PROJECTS
Project | Ballet Bernasconi
Laura Rae Bernasconi is an internationally recognised guest teacher for Ballet and Acroyoga, a dancer and choreographer living across the U.S. and Europe. Her itinerant dance company "Mudita Arts for Peace" is inspired by the Buddhist concept of Muditā, meaning the joy that comes from delighting in other people's well-being. I have been performing in "Inner Voyage", an ever changing choreography that has been staged in several occasions in The Netherlands, including dance festivals, public shows and private celebrations. Classical Odissi Indian Dance blended with western Ballet and theater techniques, bringing the spectator on a journey through a wide range of delicate emotions to touch high levels of spirituality.
Project | ENS Dance Company
ENS is a contemporary dance company led by dancer and choreographer Rens Borkent in cooperation with choreographer Sarah Huygens. I have perfomed in "Rad Haz Mat", a grotesque drama that has been developed in three episodes staged in The Netherlands in the season 2016/2017 and eventually merged into a single full evening performance. It tells the story of a distopic company whose management forces the employees to isolate and eliminate each other in order to reduce a phantomatic "jam level". In the season 2017/2018, I have been performing "DMR" directed by Rens Borkent relating to the current high-passe tempo we live in and how we adapt to it. Soon there will be the première of "Who is She?" directed by Sarah Huygens about existentialism and modern sexuality of women in the 21st century.
Project | Opera
After participating in productions such as "Der Rosenkavalier" by Richard Strauss and "Dialogue des Carmélites" by Francis Poulenc, I have danced in the National Theater of São Carlos in "A Flowering Tree" and at Het Nationale Opera in "Prins Igor" by Alexander Borodin and choreographed by Itzik Galili. This season I danced and acted in "Eliogabalo" by Francesco Cavalli and choreography by Maud Le Pladec. Director Thomas Jolly revisited in a modern key the opera by Cavalli, who in turn interpreted with a mischieveous Baroque perspective the intrigued life and the alleged sexual intemperance of Roman emperor Heliogabalus. I played one of the ancillae who cheered the emperor's feasts.
Project | Photo modelling
Photos by i.a. Erik de Roij
Project | A.C.I.D.
A.C.I.D. (Ambiguous Confession, Illuminated Dimension) was an immersive dance theater project by Monica Sharon in collaboration with Svetlin Velchev. A performance, adapted to different sites and rooms, where the audience were part of the performers’ reality. In traditional theater, an invisible barrier, called the fourth wall, exists to separate the performers from the public. As the audience was led through a building’s different spaces, this fourth wall was erased, along with blurring the boundary between reality and fiction.
Project | Tudo era duplo
I have been performing as a vocalist in the song Tudo era duplo ("Everything was double") and as a dancer in its video. The lyrics are an excerpt of the "Symposium", the dialogue by Plato about the origins of love. The story goes that once upon a time human beings had three genders - male, female and androgynous - and were double. After rebelling to the gods, they were split in two, and ever since then every half is looking for the other half. The background colours of the video are inspired by ancient Greek pottery and by the colour codes of the ancient Greeks, who were naming green-yellow-red as xanthós, bright blue-grey as glaukós and red-purple-blue as porphyreos.
Project | Se si bagna poi s'asciuga
The song Se si bagna poi s'asciuga ("If it's wet then it dries") is a kind of anthem of the hyperactive children. In its video, I mime a restless small kid that runs around, falls, plays with toys, wants the computer but does not want veggies, explores the globe, waits in the line for the carousel, and puts the toys back in the box before going to sleep.
Project | Allegoria Ensemble
The Allegoria Ensemble is an early music ensemble with an interest in Italian and Spanish Baroque music. Their album L’Anima Oscura ("The dark soul") is a journey through the works of remarkable composers of 17th-century Italy, sensitive and tormented musicians that lived under the shadow of death's brutality, including murderers Francesco Rasi and Bellerofonte Castaldi.
I have performed and contributed to the conception of three videos based on three tracks from the album.
The video of Castaldi's Hor che la notte ombrosa ("Now that the shadowy night") explores the suffering of a dark soul, lost and entangled in a sombre forest of hanging ropes.
The video of Castaldi's Quella Crudele ("That cruel") is inspired by the Baroque symbolism of nature, the rejected lover abandoned to a melancholic solitude within flowers in a sweet season.
Rasi's song Un guardo ohimè ch'io moro ("Look at me or I die") develops the classic theme of love and death. In the video two friends meet in a lounge and engage in a subtle game of searching and avoiding eye contact.