For the Los Faunos Project, Lavanderia a Vapore is testing a transnational working model by inviting Catalan choreographer and artist Quim Bigas Bassart to work with NEST, Turin’s network of dance production companies, involving teachers from local dance schools.

Within a dynamic that combines the expansion of artistic imagination and reference aesthetics with local rootedness, an international artist was entrusted with proposing an inspirational vision based on the figure of the Faun and its reworking within the repertoire. This vision is accompanied by creative tasks and choreographic scores designed to activate, among dance schools, teachers and participants, a compositional and expressive capacity that goes beyond discipline-oriented teaching aimed at perfect execution.

Building on the activities developed for Swans Never Die together with other Italian network partners, the project starts from a reinvention of repertoire around the figure of the Faun, chosen for its contemporary relevance and its many potential perspectives: an inquiry into interspecies relations, hybridity and fluid identity, nonconformity, and the connection between bodily and dance language; queerness understood broadly as the coexistence of complex, non-univocal elements, also applicable to the wish to facilitate the coming together of heterogeneous audiences and people.

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