Virgilio Sieni's 'La mer' at Cango Festival in Florence

Choreographer Virgilio Sieni presented 'La mer' at the Cango festival in Florence, a two-part dance composition for six elderly women and six young dancers. The elderly women perform slow, deliberate gestures evoking lived experience and bodily memory, while the younger dancers, three bare-chested, move to Claude Debussy's orchestral work 'La mer' (1905). Their fluid, wave-like motions—crawling, swaying, dispersing and regrouping—embody the sea's rhythms without literal mimicry. Sieni acts as a silent puppeteer, guiding the performers' limbs and spatial trajectories. The work explores feminine communities and the fragility and strength of the aging body versus youthful vitality. The performance took place at the Cango festival in Florence.