TorinoDanza Festival 2021 – Shechter, Papaioannou, Khan, Ferri, de Keersmaeker

Torinodanza Festival 2021 manages to hold its head up high this year with two months of modern dance running from 3 September to 29 October 2021. Surely with its fingers crossed behind its back with the ever-fluctuating COVID-19 regulations in Italy and abroad ready to interfere with its planning, the festival will welcome companies from Belgium, Canada, Korea, France, Germany, Greece, India, Italy, Israel, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America. There are 14 titles for 35 performances, and with 9 Italian premieres.

Anna Cremonini, the Artistic Director of Torinodanza Festival, says:

The way contemporary dance has evolved makes it an obvious reference point for measuring the temperature of contemporary creativity. It is essential to offer programmes that capture that creativity, that search for vocabularies that allow us to examine and explore the trends of contemporary thought.

If we want our era to be receptive to our world, to be enriched by stimuli, questions, and knowledge, to share the contradictions of our times, to find connections between past and future, between tradition and avant-garde, then we cannot ignore this performing art. This is why Torinodanza is necessary at all generational, social and geographical levels; it is a fundamental element in the re-construction of a community that must find itself again.

Among those taking part are Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar, Hofesh Shechter, Dimitris Papaioannou, Alessandra Ferri and Carsten Jung, Honji Wang and Sébastien Ramirez, David Raymond and Tiffany Tregarthen, Peeping Tom, Aurélien Bory and Shantala Shivalingappa, Akram Khan, and Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker.

The festival opened last night with the third chapter of the love trilogy from Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar, Chapter 3: The Brutal Journey of the Heart.

Most of the companies have featured previously at the festival in recent editions, but one piece being presented goes back 23 years: the same piece in the same theatre. In Turin's beautiful Teatro Carignano, Maurice Béjart's L'Heure Exquise, created in 1998 for Carla Fracci and Micha van Hoecke is coincidentally being restaged in the year that saw the death of both dancers. Inspired by Samuel Beckett's play Happy Days, this outing features Alessandra Ferri and former Hamburg Ballet principal Carsten Jung who will perform the piece on 13 and 14 September.

Gramilano( Editor )

Graham Spicer is a writer, director and photographer in Milan, blogging (under the name ‘Gramilano') about dance, opera, music and photography for people “who are a bit like me and like some of the things I like”. He was a regular columnist for Opera Now magazine and wrote for the BBC until transferring to Italy.

His scribblings have appeared in various publications from Woman's Weekly to Gay Times, and he wrote the ‘Danza in Italia' column for Dancing Times magazine.