LOS FAUNOS

For the Los Faunos project, Lavanderia a Vapore experiments with a transnational working model by inviting the Catalan choreographer and artist Quim Bigas Bassart to collaborate with NEST, involving dance teachers from local schools throughout the process.

Within a dynamic that combines the expansion of artistic imagination and aesthetic references with strong territorial rootedness, the project entrusted an international artist with proposing an inspirational vision based on the figure of the Faun, and with translating this vision into repertory material accompanied by creative tasks and choreographic scores capable of activating — within dance schools, teachers and participants — a compositional and expressive capacity that moves beyond disciplinary forms of training aimed solely at perfect execution.

The project, drawing upon the experiences developed through Swans Never Die together with other Italian network partners, begins from the reinvention of repertory around the figure of the Faun, chosen for its contemporary relevance and its many possible perspectives: investigations into interspecies relations, hybridity and fluid identity, difference, the connection between body and dance language, and queerness understood in its broadest sense as the coexistence of complex and non-univocal elements — a concept also linked to the desire to facilitate encounters and assemblages among heterogeneous audiences and communities.

The final outcome of the process was presented on 28 April 2024 in Turin as part of the events conceived for the International Dance Day promoted by the International Dance Council of UNESCO.