Impressions from the 19th Biennale Danza
Arsenale, Venice © Mehmet Kerem Özel
This year the Biennale Danza took place between 17th July and 2nd August 2025 and it’s the theme chosen by Wayne McGregor, the British choreographer who has been the its artistic director for the past four years, was Making Myth. This year's awards were announced in January and presented to the winners at its opening: Twyla Tharp received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement and Carolina Bianchi received the Silver Lion.
This year the Biennale Danza featured 18 productions, including nine world premieres and two European premieres, with the festival co-producing 11 of them.
During the last four days of the Biennale I attended nine performances. I will share a selection of these in the order that I saw them.
Ventre do Vulcão
I opened the Biennale with the world premiere of Ventre do Vulcão, a 45-minute solo performance by Portuguese choreographer-dancer Tânia Carvalho. This piece is a co-production of La Biennale di Venezia, Festival de Dança do Algavre and Théâtre de la Ville, Paris.
Having been in the dance world for 20 years, Carvalho presents a choreographic creation focusing on hand and arm gestures, as well as facial expressions, particularly those of the mouth.
As I mentioned before, Ventre do Vulcão is a solo performance, but Carvalho is not alone on stage. She is accompanied by expressionist lighting (designed by Anatol Waschke) and music by XNX, as well as an expressionist soundscape composed of Carvalho's live vocalisations and screams (designed by Juan Mesquita), which significantly impact the atmosphere of the piece. Wearing only a black trouser-skirt outfit that leaves her back and hands exposed, Carvalho fills the entirely empty, black space — there is only a void in the middle of the back wall for her to enter and exit the stage from both sides — with her presence, nourished by archetypal images, instinctive physicality and improvisational situations.
With Ventre do Vulcão, Carvalho creates a melancholic piece that packs a powerful punch despite its small scale, opening up space for personal and collective memory, loss and disappearance.
Applauding Simulacro (Teatro Piccolo Arsenale, Venice - 30 July 2025)
© Mehmet Kerem Özel
Simulacro
KOR’SIA is a Madrid-based dance company founded by Italian-born choreographers Antonio de Rosa and Mattia Russo. They create dynamic and atmospheric pieces through a collaborative process involving the dancers. Simulacro (Simulacra), the company's new piece, was presented at the Biennale Danza, one of its co-producers, right after its world premiere at the Condeduque contemporary arts venue in Madrid at the end of June. Simulacro, as one might expect, takes its name directly from Jean Baudrillard's theory of Simulacra / Simulation and thus draws its inspiration from chaotic hyperreality, which replaces reality with images and signs that refer to nothing beyond themselves, and interrupted at every moment by repetitions and gaps.
When the curtain rises amid smoke filling the auditorium, we encounter a circular road junction, the audience side of which is cut off and the back of which is obscured by a huge panel on the island in the middle. A parachutist suddenly lands in this non-place. A circular band of light, suspended from the stage ceiling and extending into the auditorium plays an important element in the scenography, designed by Amber Vandenhoeck in collaboration with Rosa and Russo. It completes the intersection's footprint on the ceiling, drawing the audience side into that non-place as well. Furthermore, that light band establishes the fundamental atmosphere for the next 60 minutes, during which bodies move, flow, and drift on stage within a vicious cycle of a virtual world dominated by abstraction, fragmentation, and uncertainty. During this time, seven performers fight relentlessly within a simulation resembling a video game, set against a backdrop of gunfire sounds and frantic, tense electronic music reminiscent of military/science fiction movies, composed by Alejandro da Rocha. When this all-encompassing soundscape is interrupted by Lee Hazlewood's Your Sweet Love and Nina Simone's Love Me or Let Me, it is as if both the performers on stage and the audience in the auditorium rediscover the references they had lost in the confusion between the real and the virtual, reconnect with them, and remember what it means to be human.
Simulacro is a performance without a linear narrative that presents the audience with a chaotic experience based on “sensing” rather than “understanding”, “perceiving” rather than “absorbing”, through disconnected fragments, images, and entities on stage. It is not to everyone's taste, except for the young and those who feel young.
Applauding Yoann Bourgeois & Patrick Wilson (Sala Marghera - 31 July 2025)
© Mehmet Kerem Özel
Yoann Bourgeois & Patrick Watson
The concert-performance piece Yoann Bourgeois & Patrick Watson, produced by the Yoann Bourgeois Art Company in collaboration with the Canadian musician Patrick Watson in 2022, has also been part of this year's Biennale Danza programme.
