LOS FAUNOS

The faun inhabits a threshold. It belongs neither entirely to the animal world nor to the human one. It is a creature of transition, instinct and metamorphosis. It lives in territories where the body precedes language, in places where desire takes shape before it can even be named.

Its dance does not seek perfection, but listening. It is a movement born from contact with the earth, from shared breath, from the urgency to cross the boundary between self and other.

Within every community there exists a forgotten wild memory: a fragile and untamed part still capable of play, wonder and transformation.Perhaps the faun continues to exist precisely there — in bodies that meet without defenses, in gestures that escape convention, in presences willing to expose themselves to relation.

To dance the faun, then, means accepting a form of vulnerability. It means dwelling within an ambiguous and fertile space where identities and roles blur, and the body once again becomes landscape, instinct and shared imagination.

Not a mythological figure to represent, but a condition to be traversed together.

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.
un progetto di

a project by

Fondazione Piemonte dal Vivo/Lavanderia a Vapore, Bolzano Danza / Fondazione Haydn di Bolzano e Trento, CSC Bassano del Grappa, Gender Bender, Triennale di Milano, Teatro Stabile dell’Umbria

artist*

artists

Quim Bigas Bassart; Viola Scaglione/Balletto Teatro di Torino; Elena Rolla/Compagnia EgriBiancoDanza; Daniele Ninarello/CodedUomo; Amina Amici/Compagnia Zerogrammi

scuole di danza partecipanti

participating dance schools

Ad’a Dance Studio, Apid Piemonte, Associazione Eclectica, Asd + Sport 8, Centro Ricerca Danza, Fondazione Egri per la Danza (Alta Formazione Egri Danza), Ginger Company asd, Mamadance, Scuola del Balletto Teatro di Torino
PHOTOGALLERY
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LOS FAUNOS // MAKINGOF
PH. A. MACCHIA