Interplay international contemporary dance festival

The Mosaico Danza Cultural Association, founded and directed by Natalia Casorati and active in the national territory for 26 years, has been organizing the Interplay Festival for 20 years and is a partner of several networking initiatives supporting choreographic residencies, co-productions, and actions aimed at young dance performers, at both the national and international levels.

In the last two years, Interplay Festival, a reference point in the City of Turin and of the Italian scene for fans of young international contemporary dance, has hosted the best Italian and foreign talents from all over the world and has become a partner in various projects in networks of international breadth, emphasizing its desire to get involved and include different aesthetic and poetic choices, and different choreographic paths.

EDITION 2020
INTERPLAY DIGITAL > PLAN B

Shows streaming, videos, reviews, interviews and virtual meetings: INTERPLAY, the international festival of contemporary dance Turin, turns 20 this year and fights the Coronavirus emergency proposing a rich and articulated “PLAN B”. Half of the festival on the announced period, from the 20th to the 30th of May 2020, with a digital format and the other half postponed between September and November, finding hospitality inside autumn reviews and festivals.

The long work of research, planning, organization and logistics inserted in the most important circuits international organizations cannot be postponed: too many commitments from departments and experts, dense the calendar of the other festivals. Here is the reason why the team led by Natalia Casorati has chosen to bring to the web, via streaming with interviews between critics and choreographers, the program of the festival programmed in theaters, maintaining coherence with the original project developed over long months of work. So, in the dates 20,22,26,28 and 30 May, Interplay will be staged from the theaters where the shows would have taken place (using video’s archive of the festival), starting, for those wishing to better know the topics and the performances that will follow, with interviews by experts of the sector: Sergio Trombetta, Elisa Guzzo Vaccarino, Alessandro Pontremoli, Claudia Allasia and Chiara Castellazzi, who will talk with the choreographers. And to follow the shows. At the same time, it was decided to postpone the performances that should have taken place in site specific or urban places, finding hospitality in other events. The emergency makes you closer, if not physically, at least “projectually”, turning what it could have been a critic into advantage.

The theme of Interplay 2020 is the challenge: chosen before the Covid-19 pandemic, this theme is even more urgent and actual. The challenge, the competition seen as a race for supremacy is exposing weaknesses and frailties of the individual before nature, too abused and a system that leaves many on the edge of society, which hardly welcomes and recognizes “others” as part of itself. The challenge towards the world and the systems that make competition a modus vivendi, the challenge through dramatic and spectacular anger of “Sopra di me il diluvio” by ENZO COSIMI, a work inspired by the painful relationship of man with nature in contemporary society, but also the provocation in the ironic supremacy for an impossible beauty in “Graces", by SILVIA GRIBAUDI. Or the disruptive one of the young protagonists of “To da Bone“, with a cast of eleven dancers from all over Europe, selected from the choreographers of the company (LA) HORDE – at the head of the Ballet National de Marseille since September 2019 with their powerful and revolutionary artistic manifesto – among those who live and experiment on the edge of the scene, to tell us about their fight to emerge and establish themself in the anonymous suburbs of big cities. Competition in the hypnotic dance by the Nordic ARNO SCHUITEMAKER, or for the economic supremacy by the Lithuanian-Belgian VILMA PITRINAITE. Again, the competition in the performance of the Vietnamese TU HOANG, where the dynamics of the relationship trigger in the two characters a race for victory with the consequent birth of new barriers that divide and do not unite. Unveiling and thus challenging our socioeconomic system is cheekily judged in the ironic work of CARLO MASSARI from C&C. Take on the challenge of the great classics TARDITO / RENDINA company that staged their cult show: “Gonzago’s Rose” (1999), a “classic” love story colored with delicate irony, which celebrates 20 years of replicas.

PLAN D > INTERPLAY DIFFUSO
HOW WE GO ON STAGE IN NOVEMBER

The last appointments of INTERPLAY DIFFUSO 20/20 move to the web – as had already happened with the innovative format of the first part of this edition of the festival last May. The inevitable decision, in light of the latest Prime Ministerial Decree and the lockdown imposed on Region Piemonte, was taken by the festival directed by Natalia Casorati that had to reinvent itself once again. The evenings of November 18 and 19, scheduled at Cubo Teatro, and November 27, at Lavanderia a Vapore, will therefore take place on Mosaico Danza’s DIGITAL ROOM, a virtual stage where artists and spectators can meet for a dance and sharing experience.

Each evening will be introduced and hosted by a curator, it will open with an interview with the artist followed by the projection of a video extract of their show. Only at the end of the show will the lights be switched on, that is, the microphones will be opened and the spectators who will participate, previous subscription, in digital presence are all invited to participate in a final debate between the public, artists and curators.

On November 18, the virtual stage of Interplay Diffuso hosts Sara Sguotti, who will talk during the evening with the critic Simone Pacini (fattiditeatro.it). Sara will present us a sort of video/documentary in which she tells how the lockdown has necessarily brought innovations and changes on a creative level. The work she presents at Interplay Diffuso introduces SPACE ODDITY and anticipates the new work SOME OTHER PLACE. Starting from the aesthetics of the place and reaching the intimate of the individual, the stage act links what is far away with what is near, invisible connections that live only in the imagination of the individual. In this mini-documentary, Sara Sguotti shows the realization of her research with SPACE ODDITY and a brief result of the first research phase of the new work SOME OTHER PLACE, where the focus of the relationship moves from the level of the individual to the level of the surrounding environment. At the end, the public is invited to freely intervene.

The next day, Thursday 19 November, Simone Pacini will again introduce the evening in dialogue with the Dewey Dell company before the presentation of an extract from DERIVA TRAVERSA, a show that tells the legacy of an ancient craft of shepherds in dance to explore the theme of loneliness proper to the life of those who undertake this job. The echo of the voices to recall the cattle imitates the sound of the wind and orally transmit the tradition, generation after generation. The company moves between dance and research theater, based in Cesena, Berlin and Vilnius. In their works, the choreography has an edgy style and a primitive glossary, constantly inspired and fed by images from Art history and the animal kingdom. At the end, the public is invited to freely intervene.

The highly anticipated appointment with Chiara Bersani on November 27 is also confirmed in digital version, in Mosaico Danza’s Digital Room of. After the introduction with the dialogue with the dance expert Marta Montanini of the University of Turin, SEEKING UNICORNS is the story of a unicorn, a creature moved by the desire to affirm its presence in the world. Chiara Bersani continues her study on the body, guardian of a unique and unrepeatable story. A body that identifies itself as the perceptive entity of the other, as a magnet, influenced by the revolutionary manipulation of the distances among individuals. The unicorn is a mythological animal, although it does not have a defined shape in the myths: sometimes it has the shape of an ox and sometimes of a horse.