In this piece, Bourgeois uses all the "toys" that he had previously used to showcase his acrobatic and choreographic skills in his pieces up to 2022. These items had become his trademarks and included steps, trampolines, slides, treadmills, rotating platforms, cylindrical aquariums and scattered chairs and tables.
Patrick Watson performs his atmospheric music live and solo for 60 minutes, which generally flows calmly, occasionally accelerating, and draws inspiration from classical composers such as Debussy and Satie, as well as jazz, oscillating between pop and experimental, folk and rock.
Yoann Bourgeois & Patrick Watson presents a fluid, poetic sequence of images, akin to a "best of" collage, without a defined dramaturgical narrative arc; depicting "a person who tirelessly climbs the steps one after another, falls down/throws themselves down, and returns to the steps again", "a person who climbs tirelessly, sliding down from heights in different ways and letting themselves fall", "a person who is dragged along on a conveyor belt and falls onto it again and again", "a person who takes different positions against centrifugal force (which could represent power or authority, or a relationship or love)", "a person who escapes into the water, into their own world, even if only for a deep breath each time", and "the frantic figure of today who strives to get somewhere by going up and down the steps for minutes on end without stopping, but who is actually just going round in circles".
Yoann Bourgeois & Patrick Watson was staged in a massive warehouse in the Marghera Industrial Zone, outside Venice. Along Patrick Wilson, all the creative and technical team; Yoann Bourgeois and his wife Marie Bourgeois, along with three other performers, a three-person technical crew who were also part of the performance on stage in one sequence, Goury, who created the magnificent scenography, and Jérémie Cusenier, whose lighting design illuminated even the smallest details of the space, dazzled with their precision, care and virtuosity, reaffirming my admiration once again.
Applauding Friends of Forsythe (Teatro alle Tese Arsenale, Venice - 1 August 2025)
© Mehmet Kerem Özel
Friends of Forsythe
Since its world premiere in November 2023, Friends of Forsythe has been various cities and festivals worldwide touring in irregular intervals, and was among the shows that stopped by Biennale Danza.
Curated by William Forsythe, widely regarded as one of the most influential choreographers in the dance world, with Rauf "Rubberlegz" Yasit, a breakdance artist, the project, emerged from a collaboration between Rubberlegz, Brigel Gjoka, Riley Watts, Matt Luck, and the JA Collective (Aidan Carberry and Jordan Johnson), all of whom come from different dance backgrounds but have undoubtedly crossed paths with Forsythe at some point in their careers.
Friends of Forsythe draws inspiration from folk dance, ballroom dance, breakdance, hip-hop, and ballet, focusing on the physical dialogue and communication of dancers with diverse backgrounds and movement languages.
For 60 minutes, six dancers performed asymmetrical and arrhythmic entrances and exits in duos, trios, and quadruples within a dance area defined by a wide, low, white square platform with the audience positioned on three sides. During this time, there were compositions in which the dancers' arms, legs, feet, faces, and hands intertwined and overlapped. There were also compositions in which none of their limbs touched, yet they moved side by side or one behind the other, engaging in a physical dialogue with each other through gaze, voice, and facial expression. The most impressive aspect of these dialogues, which revealed diversity, possibility, and unity, was that no dance style remained pure - in response to those with whom they engaged in dialogue.
Undoubtedly the piece drew on Forstyhe's improvisational technique in its design and structure. Choreographically and in terms of its stage, music, and costume designs, it was extremely abstract, mundane, and unreferential. Yet, in my opinion, it contained a narrative about one's own essence, defined and completed through one's relationship with the other.
Applauding La mort i la primavera (Teatro Malibran, Venice - 2 August 2025)
© Mehmet Kerem Özel
La mort i la primavera
The closing performance of the Biennale Danza was another world premiere: La mort i la primavera (Death and Spring), choreographed by the Valencia-born choreographer Marcos Morau, a rising star of recent years, and performed by his Barcelona-based company, La Veronal. Morau adapted the piece, which was performed over two evenings at the Teatro Malibran (one of Venice's historic theaters), from the eponymous novel by Catalan writer Mercè Rodoreda.
The programme brochure describes the novel as "published after the author's death, unfinished, but not incomplete".
I am unfamiliar with the author and her literary work; I haven't read the novel in question, and the programme brochure did not summarise its plot. The only additional information provided was the fact that Rodoreda is considered the greatest Catalan writer of all time and has a dark imagination. On the other hand, I was familiar with Morau's work, having seen one of his pieces live (Opening Night) and three on record (Sonoma, Afanador and La Belle au bois dormant), to be able to know that he has an very intense dark world. Therefore, the 75-minute performance before me, steeped in utter gloom, didn't surprise me.
