5th International Festival of Contemporary Dance
Body & Eros

Body & Eros is the theme of the 5th International Festival of Contemporary Dance of the Biennale di Venezia, presided over by Davide Croff, and is the final chapter in a three-year program that has allowed director Ismael Ivo to elaborate an articulated reflection on the body. A place that reflects the contradictions, the needs, the questions of our time, the body and dance, which it generates, dialogue with contemporary thought - scientific, philosophical, artistic, poetic…- in a relationship that constitutes the distinctive feature of the Festival.

-The journey through the body alights this year in the territory of desire, observed through the complexity of the esthetic experience, with its tensions and its limits. The 15 companies and 31 artists and choreographers who will participate in the 5th International Festival of Contemporary Dance – in Venice from June 14 through 30 – have been invited by the Biennale to express, through their work, their personal vision on the fundamental theme of the Festival, presenting almost exclusively world premieres, and all premieres for Italy and the Biennale.

1) Introducing and accompanying this excursion into the territories of eros and dance is the exhibition of photography by Guy Delahaye, a great portraitist whose lens has captured the “interior vision” the secret, the creative inspiration, the intimacy of so many great names in dance – Pina Bausch, Joelle Bouvier and Régis Obadia, Angelin Preljocaj, Ushio Amagatsu and the Sankai Juku, Jean-Claude Gallotta, Carolyn Carlson…

2) A singular evening, conceived by Ismael Ivo projects an emblematic light on one aspect of thought concerning the body and eros: mercification as a code for human relations. In Market of the body: auction of dancers and dances 7 different dances, interpreted by 7 dancers, will be “auctioned off” by popular television host Rosanna Cancellieri and the spectator who makes the best offer will win the chosen piece, thus revealing the core of the relationship between the spectator and the dancer, that subtle distinction that takes place between vendor and buyer in an ambiguous role game that must be inverted each time.

3) The Erotic Body is the complex response to the theme of the festival by the original master of the performing arts, Marina Abramovic: a five-hour non-stop “polyptych”, curated by Abramovic herself and constituted by the 13 artists of her Independent Performance Group, which articulates the theme of the festival in all its possible interpretations. Affection, falling in love, romantic love are exhibited and/or demystified; fetish objects, such as 200 pairs of shoes, an inflatable penis of hypertrophic proportions, a “self-erotic” chair are offered to the performance and the spectators; and again, the concentration on a single element of the body or an isolated feeling – the torso, the undulation of the hips, the kiss – are each at the center of a performance, through the “act of love” that a woman accomplishes by cutting hearts into simple sugar beets… “Sexual energy is a potent, vital force, that does not care about convention or social and moral situation. It is subversive. Which does not mean that it has no ethics or respect; on the contrary, only resistance is able to pervert this energy” (M. Abramovic).

from www.labiennale.org