site-specific performance and costumes Gaetano Palermo
performer Rita Di Leo
sound design and technical direction Luca Gallio
artistic assistance Michele Petrosino
prosthetics Crea Fx
administration KLm – Kinkaleri, Le Supplici, mk
organization Arianna Di Bello
production La Biennale di Venezia
with the support of Casa della cultura Italo Calvino
H(ABITA)T – Network of Spaces for Dance, Associazione QB Quanto Basta
awards and recognitions:
Biennale College Teatro – Performance Site-Specific 2023,
Dancescapes – Mobility Grant 2023,
Danza Urbana XL 2024 – Network Anticorpi XL,
Vetrina della Giovane Danza D’Autore Extra 2024
Duration 25 min.
Swan is a performance for public spaces inspired by the solo The Death of the Swan that Michel Fokine choreographed for Anna Pavlova in 1901. From this starting point, the work goes beyond traditional definitions of dance and theatre, using the practice of sport as a formal and conceptual level. The scene is an ordinary one: a young girl on skates is training while listening to music on headphones and filming herself with her mobile phone. As if enclosed in a bubble, she hovers with transport and obstinacy in elliptical trajectories that loop back. Her solipsism is that of sporting exercise, of the exhibited intimacy of her relationship with her body, her possibilities, and her limits. Existence as insistence: the action repeats in ever more daring figures, becoming a test of both physical and existential endurance. The subject is the fall, the wound, the muscular tear of a humanity in flight from itself, narcissistically balancing on its axis in search of a spectrum of identity and affirmation. Swan is, in fact, a portrait of life in all the tragic banality of a compulsion to repeat. The glimmer of an ever-spring still life. Of existence as a grotesque exercise in death, beyond any salvation.