Bologna Training
Description
The Bologna training week followed the Lubjana’s one, which took place from the 6th to the 14th of October: the group of 5 dance makers had the opportunity to know each other, work together and start building their sketches. This shared training continued in Bologna, Italy, organised by Cassero LGBT Center on the occasion of the 15th edition of Gender Bender Festival.
The program, hosted in the spaces of Ateliersi and Arena del Sole in Bologna, provided physical training for the dance makers and activities with guest artists, scholars, “life experts”, institutions or association.
Photo gallery
Most of the activities were reserved for the 5 dance makers:
- Felix Ruckert held a workshop on bisexuality: a workshop for potential polymorph perverts looking for new experiences. In a relaxed atmosphere, boundaries were tested and challenged with simple lovemaking techniques such as sensing, touching, caressing and kissing.
- A group of artists involved in the project is Dynamis Teatro: they brought in Bologna a performance, addressed to a single spectator at a time, played on the epidermic perception of embarrassment in the dynamic of confrontation.
- Giorgia Nardin (involved in the first Performing Gender project) proposed a workshop on the celebration of queer, femme, trans, ethnically ambiguous, resilient and militant bodies.
- A conversation with Athena-Maria Enderstein about the interrelations between gender, performance and profession.
- The young people from the handicap documentation centre Accaparlante held a laboratory, a journey with disabled people towards the discovery of one’s own body, of the limits which we recognize and those we do not, of the pleasure we can receive and that we cannot feel and the resources we have and of those that are still unknown.
- A meeting the activists of MIT- Movimento identità Transessuale, founded in 1982, a non-profit organization that defends and supports transexual people, transgender and genderqueen’s rights.
The Italian dramaturg Greta Pieropan joined the training activities for the last days in order to meet the dance makers, record some dialogues with them, and facilitate the development of 5 sketches.
These 5 sketches were performed and shared on the last training day in the Arena del Sole theatre, with the audience, a group of professionals, and some local dancers. To take part to the open activities, see the programme below.
Public Programme
4th November, 19.00, Ateliersi
The explosive solo of Liz Aggiss, an English performer with an anarchic and unconventional style, is a politically incorrect tour de force running through contradictions and interpretations about girls, women, mothers and old women. In between the public and the private, Aggiss creates a feminist pot made of expressionist movement, music hall, costume change, juggling and acting.
4th November, 21.00, Arena del Sole
The new work of Prague company DOT54 stages the themes of abandonment and loss thanks to four extraordinary performers. A breathtaking, intense and heartbreaking work showing us that nothing is more precious than life for human beings. A reflection on the impossibility of being fully masters of our own destiny, as everything is continually changing, constantly transforming.
Following the show, a conversation with the company leaded by dance journalist Carmelo Antonio Zapparrata.
5th November, 22.00, Cinema Lumiére
USA 2017, 105′
For over a decade, director Jonathan Olshefski has filmed the life of the hip hop music producer Christopher “Quest” Rainey, of his wife Christine and his daughter PJ in North Philadelphia area. Quest is the intimate touching portrait of an African-American family which has became a reference point for the entire community, in a reality marked by poverty, drugs and violence.
7th November 15.00/17.00 & 8th November 10.00/12.00, Orlando – Italian Library of Women, via del Piombo 5
The fact that dance reflects gendered sociocultural patterns comes as no surprise to anyone who has attended a dance performance or participated in a dance class. Gender studies, women’s studies, queer studies, as well as the sciences and social sciences, have all investigated how gender has played and still play a role in the ways a dancing body is constructed, represented and received. The classes will introduce the participants to multiple representations of gender in dance history as well as the stereotypes it has established, the systems of relations it has organized, and the acts of resistance and subversion it has produced. To introduce and to question this complex imaginary, the classes will focus on two films that are part of the festival’s program this year: Rebels on Pointe by Bobby Jo Hart on the world-famous Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, and Violently Happy by Paola Calvo about a group of postmodern Berliners (among whom the dancer and choreographer Felix Ruckert), looking for new ways of living, loving and experimenting with sexual fantasies.
11th November, 18.00, Arena del Sole
Performing Gender – Dance Makes Differences concerns everybody: Cassero LGBT Center invites professionals and curious people to question on dance & gender before the final sharing by the 5 Dance Makers.
11th November, 18.30, Arena del Sole
From the sketches at their first stage presented after the Ljubljana training week, enriching, improving, reshaping them after the training in Bologna, as a tool to investigate and interact more and more on Performing Gender – Dance Makes Differences themes.
The 5 sketches will be publicly presented, and after the performances the artists will gather the feedback from the audience.