The performance space felt like purgatory; a stage before death, a realm before plunging into the universe of death. Maria Arnal performed the music she had composed, singing in a shrill, screaming voice, and invited the audience into this purgatory on stage. The piece, devoid of a straightforward or logical narrative, is a collection of fragments. And, all the elements, such as the organ at the back left of the stage, the small red truck at the back right, the corpses in bags suspended from above, the giant incense bundle used to sweep the dirt floor, the drums and the costumes worn by both men and women — wide black skirts and white lace shirts that clung tightly to the neck and hands, completely covering the body and leaving only the head uncovered — are parts of this rebellious and mysterious purgatory from which there is no escape except through death. However, in the final scene, the dancers pulled red roses from black body bags arranged on the floor and scattered them around. Spring had finally arrived and rebirth had taken place. The tree trunk descending from above into the centre of the purgatory is like an axis mundi, and Maria Arnal, settled in the hollow atop the trunk, is the shaman facilitating communication between heaven, earth and the underworld. Arnal had fulfilled her duty, established the encounter and healed us. The hollow was plastered over and the lights dimmed.
Even though we hadn't physically moved from our seats, La mort i la primavera offered us a multisensory, ritualistic experience with its visuals, sounds and scents. It was an unexpected discovery and a great revelation that took time to digest.
Biennale College Danza
La Biennale di Venezia runs an educational programme called Biennale College alongside its biennales of theatre and dance. Young dancers and choreographers are selected through an open call to participate in Biennale College Danza, which is part of the Dance Biennale.
This year, sixteen dancers from various countries took part in a three-month programme comprising Sasha Waltz's In C, funded as a repertory piece, as well as pieces by young choreographers. They also participated in the site-specific public art project The Herds, commissioned by Biennale Danza, and The Remaining Silence, a piece co-created by Anthony and Kel Matsena and the dancers for the Biennale.
During my stay at the Biennale Danza, I attended an evening of performances by young choreographers from the Biennale College Danza. Tamara Fernando and Matthew Totaro, as well as Wang Le, were selected from 88 international submissions. In Padiglione 30 of the Forte Marghera recreational area — a converted structure within the grounds of the former Marghera Castle near Venice — Biennale College Danza commissioned the choreographers to create site-specific pieces. Over a three-month period, the choreographers developed their pieces, working directly with dancers on-site under the guidance of Wayne McGregor and his team.
Applauding Ai'm (Forte Marghera, Padiglione 30 - 31 July 2025)
© Mehmet Kerem Özel
Ai'm
In their 30-minute piece, Ai'm, Fernando & Totaro explore the personal tensions and existential struggles experienced today between the virtual world, which is perceived as fluid, free and infinite, and the real world, which is fragile, concrete and fraught with limitations.
From a collective perspective, Fernando & Totaro created a daring and fulfilling piece, guiding the audience through different sections of the existing building and utilising three distinct parts of it in various ways with a dramatic approach. In line with the piece's origins, the dancers (Alice Del Frate, Gerard Jover Gutiérrez, Youngin Kim, Kasia Kuzka, Te Ma, Alonso Núñez Quiroz, Simone Orlandi and Tong Pan) were brought into focus by the others in various formal arrangements, and the choreographic structure was also cohesive and engaging. Aided by Antonio Cafasso's music and Isabelle Bardot's functional costumes, Ai'm was a holistically satisfying piece.
Applauding coexistence (Forte Marghera, Padiglione 30 - 31 July 2025)
© Mehmet Kerem Özel
coexistence
In coexistence, Wang Le explored the relationship between the divine and the human. The piece opened with a sculptural effect, enhanced by Li Kun's costume design featuring long blue skirts. The evening light streaming in from the rear windows of the space added another layer to this sculptural effect. In the second sequence, accompanied by the sound of the dancers breathing, a movement language emerged that was dominated by slow, solemn dynamism. While the piece began promisingly, taking on an extraordinary quality with the addition of the breathing sounds, it failed to maintain the same intensity and impact later on. Nevertheless, thanks to the efforts of the young dancers (Davide Cesari, Francesca Crisci, Marie Da Silva, Oriol Jover Gutiérrez, Iván Merino Gaspar, Aino Päivike, Maurizio Paolantonio and LaMonte Sadler), it was a truly enjoyable piece.
[The original Turkish version of this article was published in Kineo Dergi.]
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