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PAST FORWARD
ONGOING

STEFANO MAZZOTTA

PAST FORWARD

A PERFORMANCE · A PHOTOGRAPHIC PROJECT · A CHOREOGRAPHIC RESEARCH PROJECT · A MULTIMEDIA PROJECT

  • Past Forward emerges from Zerogrammi’s archive of creations and moves through twenty-five years of choreographic research as an open, unstable and continually transformable material. It is not an orderly collection of completed works, but a landscape of traces, gestures, images, bodily memories and presences that continue to question the present.

    By its very nature, dance resists definitive fixation. It remains in bodies, in details, in postures, in the invisible tensions that pass through time. Every creation leaves behind a fragile constellation of documentary materials, but above all of experiences that have settled in the bodies of those who have inhabited it.

    Past Forward exists within this space of transmission and metamorphosis, where repertoire and contemporaneity cease to be separate dimensions. Archived creations are not regarded as static testimonies, but as organisms capable of continuing to generate relationship, listening and transformation.

    The archive thus becomes a territory to be explored: a space where memory and invention coexist, and where the past continues to produce new possibilities of presence.

  • Past Forward activates practices of revisiting, transmission and reactivation of Zerogrammi’s choreographic repertoire through a range of artistic and relational approaches.

    Choreographies, working materials, notes, images, stage fragments and bodily memories are reinhabited through processes involving artists, emerging authors, performers, temporary communities and diverse contexts. Each reactivation inevitably produces a shift: a deviation, a new interpretation, a different way of inhabiting gesture.

    The project unfolds through revivals, transmission practices, workshops, audiovisual formats, installations, public encounters and research paths that continually bring the archive into dialogue with contemporary creation.

    The repertoire is not preserved in the pursuit of an unchanging form, but approached as living material. Transmission does not coincide with replication, but with a dynamic process that embraces transformation, vulnerability and reinvention as essential parts of memory itself.

    From this perspective, the body is not merely the interpreter of the archive: it becomes its medium, space of rewriting and future possibility.

  • ZEROGRAMMI 25°
    2026
    A PERFORMANCE
    IN PROGRESS

    ZEROGRAMMI 25°

    STEFANO MAZZOTTA
    // ZEROGRAMMI
    PIU INFO
    THYESTES
    2025
    A PERFORMANCE
    ON TOUR

    THYESTES

    STEFANO MAZZOTTA
    // ZEROGRAMMI
    PIU INFO

  • ZEROGRAMMI | PLAYWITHFOOD FESTIVAL | MINISTERO DELLA CULTURA | REGIONE PIEMONTE | UMBRIA DANZA FESTIVAL | in costruzione / under construction |

  • THYESTES // PROVE IN SALA
    2025
    PHOTOGALLERY

    THYESTES // PROVE IN SALA

    PH. VITUCCIA
    THYESTES // IN SCENA
    2025
    PHOTOGALLERY

    THYESTES // IN SCENA

    PH. VITUCCIA
    THYESTES // teaser
    2025
    VIDEO

    THYESTES // teaser

    ​

  • STATUS Ongoing
    FIELDS Living archive · choreographic repertoire · embodied memory · transmission · performative research · contemporary dance
    AVAILABLE FORMATS Performance · workshop · installation · audiovisual · publication · public talk · educational pathway · residency
    ACTIVATION CONTEXTS Theatres · archives · museums · libraries · unconventional spaces · educational contexts · sites of memory
    AUDIENCE Artists · young authors · students · temporary research communities · diverse audiences
    MODES Participatory · intergenerational · multidisciplinary · adaptable · site-sensitive

A living archive of dance creations is not simply a collection of the past, but an organism pulsing within the present. Here, every preserved gesture is also a gesture waiting to be reactivated. It is a form of memory that does not merely bear witness, but insists on continuing to dance.

Past Forward is the driving force of this archive: not a nostalgic gaze turned backward, but a way of pushing the past forward, allowing it to advance by transforming it into creative momentum. It means not archiving in order to stop, but to keep things in circulation. Every choreography, every note, every trace left by a moving body becomes living material for new visions, new interpretations, new dances. Every preserved choreography is a corporeal thought that continues to generate meaning.

In this space, the archive is not a repository but a passage, a place that safeguards presences. The bodies inhabiting it are not spectators but active heirs, called to question what has been in order to become again. The archived gesture remains suspended, ready to bloom once more, to change form, to discover a new rhythm.


A living archive is made of gestures that offer themselves to transformation. It is grounded in a profound trust in transmission, yet this is a dynamic, unstable transmission, one that embraces error, deviation, and reinvention.

It is an invitation to interpret, reinterpret, even to betray, so long as the dance continues. It is a fragile pact between fidelity and invention. The body itself becomes document, medium, language.

Past Forward is therefore a practice, an attitude — not a closed place, but a crossing of memories: time flowing forward while carrying within it, like sap, everything that came before. Not to preserve it untouched, but to allow it to change, to surprise once again. For this reason, a living archive is not only observed: it is inhabited and lived through.

Past Forward moves through twenty-five years of Zerogrammi’s creations as a living archive of bodies, gestures, and memories.
A project of research, transmission, and choreographic reactivation in which the repertoire continues to transform through new bodies, new perspectives, and new possibilities for dance.

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