UN SECOLO DI DANZA
(A CENTURY OF DANCE)
 ACT ONE
(film - dance)

The history of dance through a documentary film, dance and the plastic arts.

Devised, choreographed and directed by Monica Casadei

The programme creatively and daringly combines cinema and performance. The video showing is the first of the four episodes of Un secolo di danza - A Century of Dance, subtitled Ballet from Romanticism to Neoclassicism, a written documentary devised by dance critic Sonia Schoonejeans, who works for the illustrious publication Ballet2000/BallettoOggi and the French-German cultural channel Arté. The film follows the history of ballet through the 1900s, through Russia and Europe, combining an accurate historical reconstruction with the charm of artistic evocation and proposing an interpretation parallel to the other arts.
However, the composed perfection of the film images, which start with Pierrot-Coralli's Giselle  and terminate with Maurice Béjart's  Le Sacre du Printemps, is suddenly animated and interrupted, live on the stage, by four ballerinas, the protagonists of performing invasions that stylistically, musically and figuratively echo the archetypal episodes of a century of dance.
Against a still frame that is held for a few minutes, these choreographic flashes are introduced with continuity and provide a creative fracture between the historical images of Petruska by Fokine, Nijinski's L'Après-midi d'un faune or Lifar's Icare. The incipit is sometimes choreographic and  sometimes musical, to echo the tormenting notes of Mahler's Fifth Symphony or the Kindertotenlieder, the percussions of Xenakis or the jazzy suggestions of Miles Davis. There is no shortage of iconographic shots of the plastic arts, following the avant garde artists of the early twentieth century.
Here, the ballerinas explore the new potential of movement of their own bodies, encaged and adorned by outdated and surreal ceramic costumes,  created by two Faenza-born artists,  Elisabetta Bovina and Carlo Pastore: as the bodies of today, so that we may not forget a century of dance, they reinvent themselves with contemporary gestures, artistic objects such as decorated ceramics, quoting the iconography of the past, they transform into costumes thanks to a new ready-made operation.

The Un secolo di Danza - A century of Dance project includes the creation of 3 further performances, with the projection of the other episodes of the documentary:   

Un secolo di Danza - Act Two               
From Academism to Abstractism. Abstract ballet

Un secolo di Danza - Act Three                                                          
American dance

Un secolo di Danza - Act Four                          
From Free Dance to German Expressionism

Debut:
Danzaltrove, Teatro H.O.P. Altrove (Genoa, 15-18 March ‘05)
Tournée: 
Teatro Cittadella (Modena, 18 November  ‘05)
Teatro Rossini (Lugo di Romagna - RA, 29 November‘05)
Teatro Alighieri (Ravenna, 13 March ‘06)