SUSPENDED CHORUS
14.03.2025 Première | Festival Le Grand Bain – Le Gymnase CDCN – ROUBAIX (FR)
17-18.04.2025 Italian première | Teatro Stabile di Torino – Teatro Nazionale – TORINO (IT)
Isadora Duncan said that ‘the gesture is born from desire’.
Which desires move our bodies?
In which forms do we cage it? In what judgements? How can we revolutionise our gaze on the bodies?
SUSPENDED CHORUS is the title of Silvia Gribaudi’s new work, a solo in which the performer stages herself to renew her dialogue with the audience. The reflection at the centre of the performance is on how we look at the body of the other, in whisch forms we enclose it and how we can revolutionise our gaze. The choreographer traces a scenic narrative through images and movement, pushing the limits of her 50-year-old body to reveal the dynamic flow that goes beyond age-related change.
The project stems from the study of dance pioneers such as Isadora Duncan, Anna Pavlova and Pina Baush, exploring the desires that move our bodies and imagining the audience as a chorus/witness performing desires and gestures together. The spectators become an integral part of the work, in dialogue with the choreography and thus transforming themselves into a suspended, fluctuating, plural and necessary chorus.
This new performance by Gribaudi focuses on deconstructing modern codes of beauty and on highlighting the impermanence and mortality of the human body.
DIRECTOR’S NOTE
“The research behind the SUSPENDED CHORUS project originates from the need to find myself experiencing the empty stage alone, to focus on the bare relationship between performer and audience.
I would like to deepen the relationship that arises between the temporary communities that are created during each performative act.
This is intertwined with the urgency of some questions that I seek answers to: how can a dance influence the world we inhabit? How, and from what, does the potential and ability to influence each other as human beings arise? What relationship exists between dancing and generating pleasure? How can an individual impulse become collective and generate chorality? I would like to start by studying the experiences of some of the dance pioneers of the early 1900s such as Anna Pavlova, Isadora Duncan and Truda Kaschmann. What these dancers have in common, despite their different cultural origins and historical periods, is that they challenged conventions and influenced the society of the time. They revolutionised, subverted codes and created a new dance that opened new spaces of freedom. Today, which revolution is needed? Can dance create a space for collective exploration and transformation?
In SUSPENDED CHORUS, I want to experiment how empathy can be translated into choreography.
The audience becomes a ‘chorus’ without scripts or scores, in an active and improvised relationship with those who perform. A chorus that can inhabit the subtle dialogue of ‘empty’ spaces, of silence, of indefiniteness and suspension.
I want to create an indefinite choreography that only comes to completion through the interaction of those who came to the theatre that evening. A composition that, by interweaving empathy with humour, questions social conventions and stereotypes through an act of revolution, because in theatre we can train ourselves to be a metaphor for the societies we want to build.”
credits
concept, direction, choreography, dance Silvia Gribaudi
co-direction Matteo Maffesanti
music Matteo Franceschini
light design Luca Serafini
styling Ettore Lombardi
dramaturgical consultant Annette Van Zwoll
artistic consultants Camilla Guarino, Giuseppe Comuniello
assistant choreographer Andrea Rampazzo
technical advice Leonardo Benetollo
creative producer Mauro Danesi
Production Associazione Culturale Zebra (IT)
Coproduction Teatro Stabile di Torino – Teatro Nazionale (IT), La Corte Ospitale (IT), Rum för Dans (SE), Le Gymnase CDCN – Roubaix (FR), What You See Festival (NL), Operaestate Festival Veneto (IT)
Support MiC – Ministero della Cultura, Italian Ministry of Cultural Affairs
Silvia Gribaudi is associate artist at Le Gymnase CDCN Roubaix (2024 – 2026) and at Teatro Stabile di Torino – Teatro Nazionale (2025-2027)
Duration: 60 minutes
