Veneto Summer Dance Festivals: From Vicenza to Venice

Stefano Tomassini reports on summer dance festivals in Veneto. At Vicenza's Danza in rete festival, Carlo Massari's "Les misérables" for C&C Company impressed with a stark, visionary critique of contemporary miseries, featuring a chorus of four and an elderly actor as king of nothing. At the 15th International Festival of Contemporary Dance of the Venice Biennale, directed by Wayne McGregor, the program showed curatorial uncertainty. Hervé Koubi's "Odyssey" offered a fusion product with capoeira and hip-hop but lacked dramaturgy, saved only by Natacha Atlas's singing. In contrast, Josef Nadj's "Omma" (Greek for eye) featured eight African dancers generating movement as communal exchange, a powerful antidote to commodified dance. Oona Doherty's Silver Lion-winning "Hard to be Soft – A Belfast Prayer" used elementary collage-like performance to explore Irish-English tensions, schoolgirl vulnerabilities, and broken masculinity, but its autobiographical limits prevented collective redemption. The College's New Works in Progress showed uniform movement quality and reliance on playlists, lacking choreographic thought except for Mounir Saeed's "Nemesis VS. Anubis VS. everyone" and Raymond Pinto's "Becoming." In Verona, Chiara Frigo's "Fight or Flight" for Estate Teatrale Veronese featured three female figures contending with live music, reflecting on love as rupture and self-determination, with dramaturgy by Riccardo de Torrebruna referencing Chekhov's Three Sisters.