production mk 2011 and Armunia Festival Costa degli Etruschi
with Philippe Barbut, Biagio Caravano and Laura Scarpini + guests
choreography Michele Di Stefano
music Lorenzo Bianchi

Out of their proper exotic place (the performance Around the world in 80 days) these pure dances are capable of settling in the Everywhere.
Their focus is on negotiation and evolution from a local condition towards not yet allotted territories. It's a geographical piece, where the reality of movement is developed through a constant work of translation into the surroundings.
So dance becomes the reckoning of every sinuosity on the way.
Space is measured and crossed by choreographic enquiries, querying the landscape through a tormented reconstruction of the 'exotic'. The evaluation of distance is the common denominator of these dances.
Distance between the bodies, distance between cultural patterns; but what looks like distant is always near to something else.
Testing a sort of colonialistic rethoric we found a problematic territory for the negotiation of the differences between the bodies, which aim at building a unique body of conflicting projects.
These are "creolized" dances, sites of interchange. The focus is not on the origin but on destination: how do we accept presence as a continuous settlement into a precarious realm?
Reality can be hired step by step to proceed into the uncertain.

a project by MK 2011
concept: Michele Di Stefano
cast: 1 performer (frequent flyer)
technical needs : none
set: wherever

Grand Tour is a parasitic performance and a touristic enquiry into the circumscribed world of contemporary performing arts festivals. Its model is the Grand Tour, the traditional travel of Europe undertaken from the second half of XVII century by mainly upper-class European young men of means . The exposure both to the cultural legacy of classical antiquity and the Renaissance, and to the fashionably polite society of the continent was the primary value of the Tour, whose destination par excellence was Italy.
The project starts from the determination of a festival suitable to be transformed into the itinerary of the Tour. Every single performance, theatrical piece or choreography in the programme will be analized for its spatial character and dynamics. The author/director/choreographer of every piece will be asked to host the passage, the crossing, the stay or even the camping of an external traveller during the time of the performance. The duration of this interference will be negotiated previously.
The performer, who is always the same person, will cross or visit the different performances hosted by the festival as different stages of his journey; he will not produce relevant or controversial acts, being a mere presence coming from elsewhere to have a look into the wherever. He will come back to his elsewhere without hesitation, eager to reach a new stage.
He is not a "signature" nor an actor nor a witness. He is a collision in time, a coincidence which will trasform the formal tension of a performance into an ordinary everywhere, just for a moment.
Maybe the most intriguing step of the project is the negotiation and the sharing of this light crack on the compact surface of every single creation., a flash of uncontrolled extraneity into the dramatic economy of sense. This is a reversible process which could inform any artist involved and produce new informations during its development.
The programm of a festival will enrich its complexity with another secret dimension, which could be included into the personal experience of the audience. They know that someone has contemplated the whole programm as a tridimensional place and is playing in time across this horizon, as if he'd be in search of the most exotic spot of all, more exotic than Papua.