, a true masterpiece that has its tenth anniversary this year. The three performances of the project investigate the relationship between brain and movement, between a mind that wants to impose control and a body looking for new sensations. In Extra Dry we find the utopia of the unique, a body that splits and merges again, as Greco says, “I call it a solo for two (originally it was for two male dancers). The bodies break invisible limits. The heat and the intensity, the sacred and the profane, gold as a desert or a baroque cathedral, open and closed spaces. They are bare, stripped performances, where even the materials are significant: the curtains, the golden sheen of the silk or the floor, red velvet, white canvas for kites, games of light like a presence or an object.” Extra Dry celebrates the body’s firm resistance to the power of the mind, revealing the primitive potential of the animal part of our being.