Biennale College Teatro

Blue is the colour of the water suddenly gushing out of the rock, quenching the thirst of the parched soil. The gaze of a young talent is of the same shade. It brings new life to a panorama, the theatrical one, in need of ever-changing and refreshing artistic trajectories.

The call for proposals of the Biennale College Teatro - Site Specific Performance, unique in its peculiarity, has been launched this year in its first edition. The two winners will draw the lines of the expressive horizon of a performative attitude that crosses the Present (reviewed under the lens of the incidents of the Past) to throw itself into a desirable future. The winning projects, produced by Biennale Teatro, will become part of the 2021 programme of the Biennale Teatro Festival.

Stefano Ricci Gianni Forte

With a background in contemporary dance, both as a performer and as a choreographer, as well as in the visual performing arts, Stellario Di Blasi is the first winner of the edition of Biennale College - Site Specific Performance 2021, chosen by the Directors Stefano Ricci and Gianni Forte from the shortlist of fifteen finalists (out of 106 initial applications).

Presenting a study fragment of his AB IMIS project, he presents a hypothesis intertwined with Bauman's reflections on the meaning of consumption in a liquid society. He thus recycles Absence which, nourished by the poetic halo of Emily Dickinson, transforms this suspended pandemic moment into a sampling of the self-dissolution of a land of plenty devoid of primary colours.

In a modular expanse that lives on the echoes of Pino Pascali's art - recalling the perimeters of the relationship between nature and industrial production - Stellario Di Blasi investigates through the talking body of the performer: in the forest frozen by the chatter and anachronistic habits of survival, the stage is transformed into a runway for the take-off of meaning. Meanings that dance, the word, the performing gesture, painting, and the use of objects make into propagators of memory and a stubborn search for an erased identity.

Through the recovery of a moral dignity and new coordinates of listening, Di Blasi builds an itinerary in which the languages of poetry and of the acted body construct an exploration that, shattering the fences between the different artistic disciplines, returns a new theatrical whirlwind. While drawing fruit from the performative footsteps of this century, he throws a new bridge, blazing with content, towards wider possibilities of exploration of meaning. AB IMIS, then, is not only an analysis of the contingent social moment but rather the expressive linguistic experiment on an alphabet to be refounded that Stellario Di Blasi - without taking anything for granted - seems to pursue without fear.

With the project On a solitary beach, a highly personal investigation of new languages in the field of visual-performative arts combined with a fierce desperation capable of narrating the instances of the contemporary, the other winner of the Biennale College - Site Specific Performance 2021 edition is the collective -ness, founded in Venice in 2019 and composed of the artist tandem Rooy Charlie Lana and Giulia Zulian.

Rooy Charlie Lana and Giulia Zulian question the futility of false myths, stereotypes, preconceptions, and the consequent calcified trail of dust that we are forced to breathe, deluded by the rhetoric and vacuous smiles of our politics, in the dominant social, economic, and cultural perimeters of the arid desert of mediocrity that our country has become today.

On a solitary beach is an extemporaneous expanded performance: crossing as tourists, on foot or by gondola, a site-specific museum/scene like Venice, acting in all those places of culture that for a year and a half have been denied to us, the Transghost Rooy Charlie Lana and Giulia Zulian use zentai (the full-fitting jumpsuit that completely hides the distinctive physiognomic features of the body, covered with accessories belonging to BDSM practices) as an aesthetic code to push perception to the limits, thus establishing new forms of sensitivity. They continually reposition the focus in surprising ways in the organisation of the gaze of the city's other spectators/visitors - they leave imprints, they deposit traces, launching a silent poetic cry of alarm against discrimination while strengthening, with respect to a regulatory system, the multiple powers of the drifts that have always emitted a fluorescence that will never stop. They also invite us not to oppose and to become placid collaborators of creation, leading us to reflect on identity in transit, on the visible and/or invisible passage from one state of the body to another, on what it means to be and/or not to be at the same time as oneself with different symbolic horizons.