Review: Visavì Gorizia Dance Festival – solos and duets that punch above their weight
Young dancers in a theatre foyer, a Kate Bush devotee in a red dress, two African women giving voice to the silenced, and children playing with foam rubber shapes: the smallest events packed the biggest punch.
| Title | Solos and Duets |
| Company | Visavì Gorizia Dance Festival |
| Venue | Nuovo Teatro Comunale and Sala Bergamas, Gradisca d’Isonzo | Kulturni Dom and Teatro Comunale Giuseppe Verdi, Gorizia |
| Date | 16-17 October 2026 |
| Reviewer | Graham Spicer |
The Visavì Gorizia Dance Festival 2026 featured a main stage performance each evening with a large company, but among the smaller events were some jewels that packed a punch with just one or two performers.
Compagnia Artemis Danza presented Davide Tagliavini in Special K at the beautiful Nuovo Teatro Comunale in Gradisca d’Isonzo, a short drive from Gorizia. Tagliavini was the solo performer and the choreographer of a semi-autobiographical piece.
Special K is a breakfast cereal but, it turns out, it is how Tagliavini thinks of Kate Bush – Special Kate. The show is a camp romp through some of his childhood and adolescence, from his beginnings in Sesso (yes, the town exists!) through to Folkestone’s annual tribute event called The Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever, where fans gather dressed in red to recreate Kate Bush’s 1978 ‘Wuthering Heights’ video.
Tagliavini is irrepressible and, with his body mic, keeps up an uninterrupted patter. A skilful series of projections by Cinzia Pietribiasi accompanies his anecdotes, and he often interacts with the projections in clever and amusing ways. When Bush’s red dress arrives onstage in a package from the UK, he invites two women to help him change. Thrilled, he runs through the audience, as though everyone should be as overjoyed as he is. The performance ends with a video of him, in the dress, walking around London, past George Stubbs’s painting Whistlejacket in the National Gallery, travelling on the Underground, and eventually arriving in Folkestone to join other fans of all shapes, sexes and ages, all in red dresses. It’s fun, original, irreverent and celebratory.
The BAMBU project brings together African and European art, and this year Stéphanie Mwamba from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Diana Odhiambo from Kenya performed solo pieces in the studio theatre, Sala Bergamas, across the road from the main stage. The Italian embassy did not grant a visa to a third performer from Nigeria. Both women reflected on women’s place in African society and, inevitably, the suffering arising from past and present political abuses. A revealing post-performance discussion followed, with Mwamba speaking in French, Odhiambo in English, and the organiser of their tour, Roberto Castello, in Italian. Mwamba has never known peace, with conflict in the DRC even forcing her family to leave their homeland.
In Mwamba’s piece, Kizazi, Swahili for ‘womb’, she emerges from the darkness, her hair hanging down into a large bowl that, we later discover, is full of petals and water. Her rhythms are hypnotically slow, growing larger and stronger as though an internal force is striving for emancipation. She spreads the petals in a circle around her, maybe creating a perfumed boundary, an isle of beauty and peace, away from the horrors of war, where a woman’s body is treated as territory to be occupied. Behind her, words are projected recounting the horrific mass rape and murder of at least 165 female inmates at the Munzenze prison in Goma, DRC, in 2025.
Odhiambo’s Thin Line explores the silenced stories of African mothers, the intergenerational connection represented by a strip of red fabric and maybe the act of giving birth itself. Like Mwamba, she looks at emancipation and giving women a voice, several times covering her mouth, her eyes pleading to be heard. Her intense, noble face communicated suffering, and her gestures, strength. Gripping.
Quite different was Childhood Time from the Czech-based group Dancehood. Ukrainian choreographer, dancer and teacher Yana Reutova moved to Prague after Russia’s invasion of her country and founded the Dancehood association. An onstage musician accompanied the piece with Ukrainian folk songs and carols. The four dancers brought young children onstage from the audience to play in their ever-changing world of foam-rubber shapes, which started as a bedroom and became a playground, a village and a Christmas tree. Of course, involving children onstage is already a winning move, and it was fascinating to watch the shy one, the rebellious one, the formal one, and the cheeky one change each time they were called back onstage as they grew accustomed to the dancers, the lights and the applause. This defied the old showbiz warning to never work with children or animals – in fact, a couple of puppies would have turned the thoroughly enjoyable performance into a triumphant one.
One of the festival’s most surprising pieces was performed in the foyer of Gorizia’s Teatro Comunale Giuseppe Verdi before the main show. Marianna Basso choreographed a short duet (just over ten minutes) featuring Elia Allemano and Filippo Bonelli. The piece is called The King Is Love, in which ‘the king is neither a person nor a hero. It is an invisible force that governs human relationships… Love becomes an act of truth, violent because it does not lie.’ And violent it is, with the conflicting emotions of wanting to belong and needing to be free, the push and shove of a relationship.
These two young men, in a highly coordinated piece, threw each other to the hard floor (not on a sprung stage), lifted each other aloft and held each other tightly, all with the audience within arm’s reach, showing great concentration and maturity. They flipped between emotions that were as intense in the tender moments as in the aggressive ones. The audience responded with an enthusiastic ovation.
The personable festival director, Walter Mramor, introduced Basso, who founded Contemporary ACNE, a junior company for dancers aged 13 to 20. The two men presented themselves: Allemano, 20 years old; Bonelli, just 17. These days, when youth violence is filling the daily news, what a breath of fresh air this was!
